As the marketplace becomes more complex and organizations expect employees to adapt more quickly, learning organizations may need to change the way they develop employees. To help learning organizations evolve their perspectives, weve worked with a number of clients to build an approach that engages employees at multiple points, leverages different modalities to engage different learning styles, and provides just-in-time support to remind employees of key processes after they initially absorb the information. This approach, learner-centric learning, places the individual at the center of the scenario and uses diverse methods to inform, engage, and reinforce the key messaging. This approach can help to:

Communicate the purpose of the changes to employees before the requirements become active and engage learners across an extended time period.

Integrate multiple modalities to support all learning styles. Provide just-in-time support to employees at the points

when they enter relevant transactions. Embed risk management techniques to provide

real-time feedback to employees who enter inaccurate or incomplete information.

This article explains an approach and outlines a specific scenario that achieved dynamic results. This article is constructed to:

Introduce the approach. Explain how to implement and integrate the various

components of the approach. Provide real-world examples of its integration. Offer leading practices when implementing a learner-

centric learning approach.

To demonstrate the application of learner-centric learning, this paper includes a case study that describes how we worked with one of our clients to increase employee awareness on a specific compliance topic. In this case, we used the approach to help them address the topic of transparency (the open disclosure of funds used for marketing purposes to specific doctors). Organizations can implement similar approaches for almost any learning need.

Learner-Centric LearningAn in-depth approach to facilitate employee behavior change and generate business outcomes

2The ApproachA learner-centric approach is a dynamic method that engages learners over an extended time period using various modalities and feedback mechanisms to reinforce key messaging and promote desired behavior changes.

As figure 1 shows, learner-centric learning involves five key components:

Consistent messaging that learners receive over a predetermined period and access through a centralized content repository.

Formal opportunities to increase content awareness and communication of expectations.

On-demand support that walks learners through activities they must complete independently.

Dynamic content that allows employees to access information from subject matter experts and pose questions to other learners through various communications channels.

Risk mitigation feedback delivered to employees and their managers when they enter non-compliant transactions.

Though the learner sits at the middle of the model, the success of the design relies heavily upon leadership engagement and participation. When leaders involve themselves at all stages of the approach, they demonstrate the importance of the information, reinforce key messaging, and coach employees who need additional support. Their involvement also demonstrates the relevance of the information to the learners work and opens communication lines for both parties to deliver feedback to one another. Though individuals can certainly benefit from a learner-centric learning approach without leadership involvementit engages employees in the process and demonstrates their leaders commitment to compliance.

Although learner-centric learning requires significant planning upfront and a tremendous effort to execute, the cognitive and behavioral results often justify the effort. Introducing key concepts long before changes occur gives learners the opportunity to process and prepare for the changes, including knowledge of tasks they need to complete prior to the impending changes. Leveraging a central content repository, such as an intranet page or a SharePoint site, as part of the content release allows learners to process the information at their own pace and introduces a location to revisit once the organization implements the changes. Formal learning opportunities, heavily focused on content awareness rather than on application, provide the context employees should have to adapt to the new compliance requirements, and the opportunities reinforce critical concepts they should know to comply consistently.

E-learning courses provide a valuable vehicle through which organizations can broadly deploy consistent content to a large audience and track employee completions, while team meetings allow leaders to personalize the information and create meaningful connections for their team members. On-demand support allows learners to access task-related information in order to help accurately and completely finish the required tasks. Paper-based content, such as job aids that employees post at their desks, serve as constant reminders of their tasks and provide instant access to the steps they must complete. Interactive content including simulations offers learners the opportunities to complete tasks in safe environments and receive immediate feedback. Finally, dynamic content reinforces key messages, allows key compliance leaders to engage learners in an open dialogue, and opens opportunities for employees to clarify information. The creation of a well-designed social media strategy gives organizations the opportunity to dynamically inform employees as compliance requirements evolve and gives learners the opportunity to pose questions to organizational experts in the compliance area.

