Adding “A P” to the Marketing Mix

One would think that running a business is easy – just maximise revenue and minimise costs! However, this simple formula is incomplete without the essence of what makes your business unique – it’s not just about the product, but also about the price, the place and the positioning. These “4 P’s” were coined by Neil Borden in 1964 as he illustrated how companies can use marketing and advertising to generate revenues. We add two more letters to this – “Analytics” and “People”. Holistically, this new mix now centres around customer experience, ensuring that any activity of the business is firmly centred around the customer and underpinned by data and analytics. Product and Customer Experience Products (or solutions in a B2B context) can be thought of as solutions to a problem. Do you know what problems your customers face? Is your solution the right fit to solve that problem? By solving a problem, you not only meet a basic need but also open up avenues to prevent the problem from recurring in the future -this value-enhancing activity attracts and keeps customers to your brand. This is where most data scientists spend their time – building models that predict customer take-up rates and churn rates. A question I will leave you with: if all companies are building these models, what’s next? Price and Customer Experience Pricing is tricky – it’s moved away from the cold mathematics of finding the optimal monetary amount where your revenue exceeds your cost as customers want to get value from what they purchase. Prices are simply the intersection of supply and demand and unfortunately can have an extreme impact on perceived value. For example, a bottle of water at either R1 or R100 would raise eyebrows (for different reasons), indicative that people intuitively place a value on the goods and services that they purchase. Value is also driven by quality – one would expect to pay a higher price for a higher quality product or service. At the very least, you should be able to price your products and services at the point where you have a positive margin, while still maintaining a competitive edge. However, the business that will succeed combines this optimisation with what the customer expects and perceives. Do customers feel that they get value for money after purchasing from you? This value doesn’t only have to be in the price – a simple “thank you” or confirmation of the good purchase decision or tips on how to use the product or service effectively goes a long way in creating value. Data drawn from research generate valuable insights into “segmenting” your customers into smaller, more tangible groups, after which you can apply different treatment strategies to ensure that each group is at its optimal. Place and Customer Experience As we have learnt with lockdown, businesses limited by geographical location face dire consequences if their clientele cannot reach them. This was actually an opportunity to innovate, by assessing whether your products and services can generate the same appeal virtually. Naturally, this is a trial and error experiment with many as some customers may simply not be digitally inclined whereas some products can “never” be sold online. This rise in digitalisation of businesses also generated significantly more data for use. The use of digital and geographic data is currently on the rise, as more businesses see the value of placement in offering enhanced interactions with their customers. Imagine a world where your route in the mall is “laid out” for you based on your previous purchase history, hobbies and interests Promotion and Customer Experience Marketing, in a post POPIA world, is no longer about spamming potential customers. It’s about gaining trust with your existing customers by only communicating what is relevant and timely. For prospective customers, your brand and corresponding advertising also need to be targeted at who you wish to attract. To determine your existing and potential clientele, it helps to not only segment your customers but also combine their psychographic data (values, needs, wants, aspirations) with their interactions and purchasing history. People and Customer Experience It is naturally important to focus on delivering on what the customer wants, but an often overlooked factor is ensuring that you have the right people to execute on that promise. Irrespective of the size of your business, your business is unique – it has a DNA, a culture, values and principles that differ from any other. Finding others who are aligned to this experience is critical to ensure success – it never ends well to hire a salesperson who hates talking to people! How do you know you have the right people? While interviews and personality traits can inform you of who to choose, you as the entrepreneur must know what your business’s DNA looks like. Getting these 5P’s is by itself not a winning recipe. However, by focusing on putting your customers (and employees) first, it can certainly get you into the competition. How far you progress through it depends on how capable and changeable you are. About the Author Professor Yudhvir Seetharam Head of Analytics: Insights and Research FNB
Vanity, Sanity, Reality: What’s Really Important for Your Data Strategy

