Sendero L&D Blows Past Engagement Benchmarks
The management consultants at Sendero are constantly upskilling in order to provide their clients with the best services possible. To help them learn more quickly and effectively, the Sendero L&D team sought to broaden learning options, make learning more social, and make it more accessible in the daily flow of work.
Summary
Sendero Engages Employees, Boosts Learning, Wows Clients with Degreed
The management consultants at Sendero are constantly upskilling in order to provide their clients with the best services possible. To help them learn more quickly and effectively, the Sendero L&D team sought to broaden learning options, make learning more social, and make it more accessible in the daily flow of work. To achieve these goals, learning leaders chose Degreed and engaged employees in ways that ensured the platform is used across the company. Their approach was wildly successful; for example, employee-to-employee sharing of learning content increased 121% a month on average from one year to the next. And Sendero blew past Degreed engagement benchmarks; for example, 80% of employees became activated users versus a recommended 50%.
COMPANY SNAPSHOT
Industry:
Business Consulting Service
Headquarters:
Dallas, TX
Company Size:
Small-to-Medium
The solution
Degreed-driven Learning
To Upskill Employees in the flow of their daily work—with anytime, anywhere access to the wide range of learning options and content providers needed to make learning personalized and relevant—learning leaders at Sendero chose the Degreed LXP, recognizing that it’s applicable to each learning dimension of the 70-20-10 model.
To Promote Social Learning the learning team created learning Groups on the Degreed platform and invited SMEs and others to create and share content across teams and the entire company. In addition, L&D led engagement campaigns fostered healthy competition and encouraged continuous learning on the platform.
To Support Experiential Learning the learning team migrated resources and populated Degreed with a wide range of curated toolkits with templates for client-facing deliverables. The team created Pathways focused on the company’s key practice areas, examples of past work, lists of contactable internal subject matter experts (SMEs), curated resources for a career mentorship program, and more.
To Support Formal Learning the team established learning in Degreed as a complement and companion to onboarding, classroom discussions, and other planned training opportunities.
“From the first day of onboarding, our L&D team instills the value and purpose of Degreed as the primary source for learning materials for employees of all roles throughout their tenure at Sendero,” Cox said. “We’ve worked to provide and spotlight new resources, leverage Degreed alongside instructor-led training, and encourage users to make Degreed a habitual tool for learning.”
The foundation of success
Employee Engagement
Learning leaders realized the new Sendero approach to learning relied on employee engagement, so they created a strategy for activating participation on the Degreed platform. The approaches they landed on constitute a model for success that can be replicated at any organization.
“We try to make it fun. We try to make it bite-size and digestible—to give our people a reason to say, ‘Let me focus on this for a second,’” Cox said. “We entice people and make it worth their time.”
Engagement typically spikes twice a year when the learning team asks the company’s consultants to re-rate their current skills on the Degreed platform. But an even bigger piece of the strategy is creating quarterly challenges or social campaigns that tap into the company’s unique culture and expose employees to the platform.
In one such challenge, employees completed tasks laid out on a BINGO card for chances to win prizes. In another, teams could see on a real-time dashboard how their learning activity on Degreed matched up against other teams.
In another example, the learning team ran a campaign with a back-to-school theme encouraging learners to focus on growing a skill of their choosing. Yet another echoed Spotify Wrapped; the team created a graphic highlighting interesting and timely employee learning stats and facts from the preceding year. One of the most successful campaigns focused on exploring emotional intelligence after leadership identified it as a skills gap. Each week for more than a month, employees had the option to focus on a new piece of content that informed spirited conversations.
Clarity is a key to success, Cox said, describing a springtime challenge called “Spring into Skills,” in which employees were compelled to find something new to learn. They pushed back, concerned they didn’t have time. Learning leaders ultimately determined the directive was too vague.
Knowing your audience and playing into their attitudes and preferences is critical, Cox said.
“Knowing your audience is huge. This is where we get to be creative, and it’s been a fun journey trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” Cox said. “A big component of our company culture is one of our core values—Shared Success. It’s, ‘How do we help others? How do we push that forward?’ One of our other core values is Higher Reaching. It’s, ‘How do we keep excelling, pushing the boundaries, continuing to push the limits?’ Both of these come together through social interaction, and we want to push each other.
“We’re a very competitive company, so finding ways to play into that and to encourage each other was a big piece.
“Tapping into the spirit of friendly competition motivates our people, as does playing into the fun of shared memories and nostalgia. We promoted a recent learning campaign with a 1990s back to school theme, and a lot of people really responded to it.”
These approaches give employees a sense of ownership over the Degreed experience, Cox said. “Degreed is for everybody at Sendero, and we want people to know that. We don’t just want L&D to be gatekeepers of learning. We want it to be happening naturally.”
RESULTS
A Confident, Productive Workforce
Degreed helps the five-member Sendero L&D team maximize its impact.
Because Sendero consultants are able to access personalized and relevant learning in the flow of work, they’re empowered to quickly refresh their skills and get up to speed before joining a new project. That quicker time- to-proficiency translates to bigger business impacts for Sendero clients, and it makes the company’s consultants less stressed about their jobs, according to Cox, who cited qualitative data from annual employee surveys.
“A big way we’ve realized those improvements to the employee day-to-day is through Degreed Pathways and the Toolkits we provide employees on Degreed. These resources make it easier when our consultants are doing something new. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
Sendero L&D Blows Past Degreed Engagement Benchmarks
When Stephanie Muschalik, an Associate at Sendero, was staffed onto an organizational change management project, she relied on the Pathways and Toolkits in that practice area to brush up on the deliverables she and the team would be responsible for creating. The team facilitated roughly 36 hours of training for the client and used training plan templates housed on Degreed to stay organized.
“Looking through the samples of what previous Sendero teams had done helped set me up for success when creating a variety of training materials for my client,” Muschalik said. “Seeing how other Senderoans had organized their training plans helped me have a new perspective on how to stay on track and facilitate the trainings successfully. The clients were thrilled with how on top of it we were.”
Keys to all this success are the engagement campaigns championed by the learning team. Eye-popping metrics show just how successful those campaigns are.
121%
increase in Employee-to-employee sharing of learning content
35%
Increase in Learning content completions
10%
Increase activity on Degreed in one month due to a single engagement campaign
5%
Increase in Monthly average users, from 54% to 59% from one year to the next
Looking Ahead
With Degreed, Sendero has engaged its people in ways that champion growth in the flow of work— reinforcing the value of continual upskilling to the company’s consultants while providing them with easy ways to stay current, relevant, and impactful.
Building on that success, the learning team anticipates benefitting more and more from the vast wealth of skill data available to Degreed administrators—information the company can use to enhance its employee engagement campaigns, refine learning programs to make employee development opportunities even more personalized, and inform smarter business
decisions.
“When I started, we were like, ‘Skills data, what is that? Is that something we want to use as a company and gather here?’” Cox said. “It definitely is, and our approach will continue to mature.”
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