Effective learner-centric engagement incorporates the following tactics:

1. The organization possesses and regularly leverages multiple communication vehicles when sharing information. Many organizations leverage email as their primary communication vehicle when needing to quickly communicate to large audiences. However, given the large quantity of email employees receive in todays business environment and changes to the way we absorb information via email, employees actually comprehend limited amounts of information via email. To receive the full benefits of an awareness campaign,

Learner

ConsistentManaging

FormalLearning

RiskMitigationFeedback

SocialMedia

Presence

On-DemandSupport

LeaderEngagement

LeaderEngagement

LeaderEngagement

LeaderEngagement

LeaderEngagement

Figure 1: Learning-centric engagement model

3it helps to introduce only the most critical content and drive employees to a centralized content repository through emails. Its also helpful to avoid implementing changes to communication styles while introducing compliance requirements; use a recognizable communication vehicle during this time.

2. The organization has processes or a formal system in place to track dissemination of compliance information. The agencies that monitor organizational compliance require internal compliance groups to provide analytics demonstrating their adherence. When presenting their cases to governing bodies, compliance leaders support their cases when they openly demonstrate that they communicate compliance requirements to employees and offer them opportunities to engage with the information formally. Organizations with significant resources often rely upon learning management systems to track the completion of formal learning opportunities; organizations without the luxury of learning management systems most likely track attendance at meetings and broad communications including emails.

3. The organization uses a content repository where employees can access information about the compliance requirements. Learning materials, meeting presentations, and task-support materials must reside somewhere, requiring the presence of a shared space for employees to access information. It may be helpful for the organizations post information on a shared drive, site, or intranet page that employees easily access. The ability to easily access available information encourages learners to revisit the information consistently and increases information clarity for the people who must comply.

4. The organizations leaders commit to communicating openly with employees about compliance status and participate in conversations when employees seek information and context. As the approach shows, effective learner-centric learning approaches involve heavy leadership participation. When leaders engage learners in compliance-related conversations, they demonstrate their own personal compliance commitment and allow learners to clarify expectations when confusion arises. At a minimum, employees expect leaders to openly discuss compliance requirements in team meetings and answer questions when they arise. If leaders participate in conversations on broad communication channels such as social media, their participation further reinforces the importance of compliance efforts.

While deployment of learner-centric learning approaches varies some based on organizational conditions, these hints can be helpful:

Assess organizational communication vehicles and determine the modalities that employees most commonly use.

Engage leaders early in the process, and provide them with easy-to-use resources that they can deploy in manners that best work for their teams.

Develop a communication strategy that leverages various modalities and provides broad messaging across the organization.

Create a central content repository that houses the most current information and allows learners to review when necessary.

Focus formal learning opportunities on awareness of key concepts and utilize easily accessible support materials to walk learners through critical compliance tasks.

Generate opportunities for continued conversation about key compliance topics, either through social vehicles or in-person meetings.

Learner-centric learning approaches can increase awareness of compliance issues, drive employees to accessible resources, and demonstrate the organizations commitment to compliance. Dissemination of compliance information through commonly used communication modalities provides contextual information employees need to understand the purpose of the requirements. Formal learning opportunities communicate expectations and allow employees to engage with critical messaging. Support materials that employees can access on demand reinforce key concepts and allow them to rely upon the materials when completing key compliance tasks. Ongoing, informal communication opportunities, with leadership involvement, keep learners up to date on relevant compliance information and increase clarity of information. When put together into a synchronous plan, this approach can give employees the support they need before they have to comply, while they complete required compliance tasks, and, for the foreseeable future, while they change the way they operate to establish ongoing compliance.

4Implementing Learner-Centric LearningIn an effort to increase organizational awareness to transparency compliance and prepare employees to complete new transparency-related activities, we first assess the organizations preparedness for the change.

With a good understanding of organization-specific needs, you can begin to plan out the five key components of the approach:

Awareness campaign Formal learning Performance support Informal learning Risk mitigation

Components of Effective Awareness CampaignsTo increase organizational awareness of transparency regulations, reinforce key internal messaging, express the importance of compliance tasks, and prepare employees for the associated changes, compliance teams first execute in-depth awareness campaigns that engage employees at several pre-determined times.

We decided the following elements would be important as we launched an effective awareness campaign:

Core messaging architecture: Identifies critical messaging for consistency across all modalities and simplifies the release of information.

Intranet page: Creates a centralized content repository where employees can easily access the most current internal and external transparency content, as well as support materials.