By Jason Foster – Founder & Chief Executive, Cynozure Group (USA) Revenue = Vanity One of the biggest mistakes is to focus on your company’s top line: revenue. Oh the allure of revenue! It’s easy to focus on the revenue number as it’s the biggest one on the P&L and it hasn’t yet been reduced by the various business costs and expenses. It’s an impressive sounding number too “we’ve grown our revenue by x% this year” can sound great. Also, it’s relatively easy to understand as it’s money into the business, it’s transactional, so there are minimal calculations to do. It is however, a vanity metric because it doesn’t come with any context. That context being how it compares to previous years, how it compares to the market, but most importantly: whether it generated any profit for the business. If you made £1m but it cost you £1.5m do so, then you’ve made a loss and have no money to reinvest in the business to drive growth. Revenue growth is important of course as its the way you will create more value in the business in the future, assuming subsequent profits. Profit = Sanity To that end the saying continues, profit is sanity. Profit is essentially what is left once you’ve subtracted all the various costs and expenses of the business. Profit is a much better indicator of the health of a business; and is more commonly used to gauge the valuation of a business. It’s a much better indicator of financial performance. Generating profits is what keeps you sane. The problem with profit though, is it isn’t actually real until it’s turned into actual money. So on paper you might have sold £1m of services and products, and it may have cost you £300k to deliver that revenue. Leaving you £700k of profit on paper. However, the actual receipt of that money is what’s important. Depending on payment terms and when money actually arrives that profit is just on paper. Cash = Reality That’s where this saying ends. With saying cash is reality. Actual physical money in the bank, and more importantly the flow of real cash into the business (not on paper revenue or profits), is what really makes or breaks a business. The money is there, you can see it, you can spend it, you can pay your staff, you can buy more stock, you can invest in growth. It’s the peace of mind required to keep a business grounded in reality. A positive cash flow is a really powerful indicator of a healthy business as it shows that you can generate revenue, collect the money, pay your costs and expenses and still be left with money. Cash is the lifeblood of the business. I’ve applied the same thinking the world of data, analytics and artificial intelligence to better help us understand what’s really important, and the reality. So it goes like this… AI = Vanity Like revenue there is an allure surrounding Artificial Intelligence (or any other latest technology solution). It’s the big one. It’s what people talk about and crave because it sounds impressive. “Yes we applied AI to that problem” “we’ve bought a platform that’s AI driven” “our software is an AI Driven platform for fixing the business”. To be at the forefront of innovation can be very important for you or your business and that innovation in, and of, itself can support your ambitions. It might attract funding, budgets, great talent. And whilst that is great, in those instances you are essentially using it as a vanity tool. Look, vanity works in the same way making revenue works; but like revenue, AI on its own is only part of the picture and needs context. Data = Sanity So continuing the analogy data is therefore sanity. More accurately, good clean trusted data is sanity. Without this your AI, analytics and insights are nothing. The lifeblood of your organisation is data. It’s the horizontal that cuts across the end-to-end value chain of your business. It gets created in every transaction and interaction that your customers, employees, partners and stakeholders have with you. Well captured, consolidated, modelled and activated data is what allows the value and benefits of having that data to be realised, and plugged into artificially intelligent systems to drive benefit. Data, when done right, is the sanity of your business. It allows you to manage processes, operate effectively, interact with customers, assess financial performance (remember revenue, profit cash?). It has the power to transform the business. Looking after it well ensures you don’t break regulatory or other legal obligations; knowing you’re on top of data will keep you sane for sure. But here’s the thing. Data is nothing really. Like profit, it doesn’t give you anything until its turned into value. You could have the best data, the best data pipelines, platform, people to manage it and model it, but without actions being taken or change being made its just data sat in systems. Business Outcomes = Reality That’s where my saying ends: business outcomes are reality. Actual business improvement through the application of data, analytics and AI. Data products that guide decision making, and people making quicker decisions – more right, more often – to improve revenue profit cash customer service business operations environmental outcomes societal improvements That’s reality. And it’s not always positive – I can find plenty of people that are impressed with the AI created and the data held by Facebook, but I can find as many (if not more) people who judge the outcomes of that ecosystem at scale to be detrimental, if not disastrous, for the world. To summarise: What happens as an outcome to your data strategy is what really matters, what really drives improvement; and like cash really is the lifeblood of the business. Listen to the podcast here.
