For global staffing company Manpower, there are multiple sides to development. There’s the regional approach, and there’s learning for leadership. In the former, learning leaders re-create exact working environments to effectively train their staffing spe
by Kellye Whitney
March 1, 2006
For global staffing company Manpower, there are multiple sides to development. There’s the regional approach, and there’s learning for leadership. In the former, learning leaders re-create exact working environments to effectively train their staffing specialists and direct-hire experts to hit the ball out of the park that very first day on the job. In the upper tiers of the company, leaders are groomed via global task forces that mesh action learning, development and project management skills to create culturally savvy leaders capable of executing the company’s new and continually evolving strategic vision. Together, the multi-faceted approach to learning and development at Manpower enables the company to find the best solutions for more than 25,000 employees and some 400,000 customers worldwide.
“We do a great job of tying learning, training and development all into our vision,” said Kathryn Gettelman, director of talent development in corporate learning, Manpower U.S. “We lead in the creation and delivery of services that enable our clients to win in the changing world of work. And when we think about the creation and delivery of services, we’re also very much aligned to thinking about how do we enable and really unleash the talent of all of our people to create and deliver those services.”
To ensure that the learning and development organization remains a central focus linked to the execution of company vision and strategy, all full-time Manpower employees as well as temporary workers and direct hires in any industry can have development plans. The company’s Global Learning Center focuses specifically on development for temporary and contract workers. The center has more than 3,000 online courses on everything from basic Excel and computer-based programs suitable for an administrative assistant to courses on how to safely operate a forklift. There also are courses available for college credit. “These courses are offered to every employee, every temp worker. They have access to this database for a certain length of time while they’re on the job. We feel strongly about the development not only of our people, but of the people we place,” Gettelman said. “We want to make sure they’re set up for success even though they’re no longer our employees. If they get on the job and realize that a course on this topic or this topic would benefit their job, they have access to that.”
Measurement has taken on a more important role in the past two years in response to a growing need to evaluate course effectiveness and ensure that training is “living” and directed toward solving business problems. For instance, before employees attend a class, they are sent a list of objectives, as is their manager. Afterward, depending on the scope and duration of the class, managers get follow-up calls to gauge employee behavior and performance, and to assess the potential need for coaching or reward. “We hear that people are getting a lot out of the training, but once they leave, how have they changed their behavior? How are they acting or doing their jobs differently? The objectives help guide your change in behavior. Then we’ve got people in the classes who really know why they’re there,” Gettelman said.
Addressing the need for direct-hire employee development is a significant shift for the company. Manpower is well known for its ability to provide temporary workers, but the organization has expanded to aid a widening net of customers who need direct hires, which involves a different set of skills and competencies. “Now it’s not just managing and looking for those temporary opportunities. You’re looking for long-term opportunities, looking for different things in your candidates, in the customers you’re serving,” Gettelman said. “You’re asking different questions. It is a very different way to run a business. Our direct-hire team members are really the subject-matter experts. They’re the ones who know how to do direct hire and do it successfully. We said, ‘OK, there’s three women who do this really well. How do we impart that knowledge to all of the direct-hire consultants that we’re hiring so that they can do it equally as well?’”
This example of using learning to solve a business problem resulted in a weeklong experience called Extreme Direct Hire, which has a combination of learning, such as instructor-led instruction on behavioral interviewing, and role playing and coaching on the phone and computer. Classes last from early morning to early evening, much like a workday. “They have to come up with a marketing campaign,” Gettelman said. “As they learn about all the things that Manpower offers, they have to put that together to help market themselves to potential customers. Everything from the 15-second e-mail that you leave somebody because they’re not there to the presentation you make in person to what do you send to somebody to garner some initial interest. The whole week is a combination of all these different experiences—experiential learning, a little bit of instructor-led, lots of role-plays to create the situations—so these people can effectively hit the ground running.”
Recently Manpower rolled out a formal development plan to assess all of its employees and managers, and then target recommended opportunities, such as courses in the Global Learning Center, outside vendors, on-site facilitators or conferences. “I think about it as a developmental menu and link it to the overall performance process, and that obviously links to compensation and those kinds of things,” Gettelman said. “People want to develop their people but don’t always know how. This is the road map for the how. We have every single course aligned to one of our strategies. Then we’ve got metrics linked directly to the actual dollars being produced or the number of hours of staffing work our specialists put out there. We can link their productivity to those hours or the sales or what-have-you. It’s a vision in action, and it’s kind of growing from there.”
“Development is a key part of our corporate strategy, and it has to be tied to our corporate strategy,” said Mara Swan, senior vice president global human resources, Manpower. “We have 25,000 employees. We’re responsible for all of them, plus our temporary workforce, and we place millions of workers each year. I think the biggest challenge for us is two things: ensuring that learning is tied to the strategy and deploying training and development because we operate in 70 countries in multiple languages, and that makes it very difficult.”
Swan focuses on development at the global level: how to construct specific global task teams, get them up to speed quickly and develop a common training language for leadership development activities in multiple locations. In January when Manpower launched its new strategy and vision at a leadership forum, it meant clearly defining leadership roles and determining appropriate competency models and development needs for leaders. “A lot of it is doing that whole strategic overhaul of our development, our philosophy and how we deploy development in our company,” Swan said. “We’re in the middle of that right now. Typically companies go through phases where you have a strategy from five years ago. We feel like we’ve achieved that, and now we’re looking at where we want to take the company. We have to look at what is the role of our leaders in developing that strategy?”
In keeping with that new strategy, Manpower launched an initiative to help leaders create a more global perspective. Task forces are one aspect of development. “We also use leadership meetings as forums for communication and development of our leaders. That’s worked for us up to this point, and now we need a little bit more structure around that. The first phase of that is to go through the strategy. How we go to market and then how does our leadership support that effort? What do we need to be doing in order to support it? Then we’ll come out with a combination of training courses, people systems and development for our people so that they can grow their skills. We believe in learning and working with your peers, action learning, actually working on a project.”
Many of the details are confidential, but Manpower has four large global team projects that are critical to execution of its strategy. The teams offer cultural training about how people make decisions in other countries to ensure a more productive work start, help people understand basic project management and how to work on a global team where English isn’t the first language. Global development is facilitated by using the company’s succession planning process to identify people for development as well as promotion. “We get one of these projects out of our strategic planning process and say, ‘OK, this project has to have 10 people on it. Let’s go to our global task force list and see who would be best to work on that project.’ We’ll get a cross-functional group from different levels in the organization from different countries. They typically work with an executive sponsor—someone who reports directly to the CEO—who can help frame up the goal, and the time length of the project. Then the task team would work on that project and present it back to the leadership team. It’s been a really effective way of developing our people,” Swan explained, comparing the new format to classroom training, which lacks the real-time, on-the-job-practice component. “We’ve been a global company but have operated fairly regionally oriented. Recently with the competition, our clients are getting more global. You understand the challenge there when people have different ways of making decisions, language issues, all sorts of things. So when they start to work on teams like this, we’ve just seen an incredible amount of power, and I think it’s a good way to check your succession planning process and the identification of your employees with high potential. Training is only good if it’s connected to what you’re trying to achieve. Instead of just focusing on training, I’d like to identify each key role for the company, country manager, branch manager. What are the skills they need and how do we develop the competencies that support those success factors?”
–Kellye Whitney, kellyew@clomedia.com