Multimodal communications: Succinctly communicates critical compliance information and drives employees to other resources such as the intranet page and the social media community.

Leadership toolkit and meeting presentations: Provides additional contextual information to leaders so they can openly discuss transparency with their employees, communicate key messaging through their preferred communication methods, and reinforce key messaging from the course itself.

Learner-Centric Learning at Philips

The learner-centric learning approach Deloitte helped Philips implement involved five key components:

A multimodal awareness campaign that introduced key transparency concepts to prepare employees to complete critical compliance tasks.

A dynamic e-learning course, focused on contextual information, which allowed learners to engage with the content and assess their understanding at several points in the course.

Performance support materials that allowed learners to access task steps at the moment they needed to complete the tasks.

A social media community that created conversations between key compliance leaders at Philips and employees worldwide.

Risk mitigation feedback that notified learners and their immediate supervisors when their transactions did not meet expectations.

5Building Transparency Awareness at Philips

Immediately upon launching the project, the team built a core messaging architecture. The core messaging architecture covered four key topics: accountability, personal commitment, integrity, and employees roles. All communications, regardless of modality and sender, addressed at least one of these topics, establishing consistency in all messages. In addition to building a core messaging architecture, the Philips team assessed audience needs, categorized the teams based on those needs, and leveraged multiple communication vehicles to meet the needs of specific audiences. Finally, the team engaged leaders and shared key information with them first, so they could lead in reinforcing key messages and encouraging compliant behaviors. With the combination of these three techniques, the Philips team created significant buzz around the topic before the formal training went live and long before employees needed to begin entering all transfers of value to covered recipients.

Formal LearningAfter increasing awareness across the organization, teams implementing learner-centric approaches should introduce formal opportunities to educate employees about the topic. Teams can launch formal learning opportunities using a variety of modalities, but e-learning provides a great reach and effective mechanism for capturing completions. If the organization prefers to train people in person, instructor-led training provides face-to-face contact with employees to answer any questions, but this method also requires manual attendance tracking.

To increase the value of the formal training opportunities, limit the content to topics related to the compliance requirements. Too often compliance training overwhelms employees with too much detail about the laws themselves and the actions they need to take. Accessing information when they need it to do their job from the content repository increases relevance to their roles and improves

information retention. For other topicssuch as specific details about the laws, system tasks, and who to contact with questionsinformation should be readily available for employees in an easy-to-access format.

To reduce completion time and increase retention, limit courses to approximately 30 minutes. Though this shifts from the tendencies of many learning organizations, employees often take away more from courses that focus on key topics and assess their knowledge periodically throughout the course. To further reinforce the trainings importance and encourage quick completions, limit the amount of time learners have to complete the course to two weeks. Though new compliance requirements certainly encourage employees to complete compliance courses, limiting the course completion window creates urgency in learners minds, and drove the results we anticipated. In this case, it worked as planned.

6Just-in-Time Performance SupportRather than teaching people how to use systems or complete specific tasks in e-learning courses, create ancillary materials that walk learners through the steps to complete various compliance tasks. The performance support materials provide learners just-in-time support that they access as they complete compliance tasks. This is often more effective than expecting learners to remember critical steps from a previously completed e-course.

The performance support artifacts may include:

Job Aids: Short one-page cards that walk participants through just the actions required to complete the tasks.

Reference Guides: Longer guides that walk participants through the steps with graphics demonstrating the various system interactions.

Embedded Simulation: System simulations that allow learners to practice tasks in a simulated environment with immediate feedback before they begin completing tasks in the live system.

Transparency Course at Philips

The transparency course built by the Philips team required users to complete a series of activities to directly involve them in the learning process. The course included specific instructional techniques to help learners retain the key messages:

Matching exercises True/False questions Scenarios requiring learner responses Unit-ending mini-assessments to gauge understanding A course assessment allowing learners to demonstrate the actions they would take to comply

Although the instructional design practices and course completion times certainly helped drive completions, reaching the 85 percent completion rate target across required learners did not come without some additional effort. To encourage completions, the team sent reminder emails from the Learning Management System (LMS) to learners who did not complete the training before the deadline, analyzed completion data on a weekly basis, and communicated with the leaders of lagging teams.