BI in the Moment

By Michiel van Staden, Data Analytics Lead, ABSA Leadership spend most of their day in meetings, making decisions. Operations are mostly busy doing operations, taking decisions. In the spaces between, there is hopefully some time for all to engage the relevant colleague communication platforms, decision-making. When running, we run. Every now and then we might pause to catch our breath, engage those around us. Whilst running, there are apps that feeds us relevant info on our progress as we go and on pausing, gives us just what we need to decide on the way forward. Coming from 13 years in data analytics experience across fraud prevention, credit risk and operations to digital and marketing, I’d like to talk about practical ways to feed decision-making in workplace meetings, operations, and the spaces between, with relevant information. Reports Coming From Systems Within our organisation, we have many different systems collecting information. Some of these have been developed to engage potential new customers, others to process applications. There are systems to manage accounts whilst the relationship is in good standing, and still others for when that relationship goes through challenges. Based on the relevant function, each one of these processes would generate datasets that would then be stored accordingly. Much of this does now reside on the same centralised data warehouse, but there are still nuances in terms of dataset-specific access and formatting. Often this would dictate the way reports are developed. Datasets relating to applications would for example form the basis for a sales report, often taking shape around the pieces of information that happen to have been stored. In developing this report, the temptation is often great to include as much information as available, some of which might even not be accurately captured or well understood. From this position, getting the business to actively access and use these reports is an uphill battle. Even for those very close to the relevant system process, field names as captured in the data can be totally unfamiliar, whilst in parallel they are still struggling with navigating the reporting tool and trying to make sense of the overwhelming amount of information. Already being pressed for time, this does not bode well for adoption, but with time it is possible to get there. Demand is there to track business performance, and thus leadership is forced in a sense to make the reports work. As stakeholders continue to engage with the reports, questions do emerge around the fringes. For example, enquiring what role prospecting to potential new customers played in sales and what happened with the relationship post sale. At this stage there might very well already be prospecting and existing customer relationship reports. In some cases, the data specialist responsible for sales reporting might also be close to those, but more probably not. Whether to merge these reports or keep them running in parallel, with the increasing likelihood of overlaps as they grow, can be a very complicated problem to solve. Can the different data sources be compiled practically into one report? Are the other reports being used? Will the overlapping numbers be consistent or conflicting? When not handled well, you can easily end up with a myriad of reports, containing duplication and inconsistencies, whilst becoming increasingly too large, complex, and unwieldy to be of any practical use. Add to this ad hoc requests for specific pieces of information increasingly landing on data specialists laps because stakeholders are not able to effectively find the information themselves. The Business Does Not Know What it Needs When you do ask the business what intelligence they need, they are not able to tell you. Not having a view of what is possible and available in terms of reporting makes it very difficult to devise specific requirements for what the business will need and be able to practically use. As data specialists, our first task is to get to know the data on offer very well. We have to figure out how to access the data coming from different systems, need to ask the questions towards understanding exactly what each piece of information means and ultimately need to become very comfortable in weaving data from these different sources together into an end-to-end picture. Additionally, it is also key to understand the business. What is the business strategy? How does it make its money? What are the key processes? What does the business offer its customers? And lastly, take time to listen to and understand your audience. What does their typical day look like? What challenges are they facing? How do they make decisions? What are their thoughts around data? How comfortable are they in working with data? Only once you’ve got a very clear understanding of all of these components can you engage your stakeholders very practically, giving them the business intelligence they need to do their jobs better and make informed decisions. BI in the Moment Knowing exactly what data is available and which processes are core to the specific business area, sit with your key audience to understand what the key meetings are in their schedules and unpack what information would better enable them to make the critical decisions in those sessions. Give them what they need. Also spend time in the various operational functions. Unpack what systems they are using and how they make decisions within those processes on a day to day basis. Give them what they need. Understand your data Understand your business Understand your audience Give them what they need In the spaces between there might still be additional, maybe slightly more generic information that could give your audience the latest on business progress or performance, informing their decision-making more holistically. Actively work with your stakeholders towards narrowing down a handful of key metrics, giving them what they need at a glance, in an email or messaging body. Clicking through to reports on a daily basis quickly becomes very tedious and discouraging. Before adding any new metrics or views to a dashboard, review all the existing ones. Are they still relevant and value adding? Or is the report starting to slide into becoming less valuable? Then something has got to give. Nobody wants to keep generating reports nobody uses, and nobody wants to be inundated with reports they cannot use. Give them what they need. BI in the moment.
