HR Awards
Best L&D Programme
KAS Group Asia (Kmart & Target Australia Sourcing)
KGA Learning Strategy
The fundamental goal of this initiative was to drive a culture of self-learning and disruption. KGA is on a digital transformation journey. Therefore, it was imperative for the organisation’s success that employees are open to learning new things and, thereby, future capabilities. The idea is to create an environment that fosters learning from failures and experimentation. The learning nudges provided through the learning strategy empower leaders to provide quick intervention and coaching as well as guide them towards the right approach of development. Additionally, everyone is empowered to choose the learning of their choice, and the time they want to invest in learning.
The learning strategy has been vital in building talent and growing them within the organisation. The key area where the transformation has helped the business raise the bar of the overall performance, i.e. not only the ‘what’ of the business goals but the ‘how’ as well. Key levers to drive this change were driving a culture of change and self-disruption, and the focus areas of the strategy involved: leadership development, building high-performing and engaged teams and learning culture. This journey was a significant transformation from the traditional learning approach and was based on four key pillars:
- Educate: creating awareness of the accountability of each role in the learning journey and awareness around some key aspects to be successful in their job roles.
- Enable: building enablers for leaders and managers to empower them with the right tools and resources to support their team’s development. One of the key mindset shifts that the KGA learning strategy focused on was moving away from a centrally driven traditional learning approach to on the job learning opportunities and identification. As a result, ‘Facilitative Leadership’ and ‘Managers as Coaches’ were launched along with ‘Building Effective Teams’ to raise the overall performance bar.
- Deploy: in addition to flagship training programmes, the core of the self-learning culture was to provide employees with tools that would allow for self-paced on the go learning through our online Learning Management System. Some of the tools, which on average 30% of employees leveraged for everyday learning via the LMS, included ‘ Leadership Insights’ with a one-minute summary reading provided, with around eight articles being read by each employee.
- Evaluate & Measure: the success of the learning programmes was evaluated using Kirkpatrick levels and KPIs connected to business success metrics.
Key ROIs
- Talent Retention: HiPos were identified, and quarterly governance discussions were conducted to assess and evaluate the plans put in place by managers for these HiPos.
- Performance Management: included the leadership capability framework and what ‘Amazing Looks Like’ to help differentiate top performers. Functional and department level calibration discussions were conducted to ensure that a high-performance bar was levied to measure the delivery of goals as well as the behaviours leveraged to deliver the goals.
- Employee Engagement Survey: KGA conducts bi-annual engagement surveys, with a full detailed survey once a year and a ‘dipstick’ survey done mid-way. In terms of career development, employees scored: access to learning at 89% (+9% YoY), career opportunities at 78% (+14% YoY), and manager’s interest in employee’s career and development at 83%.
Programme Evaluation: overall, programmes received an average score of 4.3/5 for relevance and content. Furthermore, 92% of the participants across all programmes gave indicative behavioural feedback of applying the knowledge in their job roles, with 95% confident of applying the learnings in their job roles.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