Performance Support Plan at Philips

By separating the system support from the awareness learning, Philips was able to drive the appropriate behaviors. For systems in which the team could directly embed the support materials, learners accessed the information at the exact time it was needed. For systems in which the team could not embed the support materials, learners accessed support materials at the intranet page that they visited throughout the awareness campaign.

To simplify access, the team placed a link to the job aids, reference guides, and simulations directly on the Transparency home page. After the team created home page links, the number of employees who clicked through to the system resources rose significantly.

7Creating an Ongoing DialogueTo reinforce key messages and create opportunities for ongoing transparency dialogues between learners and subject matter experts, your team can create a social media community. A community may contain links to additional resources, as well as provide a discussion forum to allow learners to communicate directly with transparency experts. Much of the early activity will involve subject matter experts posting transparency-related comments and sharing links to external information to build the sites user population. As the community evolves, learners can post questions to the community, with the intent of receiving answers from organizational experts and their fellow community members.

Building a solid community takes time and effort. To encourage participation, site administrators should create a draw that inspires potential members to visit the site and communicate with other community members. The draw may come from executive participation or strong content derived from internal subject matter experts, but ultimately the users need to feel there is a reason to join the community.

If members do not immediately join the community, the team may want to create a separate mini change management plan for the social media launch, encourage leaders to actively participate early in the communitys evolution, and communicate broadly about the value of community membership.

Risk Mitigation to Close the Feedback LoopEffective learning programs incorporate ongoing feedback from their own leaders and the organizations compliance leaders to reinforce the behaviors they expect. This feedback can come directly from leaders who interact with the employees regularly or from organizational leaders who employees view as subject matter experts.

Using Social Learning to Continue the Transparency Dialogue at Philips

The Philips team created the community with the hope of reinforcing key messages, answering questions that confused learners, offering a safe space in which they could pose transparency-related questions, and providing compliance experts the ability to track the types of questions posed by learners.

However, the social community did not gain the traction the team initially hoped. At the time of publication, the community membership consisted of the client team, a few key opinion leaders, and a handful of learners. In retrospect, taking additional actions would have made the community more successful:

Engage employees early and communicate the shift away from the functional email account and to the community.

Ask senior leaders and influential opinion leaders to participate in the site to drive interested employees to the community.

Broadly communicate the communitys creation and purpose to invite more people to join.

8Given the large quantity of transparency-related data, it helps to create an automated mechanism to audit transactions and provide feedback to employees who have non-compliant transactions. When the auditing system recognizes a non-compliant transaction, it flags the transaction, sends a request to the employee to correct that transaction, and copies the employees immediate supervisor on the email. If the employee does not respond within a reasonable timeframe, the system can then send the manager an email directly asking him or her to provide the feedback to the employee directly. With this type of loop created, employees receive feedback directly from the compliance team and from their managers, who also receive notifications of non-compliant transactions.

Feedback from various parties closes the loop for learners and reinforces compliant behaviors. The employees receive information about the new expectations throughout the awareness campaign, specific information about the regulations in the formal learning program, on-demand support from the performance support materials, answers to their questions on the social media community, and feedback from two different parties through the audit system. With this type of information loop, many employees quickly change their behaviors to meet the new expectations.

Leading PracticeEvaluation of the learner-centric learning work at Philips can be condensed to a set of leading practices:

Communicate early and often, using as many modalities as possible. The teams strategic email deployment every two weeks kept transparency relevant in the eyes of the learners and encouraged them to complete upcoming compliance tasks (i.e., training).

Engage leaders early, often, and specifically. The decision to communicate openly with leaders and provide resources they would use to communicate with their teams increased their comfort with the topic and helped them commit to and champion the effort.

Create a central content repository in a familiar location. The creation of the page on the Philips intranet system allowed learners to easily access information, and aligning the look of the site to other successful intranet pages made learner navigation simple.

Make formal learning opportunities engaging. Regardless of the modality used to deliver the training, engaging learning excites learners and forces them to interact with the content rather than statically receive it.

Shorten the window to complete the course to create urgency. While compliance does not always generate motivated responses, learners take compliance requirements seriously because of the potential consequences of noncompliance. Shortening the window to comply with the learning requirements creates urgency and encourages learners to complete the courses.

