Paulo Goelzer, CLO and vice president of international strategy for the Independent Grocer's Alliance (IGA), is challenged to deliver localized, relevant learning for more than 3,500 independently operated grocers.
by Kellye Whitney
March 27, 2006
Imagine a chain of grocery stores that stretches from the United States through 40 countries from Anguilla to Zimbabwe. Imagine having to sustain localized, culturally consistent learning and development efforts for all of the independent business operators who make up that chain. This is IGA, the Independent Grocer’s Alliance, and it is Paulo Goelzer’s world. He began his learning and development career as a teacher at a top Brazil university, where he was twice honored by students as their best choice professor for strategic planning and marketing, seemingly prophetic subject matter considering his first position with IGA a decade ago involved developing new retail franchises overseas. Now, as the company’s CLO and vice president of international strategy, Goelzer finds that teaching impressionable young minds in a continuously changing setting offered a number of advantages when it comes to offering up performance-enhancing learning for the retail grocery business.
Grocery store chains come with a number of learning challenges, including a high employee turnover rate, a factor that Goelzer battles in more than 3,500 independently operated grocers in 48 of the 50 United States. To combat the turnover issue and other challenges inherent to providing learning and development opportunities for such a disparate population of franchise organizations, Goelzer ensures that IGA learning is localized, relevant and organized.
“This business of supermarkets is a business that is very local and people-intense,” said Goelzer. “We need to provide a learner-centered process for adult learning that is performance based. The challenge is to create the conditions that make change happen in all those different countries and cultures in a way that is available all the time. You’re talking about something that is culturally specific, learner-centered and performance-based in many different ways and many different countries.”
The IGA Coca-Cola Institute for learning operates as a support system for all of the independently owned stores in the IGA system. Learning is voluntary in this system, meaning that Goelzer cannot command training interventions. Instead he must offer training that is attractive and capable of convincing store operators that using the system will build new skills and knowledge in the IGA system. “I need to create information that is meaningful and relevant and create a system that’s performance based with the cognitive structures that people have in different locations to absorb that education and basically make it easier for the store owner to use the training. In some respects, it’s more difficult because it’s voluntary training. If it’s not good they really don’t use it. I need to sell it more. I am evaluated by the number of people that I train, but I cannot mandate, so it’s more difficult than a situation in a traditional HR company where they are all employees of the company. If I don’t have a training that has the components to make it a good training, people will just ignore it.”
Naturally, senior learning executives don’t want their efforts to be ignored, so Goelzer has established a number of tools and tricks to prove to his franchise audience that learning is an asset to improve their store’s performance. “They look at me and they say, ‘hey, here’s something that I can use for my people in the store, and it will make my life easier. I can use this in my store, and it will increase my performance.’ That is the challenge. You really need to understand instructional design, sequencing, performance and you need to be really performance based. I really need to look in their environment and see how the learner works and what their problems are, which is not new in education.”
Environment, or what’s happening in the individual stores, is important. Goelzer chose a system of training based on the common grocery store positions and implemented a large, Web-based learning process. For example, to create learning interventions for the courtesy clerk or bagger, Goelzer performed some up-front analyses to determine: What are the courtesy clerks’ needs? What happens in their day-to-day environment? What are the job conditions? From there, Goelzer and his team work to create relevant learning that is student-centered and based on that courtesy clerk’s individual needs at that point.
IGA uses a significant e-learning platform as well as traditional classroom-based activities for its management- and supervisory-level positions. “We have train-the-trainer materials we put on the Web for trainers in locations with multiple languages such as Spanish, Chinese and Polish. Then we have a Web-based approach where we do certification, which is based on the environment and the position. We have a full LMS. We track what’s happening in each store, and we have centralized management of the content, but we decentralized the use and that tool can be used by itself,” Goelzer said. “I believe it’s better to use a blended approach when you do on-the-job training with the Web-based certification.”
IGA learning offers certifications for management- and non-management-level employees. “We are developing classes every day, but we started with the bottom—the stocker, courtesy clerk, the cashier—which is our most popular certification because in grocery stores, cashiers are where the biggest turnover is, and it’s a position that requires some skills to operate. First, they need to know the technical skills related to operations of the POS (purchasing system), the register, and then you need to have human or customer service skills because that’s who you interact with, and you need to be able to relate to that person. Third, you need to have product knowledge to know what the produce is when you put in the product number. A melon has a number. Also, you need to understand coupons and some governmental issues.”