How Adidas is Using Sports Psychology to Sharpen Employee Performance

Adidas is on a mission to evolve to a performance culture – establishing a fast-paced, feedback-driven performance management approach that has more in common with the elite athletes that they sponsor than their corporate competitors Nike and Puma. This signals a significant shift for Adidas in their performance strategy which previously conformed to the traditional PM model. “In the past, we followed the traditional approach of annual reviews at the end of the year. We were always looking back and that really wasn’t in line with our vision for a future-focused performance culture,” said Andy Longley, Global Senior Director of Talent. Andy tells us about Adidas’ new performance and development approach, dubbed “My Best”, which borrows elements of sports psychology and techniques from elite sportspeople and applies them to monitor the performance of their 55,000 people. “We’re using this new performance development approach to accelerate our culture change so we can focus on the two culture shifts we’re trying to drive: 1. Playing to win: promoting healthy competition against our competitors as well as internally; and 2. Evolving to a performance culture: constantly try to improve what we do at the individual level, at the team level and a macro level.” Coaching, Detail and Regularity The foundation of Adidas’ new performance development approach is coaching, with an emphasis on detail and regularity, something that was missing in their existing approach. “For an athlete to become the champion of their own development, whether that be an Olympian or a team sport athlete, they need regular feedback from coaches, teammates, nutritionists and analysts. This regular, real-time information is essential for creating self-awareness in the athletes and helps them iterate on improving their performance every day. “That’s one of the foundational tenets of what we’re trying to do in ‘My Best’. Creating more awareness within ourselves, as employees and leaders, building more coaching into our muscle memory, to help create performance-driven habits in our people every day, just like athletes do.” Their feedback-focused performance development strategy has four key elements which Longley outlines here: 1. Monthly Touch Base “The monthly touch base is a conversation between an employee and their line manager that is focused on performance and development only. It’s not an operational catch-up. We’ve created this space for these coaching conversations to happen more frequently and it’s the glue that holds a lot of the other elements of our performance strategy together.” 2. 90 Day Plan “Very rarely do athletes focus on the end of the season; they’d normally focus on their next game if it’s a team sport, or their next event if it’s an individual athlete. They’re looking to try to achieve a personal best or land a team structure which often requires a frequently-changing strategy. We’ve brought that shorter-term focus into our performance strategy with our 90-day plans. “The 90-day plans give a shorter-term focus on our objectives and mean we can adapt our objectives for that quarter against the business needs. It means we are agile enough to be able to pivot according to the business conditions or environment e.g. if we get a new competitor, or if we have a macroeconomic situation like we are currently experiencing in Latin America with devaluations of some of the currency, that has a big impact. This shorter-term focus on our objectives means we’re able to iterate more regularly.” 3. Technology Driven Feedback “Just like an athlete would use biometrics such as GPS tracking to measure how many kilometres they run in a match, we wanted to use technology to bring in feedback from multiple sources, so that each employee could see how they were tracking in real-time. We’ve built an app which is able to collect feedback from stakeholders, colleagues, or team members if you’re a leader, to help you evaluate and drive your performance.” 