Make system support easy to use. Throughout the project, the team engaged with end users to test system knowledge and the quality of the support materials. The end users gave great feedback, which helped the team deliver high-quality, usable resources.

Risk Mitigation Feedback at Philips

To close the loop on transparency compliance, the Philips team brought in a risk mitigation specialist to create a set of expectations that employees needed to follow and an audit process that ensured continuous compliance. With the expectations communicated and audit processes in place, employees received feedback on their transactions that did not comply with expectations.

Risk mitigation feedback at Philips did not come without system upgrades. The Philips team built a business intelligence system to consolidate transparency-related transactions from four disparate systems and assess the validity of the information it received. From there, a risk management professional on the team received reports that included all non-compliant transactions and notified those employees of their transactions that required edits.

The feedback closed the loop on the learner-centric learning process. Employees received communications about the new expectations early in the process, learned about the specifics through the e-learning course, received on-demand support from the performance support, discussed the topic on the social media site, and received feedback when transactions did not meet organizational expectations. By engaging employees throughout the learning process and helping them understand changes they needed to make to their transactions, the team embedded a sense of correctness and completeness in transparency transactions.

9Results at Philips

At the end of the campaign, the results spoke for themselves. In the first month after the launch of the intranet page, more than 1,800 targeted employees visited and spent time on the site. After receiving emails, the team received numerous requests from organizational leaders asking for resources to reinforce the campaigns key messaging. In addition, the awareness campaign yielded great results in terms of training completions: Within two weeks of the launch of the training course, more than 60 percent of required learners completed the course. In the end, taking the time to build a strategy, develop core messaging, and deliver content over an extended time period demonstrated itself valuable to increasing transparency.

In addition to the leading practices, the team learned important lessons that may expand on the programs initial success:

Launching multiple changes simultaneously requires clear communication about each change. The situation with the audit system provides a nice case study for the challenges of multiple changes at the same time. In retrospect, the team could have communicated separately about each of the system changes and additions instead of incorporating all of the changes into a single communication.

Social media community launches require their own awareness campaigns. Successful communities typically possess great content and significant leadership participation. In retrospect, lining up subject matter experts, feeding them with immediate content to post, and encouraging learners to join the community may have helped the community experience greater participation and depth of conversations.

Notification of incomplete training should be sent directly to leaders of lagging groups. Frequent reminders were sent to employees who had not completed the training as the deadline approached and passed. While many organizations consider LMS notifications a valuable practice for driving compliance training completions, the notifications were not well-received. While Deloitte still advocates the practice, notifications should also go to the leaders of lagging teams in an effort to create some local accountability for the learners.

ConclusionThe learner-centric learning approach designed and implemented as part of Philips transparency compliance efforts delivered effective results. The initial communication campaign, including the emails and intranet page, significantly increased learners transparency awareness, drove learners to available resources, and helped the organization hit its target 85 percent completion rate on the training course. The formal learning opportunities, including the e-learning and meeting presentations, received high acclaim from learners, and the challenging knowledge assessment provided Philips with data that the company can use to demonstrate the learners understanding of key compliance topics. The performance support materials provided learners with the information they needed to accurately complete transparency-related tasks. Although final data on the value of the resources will not be available until after the time of this papers publication, website analytics show impressive numbers of targeted learners have clicked through the performance support materials and spent time reviewing the materials.

While low awareness to the organizations social media platform at Philips has been a challenge, the learner-centric approach appears to be a success. It significantly improved awareness to transparency compliance, educated employees on the organizations expectations, and created the desired behavioral changes. As employees continue to integrate the expected behavior changes, they can further improve their understanding of transparency compliance and hold their colleagues accountable for their behaviors to help ensure that Philips achieves its transparency compliance objectives.

ContactsJosh HaimsPrincipalDeloitte Consulting LLPjhaims@deloitte.com

Burt ReaDirectorDeloitte Consulting LLP brea@deloitte.com

Jennifer StempelSenior ManagerDeloitte Consulting LLPjstempel@deloitte.com

Bob Buckler (Deloitte Consulting LLP) also contributed to this article.

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