Goelzer said generally he and his team work to create learning that will address the human, technical and conceptual skills necessary to ensure IGA employees around the globe can effectively solve problems. Web-based training enables the company to provide learning in a convenient format to address the significant turnover issue, particularly in the United States. “Half of the part-timers, which is almost 70 to 80 percent of the people, they will quit after 97 days,” Goelzer said. “It’s huge, and this is not an IGA number. Because we have independent owners, the numbers are smaller. That’s the reason we went to Web because you need to have something available 24×7.”
With high employee turnover rates and a learning and development system that is almost completely voluntary, metrics present another interesting challenge. IGA conducts research, sends out questionnaires and does in-depth, qualitative interviews with store owners to understand their challenges and evaluate classroom learning content and delivery. IGA also uses online testing to ensure that learning has an impact and is valued by senior management and all other employee levels in the organization.
“We built into our LMS system certification for each section on a course. Let’s say you take a cashier or stocker or a produce clerk course, whatever,” Goelzer said. “For each session, there is a post test. This post test is linked to subjects that the person saw, and for each reusable learning object I have five questions so the test is never the same. After each section there is a post test, and the person needs to get to a certain level. If the person doesn’t get 80 percent, the question the person got wrong comes back again. The content comes back, you need to read it again, and then you have a second post test. This process happens until you get to 80 percent. After you get 80 percent in a course that could have 10 sections, you can be certified in that position. My metrics are linked to reusable learning objects, and those learning objects are learned because there is a post-test.”
Next, Goelzer plans to turn his hand at capturing the knowledge of IGA’s more than 3,000 independent store owners. “Those guys are out there creating new things. They’re almost like labs of development, and some of them create new techniques and processes that we don’t know about. The new frontier for us is to try and capture the independent developments out there, institutionalize them and make them available for others. How can I capture those learning improvements that happen in those independent owners? You use the technology to allow people to give you feedback but also to give you new ways to send pictures, images, alternative ways and even give some prizes for new ways and compensate people for bringing to our attention new technologies. It needs to be an incentive so technology would be the way that captures. I think we need to create a system, how can I put the incentives to the learner or to the owner or manager so that he or she gives or allows the knowledge to be captured? That’s the key, creating incentives for the person and notoriety. It could be money, promotion or exposure in different ways,” Goelzer said.
“He’s absolutely brilliant,” said Thomas S. Haggai, chairman, CEO, IGA. “Paulo’s served as the head of our IGA Coca-Cola Institute and our chief learning officer, but he also is a world strategist. He was the perfect fit for us once the world came calling. We’re in 40 countries, and in every case we’ve been asked to come by either the country or a company. I went down to visit my friends at the Coca-Cola Company and asked, ‘What difference can we make?’ They said the biggest thing would be education, so beginning 20-plus years ago, that’s where we’ve gone. An independent business needs to be at the cutting edge when it comes to their training. We started that, and Paulo came to really head it up, and what he’s done is just absolutely magnificent. He introduced to us the word ‘blended,’ so we have blended education. The other thing he’s done is to take the word ‘training’ out and use the word ‘learning.’ I was raised on the idea that you stay alive by exercising every day physically, mentally and spiritually, and learning is something you never stop. That’s what gave you vitality when other people were surrendering to their pains and aches and all the rest. We’ve become a learning organization. We believe that we have a unique way to give people true learning, and we do it without apologies. Paulo is an example. We say walk the talk, but that’s almost too superficial. He is the talk. The guy is always learning, always got a book in his hand, always trying something different, always open.”
—Kellye Whitney, kellyew@clomedia.com
Name: Paulo Goelzer, Ph.D.
Title: CLO & Vice President of International Strategy
COMPANY: IGA Coca-Cola Institute
Successes:
- Implemented an LMS that leverages learning through work-based courses relevant to the associate’s position.
- Developed a system that captures, redistributes and co-creates cross-cultural solutions to accelerate learning.
- Implemented a system that supports manager/instructor training, shadowing, self-study and coaching approaches by blending information that is transmitted in a meaningful and organized way.
- Renamed the corporate university. Made training learner-centered, and shifted the focus to increasing performance.
- Created a management development program based on experienced instruction, engaging conversation and meaningful interactions.
Learning Philosophy: “I believe that learning initiatives should be learner-centered. We should follow the andragogical model developed by the great educator Paulo Freire that suggests that adults need to know why they need to learn. In training, the purpose is to create change in learners. I believe in continual learning. Perhaps the philosopher Eric Hoffer stated best, ‘In times of change, learners inherit the Earth.’”