4. Quarterly Performance Conversations “The final element of our performance strategy was changing the frequency of our formal performance conversations from annually to quarterly. These more frequent reviews allow employees to get feedback in time to be able to digest it and adjust their work accordingly. Just as athletes would review footage of their last game to improve their technique for their next match, we’re helping our people do the same rather than waiting till the end of the year.” Plan Ahead to Avoid Stalling The program was formally launched in Q1 2018, but the culture change piece started almost two years before, and this is a key factor in the program’s success says Longley. “I advise to give yourself at least a year to plan when it comes to culture change, otherwise you can have some early struggles. A year seems like a long time for an organisation to wait, especially smaller ones, but it’s not a long time in a culture change and planning before you lead is incredibly important. “For this program to work, we knew we needed to get a head start on building up our leadership capabilities so they were able to have effective coaching conversations and be able to give challenging feedback. Throughout 2017 we worked with our leaders to foster these skills and then when we launched the program in 2018 we were confident they were in a much better place to be playing a role of coach, rather than the more traditional role of giving instructions.” As for organisations who are looking to embark on a similar transformation, Longley has two more pieces of valuable advice: Find a way to remove an individual’s financial compensation from what you’re trying to do with culture change. “When an individual’s bonus is tied to trying to change their performance, and you’re also trying to execute a cultural change, there can be mixed messages. Individuals are always thinking around their bonus, especially the extrinsically-motivated individuals, so if you really want your culture change to land, disentangle your individual compensation from it and you’ll get traction much sooner. You can always introduce it back in once your culture change has landed. That’s something we would have done earlier if we’d known.” Establish leadership groups to bring culture change to life. “It was important to us that “My Best” was not an HR-driven initiative. The program is CEO-launched and driven, but we also created two leadership groups which are really our primary way of driving the cultural change. “The first is our core leadership group made up of 22 of the most senior leaders in the organisation. They are the ones who really drive and champion leadership as a differentiator in performance culture. The second group is an extended leadership group which comprises 150 of our most driven and passionate executives. These two groups are the way we bring the culture change to life. They role model the performance culture and our purpose of ‘changing lives through sport’. A Marathon, Not a Sprint The program has received incredible support from Adidas’ employees who are loving the one-on-one feedback and career coaching. This is reflected in the completion rates of performance conversations which is currently sitting at an incredible 95%. A more challenging aspect of the My Best program has been the time commitment expected from senior leaders, but it’s all part of the growing pains of a new program says Longley. “If you’ve got a team of 12 people which you’re mentoring for an hour every month, in addition to your day job, and being part of a leadership group which needs to attend leadership activation events every quarter, that all takes a lot of time. So helping support the executive level in that has been the challenging part. But that’s where of course having your CEO and your board as the champion endorsers – and not your CHRO which many organisations have for a program like this – has meant we’re able to move through that with support.” About the Author Andy Longley is Global Senior Director of Talent at Adidas. Before joining Adidas, Andy was Head of Recruitment at Emirates, responsible for attracting and selecting international pilots. He has an MSc in Applied Psychology and his extensive experience includes organisational psychology, talent acquisition, talent management, executive and employee coaching, diversity & inclusion, strategy and workforce planning. In 2010/11 he spent a year as a volunteer for the UN, monitoring international peace agreements in the Middle East. This post originally appeared on the HR Innovation & Tech Fest New Zealand blog.
