The work described in this case study was performed by LEO Learning in 2018-2019 prior to becoming part of GP Strategies.
Situation
IHG is a multinational hospitality company managing more than 5,500 hotels in 100 countries under its umbrella of familiar brands including InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and HUALUXE.
With aggressive growth plans in a complex sector that is being rapidly changed by digital technologies, IHG wanted to ensure that it is deriving maximum benefit from its investment in learning for nearly 400,000 hotel staff.
The global learning and development team decided to put in place the policy, processes, and tools required to measure impact on individual and business performance.
Challenge
Like most organizations, IHG had been tracking participation and satisfaction, using Excel, and conducting surveys to gauge the transfer of learning. They had also started measuring the business impact of a major management development program. The challenge was that they wanted to scale up the volume of programs they could measure, so they turned to LEO Learning to help them introduce a ‘big data’ approach. We jointly developed a plan of action that began with establishing very firm measurement foundations.
This involved developing a measurement framework appropriate for the IHG way of working and a ‘kitbag’ of tools that simplified and standardized the process. Crucially, the analytics team decided the starting point for the implementation phase was an education program for the L&D family.
Solution
Beginning with an intensive session to establish detailed learning objectives, IHG and LEO Learning worked in a highly-compressed timescale to develop the new learning program. This would be delivered in IHG’s existing Learning Experience Platform (LXP), Fuse. A series of three core webinars explored the principles of measurement, followed by post-work during which the delegates applied the principles in practice. A fourth session comprehensively explored how the L&D team could extract useful data from their LMS.
Throughout the program, IHG’s development team, supported by LEO Learning, maintained a lively dialogue with participants, using Fuse’s built-in forum, and tracked their level of participation through the data available from the platform.
At key points, formal assessments were conducted to check the degree to which the participants were developing new knowledge. The formal elements of the program were then supplemented with curated content that allowed participants to develop their own learning journey based on their needs and preferences.
It was critical that we developed the IHG way, a standardized approach that would make it far simpler for the teams to apply measurement to their learning interventions. Our goal was to move measurement from a ‘one-off project’ to business as usual. The data has always been there. We just had to have a simplified way to identify and collect it.
Betina Skovsted, Global Learning Director
Beginning with an intensive session to establish detailed learning objectives, IHG and LEO Learning worked in a highly-compressed timescale to develop the new learning program. This would be delivered in IHG’s existing Learning Experience Platform (LXP), Fuse. A series of three core webinars explored the principles of measurement, followed by post-work during which the delegates applied the principles in practice. A fourth session comprehensively explored how the L&D team could extract useful data from their LMS.
Throughout the program, IHG’s development team, supported by LEO Learning, maintained a lively dialogue with participants, using Fuse’s built-in forum, and tracked their level of participation through the data available from the platform. At key points, formal assessments were conducted to check the degree to which the participants were developing new knowledge. The formal elements of the program were then supplemented with curated content that allowed participants to develop their own learning journey based on their needs and preferences.
From the outset, LEO Learning utilized their knowledge and experience to not only help us vocalize what we wanted to achieve, but also provide their own sizeable contribution and framework without which we would not have been able to achieve the positive results and traction we achieved.
Ben Meyer, Manager of Global Learning Insight and Analytics, IHG
Results
IHG’s team say they have seen “amazing engagement” with the program. Seventy-five percent of the potential audience logged in for the first webinar, and participation in the program was high even though it was not compulsory. Crucially, more training managers are now seeking the analytics team’s help to develop truly effective measurement plans for programs that are business critical.