Measuring Productivity in the 4th Industrial Revolution

Frederick Taylor pioneered the concept of Time and Motion studies in the early 1900s. This was right in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution. He was a qualified Mechanical Engineer and became one of the first professional Management Consultants. Taylor focused on improving industrial efficiency by bringing science into the field of productivity. He introduced the concepts of selecting, training and developing individuals to accomplish simple tasks instead of expecting them to learn passively through observation and supervision. He also encouraged employers to divide work equally between managers and workers, while establishing the concepts of budgeting and performance management. Taylor inspired James McKinsey, who founded the global consulting firm bearing his name. Their thinking helped with the design of efficient workplaces that allowed production to run smoothly along carefully designed assembly lines. This would eventually lead to lean manufacturing methods that were adopted by Japanese and US vehicle manufacturers to further improve efficiency, productivity and significantly reduce waste and production defects. From Doing Things Right to Doing the Right Things Over the years, mechanisation and robotics have automated many of these manual and repetitive tasks, leading to the Third Industrial Revolution. Employers could now ensure greater efficiency and quality, requiring fewer blue-collar workers. This shifted the requirements of productivity from doing things right, to doing the right things. As we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this shift becomes even more profound. Our employees are no longer expected to focus on applying technical skills and displaying their physical abilities and prowess. They now need to be creative, solve complex problems and rely on social and networking skills to accomplish vague targets where success is not clear or defined. Productivity is not measured by counting widgets the way Taylor and his consultants did 100 years ago. Customers have different demands and expectations now. They want an experience, not just a product. Social media, online shops and the Internet of Things are slowly transforming the way that we buy and sell almost everything. From groceries and insurance to banking, holidays and transportation. The fastest growing corporations are no longer selling products, they are providing services online. Amazon, Facebook, Nvidia, Paycom, and Arista to name but a few. Artificial Intelligence and Going to Mars The dawn of Artificial Intelligence brings exciting new opportunities for employers and employees. Flexible working arrangements, cloud technology, education, medical care, nutrition and provision of energy. NASA envisioned us populating Mars by 1988. This did not happen, but thanks to one remarkable South African entrepreneur, the sights are now set on 2030 – perhaps even sooner than that. What will we do on Mars? To start with, learn to produce our own food and water, find new energy sources and materials on the planet to build and power up the habitation complexes. But then the focus will shift to scientific discovery and technological breakthrough. Mars will start exporting knowledge to Earthlings – not raw materials. Not manufactured goods. But ideas, concepts and technological solutions. This significantly transforms the way we measure success and productivity. Forget trying to identify leading and lagging indicators. Success will depend completely on thinking, no longer on doing. Productivity will not be based on what you can produce but on intangible measures such as contributing novel ideas, collaboratively solving complicated problems and strategic decision-making based on predictions and analytics. Managing performance must be ongoing and feedback cannot be limited to annual engagement surveys and appraisals. Where to for South Africa? What does this mean for South Africa? Data and ISP fees need to drop (significantly) so that we can enter the virtual world without any hindrances. Our education system needs to be overhauled to allow for rapid adoption of new technology and exposure to online content. If we fail, we will fall further and further behind the technological wave and risk becoming stuck in the backwaters and political quagmire with other developing countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Indonesia. Russia, China and India have embraced technological advancement to drive better productivity and this has shown a consistent improvement in their Capital ratios over the last few decades. George will be speaking on identifying talent by triangulating results of performance reviews, psychometric assessments and Microsoft Office behaviour at this year’s HR + L&D Innovation & Tech Fest. You can grab your ticket for this year’s event here. About the Author George Honiball is the Talent Manager at Rand Mutual Assurance. He is an Industrial Psychologist with over 25 years of experience as a Senior Manager and Business Consultant with companies based in South Africa as well as the United Kingdom. He has two children, is a published author and brews his own beer.
The Power of Play: How The LEGO Group Has Built Fun Into Their Employee Experience

Playfulness: it’s not necessarily something we associate with the corporate world, where stoic seriousness is traditionally the name of the game. However, play is such an important fundamental element of creativity, learning, motivation and interpersonal engagement that it seems illogical to separate it from the work environment in the way that we traditionally have. The LEGO Group agrees. As the world’s biggest toy company, it is perhaps to be expected that the company has made play a central element of the culture. But the tangible way in which it forms part of the employee experience is what really drives transformative results at the LEGO Group. Thomas Møller Jeppesen is HR Director, Partnering & Operations at the LEGO Group (DNK).Here, he gives us a glimpse into the power of play as a cultural game-changer at the company. Fun as a Fundament From the very beginning, the transformative power of play has been understood at the LEGO Group. The core values of the company – fun, creativity, imagination, learning and caring – all tie in with play, and the company sees this as an incredible asset for building a strong company culture. Play is fundamental in the way we learn and work together – without it, we wouldn’t have languages and cultural practices because play is a prerequisite for a child’s ability to learn. It is the LEGO philosophy that good quality play enriches a child’s life and lays the foundation for children to become creative, engaged, lifelong learners. The LEGO Group emphasises the importance of play for adults too. All too often adults undervalue or forget to play, but constructive play can allow adults to experiment, create, innovate, problem solve, find out what works, make mistakes and build bonds with one another. Last year Forbes Magazine named LEGO the most powerful brand in the world. The company wants to leverage that power to bring out fantastic products that encourage people of all ages to play, and to ensure that the power of play is recognised as fundamental to the human experience. Playing on Employee Experience at LEGO At The LEGO Group, it’s “play from the first day!”. From the very first interview, LEGO employees will likely encounter the power of play. During the recruitment process, potential employees may be asked to build something, and during onboarding they will engage in building competitions with their new colleagues as a way of breaking the ice and emphasising the importance of play in the LEGO world. Community outreach programmes allow employees to engage the wider community around play – all as part of the job. These initiatives are broad and varied – for example local school visits, events around play, city sustainability workshops, and other events that allow the employees of the LEGO Group experience the power of play and the LEGO Brick. Employees can become qualified to facilitate play sessions in their local communities – all in a drive to bring development, meaning and joy to both employees and the communities they touch. The company holds an Annual Play Day for all LEGO employees worldwide. The organisation is closed down for a day (a huge feat for such a massive global operation!) and all employees are given the time to experience the power of play together. It’s an event that LEGO prioritises above operations so that they can emphasise the importance of play and its integral role in building an exceptional company culture. The organisation and employees are feeling the positive results of this focus on play. The culture they’ve built around having fun, caring, imagination and creativity is tangible and special. These initiatives give employees meaning in that they foster community engagement and a sense of being part of something bigger. The level of interconnectedness across the organisation is apparent because it is easy to build relationships around play. There is a cohesiveness and a real sense of pride that comes with building something together. That’s the power of play! About the Speaker Thomas Møller Jeppesen has worked for the LEGO Group for nearly six years in various HR positions, most of them working within the field of employee engagement and business partner to product development and innovation functions. He would describe himself as an adult with a kids mind when it comes to his desire to play and learn. “You never get too old to play!” This post originally appeared on the HR and L&D Innovation & Tech Fest Australian blog.
e-Learning is Dead: 6 Important Things You Need to Know

eLearning is dead, people. Let’s face it, our efforts to translate one-on-one analogue learning into digital tools have failed. Despite our best efforts to entice learners with “interactive” content, online communities, and incentives for completion, people remain uninspired and unmotivated. Here’s why: It’s usually boring: boring videos, boring content, multiple choice *sigh* We often assume one size fits all: We know that people have different behaviours and different learning needs so why do we assume that one e-learning solution is going to be right for everyone? It’s not relevant: Does everyone need to have the same learning at the same time for the same business challenge? Probably not. A New Era of Digital Learning “The art of L&D is about creating a learning journey” These eloquent words were spoken by Reza Moussavian, SVP HR Digital & Innovation at Deutsche Telekom (DT) during his presentation at HR Innovation & Tech Fest in Australia in 2017. As the incubator of Deutsche Telekom’s HR function, Reza has challenged the existing Learning & Development approach: from mass standardised boring e-Learning to human-centred exciting social learning. “After some soul searching we came to the conclusion at Deutsche Telekom that eLearning is not the future. We had to do things differently if we wanted to engage our 220,000-strong workforce who were already living a digital lifestyle. But we knew that our HR and L&D people were not going to be able to disrupt themselves, so we set up a special disruption unit which focuses on delivering different digital learning experiences,” Reza said. Here are Reza’s top 6 ideas about the future of digital learning that he presented: 1. Treat Your Employees Like Your Customers Most savvy companies are currently switching from cost focus to customer focus, creating exceptional experiences for their customers. The interesting thing is you can only have satisfied customers if you have satisfied employees, so there is a clear link between employee experience and customer experience. However, when it comes to corporate learning, many companies are forgetting about the experience they’re delivering for their people. Put as much effort into your digital learning strategy as you would your customer experience strategy and you’re on your way. 2. Start with an Innovation and Growth Mindset When Reza’s team started their digital learning journey at Deutsche Telekom, the team looked at reports like The Future of Jobs from the World Economic Forum which outlines the core skills that people are going to need for the future of work: things like complex problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and creativity were key. “We realised our focus on learning needed to shift from teaching people how to do things right, to giving them the capabilities and competencies that are suitable for working in the digital age,” he said. 3. Make Digital Learning Self-Paced and Self-Managed Learners should feel they have control over the content, they should be inspired rather than forced to do something. So digital learning should be flexible enough to allow learners to login when they choose: during private time or working hours depending on the daily business challenges they have. It should also be self-managed. Trust that your learners can master the complexity of different tools and don’t settle for one HR system that promises to do it all. After all, they are mastering the use of Twitter, SharePoint, a browser, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc. all at the same time in their private lives. “By making use of different tools, we can expose people to a certain level of complexity, which can actually be a good thing. Our job as L&D professionals is to set the flow and create a learning journey using these different tools,” Reza said. 4. Focus on Relevance We should ideally be making digital learning journeys that are applicable to learners’ jobs. That way we can weave them into digital transformation programs. And if they’re not immediately available for on-the-job applications (because not every business unit of 20,000 people has the same challenges at any given time) then think about how you can make it more fun, more entertaining, more inspiring. 5. Utilise your Enterprise Social Network DT was one of the first companies in Europe to make use of an Enterprise Social Network seven years ago and now have 120,000 active users. Reza believes this is one of the most underrated tools from an HR perspective. “We are currently putting digital learning into the social network, but this is limited due to its capabilities: you can upload videos, comment and link to articles, but that’s it. So you have to be very good at providing fresh content on a weekly basis because otherwise, people lose interest in it.” 6. Deliver an Experience Great Digital Learning provides an experience learners wouldn’t get in a face-to-face or analogue training. At DT, they’re currently looking at how they can use Virtual Reality to deliver coaching and virtual classrooms. One stumbling block they’ve come across has been the physical restrictions of VR “We initially thought that we could get rid of training spaces, but we found when people use VR and they walk around, they are a threat to themselves and to colleagues unless they’re using it in a contained space. So we’re learning that new requirements arise by making use of new technology,” Reza said. Less Technical, More Experience “Digital learning for me is designing learning not only by content, technical skills and competencies; it’s about designing a storyline that provides an experience for people,” Reza said. Digital Learning is not eLearning 2.0. It’s about shifting learning to align with the new realities of the digital world. The future of digital learning is: Making use of different experience types: video, podcast, quizzes, gamified elements Having access to the learning on the go, anytime, anywhere, from any device Choosing topics that users think are of relevance (not just HR) so they can connect to the overall story And above all, making whatever is there inspiring! About the Speaker Dr Reza Moussavian is Senior Vice President of the HR division “Digital & Innovation “ at Deutsche Telekom AG. Since its establishment in April 2016, the division successfully introduced new tools like a leadership-app, digital collaboration, innovation methods, future work, top management innovation formats and exploration of new technologies for Deutsche Telekom AG. Before taking the lead for the HR division “Digital & Innovation”, Dr Moussavian ran its predecessor named “Shareground” that focused on implementing a culture of innovation throughout Deutsche Telekom. This post originally appeared on the HR Innovation & Tech Fest Australian blog.