Story:
How Avatars Saved an Executive Training Program: Web 2.0 Makes Learning Fun, Social and Low Cost
Who is Avaya?
Avaya is a global leader in business communications systems with about 19,000 Employees in 54 countries and nearly 10,000 channel partners worldwide. Our innovation enables businesses to excel by making collaboration intuitive, relevant and spontaneous. Specifically, we provide unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services to leading businesses and organizations around the world.
Our Culture Shift Journey
In 2008 Avaya began a journey to shift our culture. Our baseline employee engagement survey data was showing key challenge areas that were getting in the way of our business success and in having the type of company where most people get excited to work. Our HR team launched into a series of interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders to define our “desired culture” and then came the hard part – closing the gap from our current culture to the nicely outlined future state.
Role of Leaders in Changing Culture
One of the things we did to make this shift occur was to invite our most senior leaders (just under 1% of the total company population, ~180 executives) to a “bootcamp” of sorts, a live 3-4 day leadership development program. As is often the case, most of our leaders walked away feeling energized and empowered, and that their leadership skills and ability to drive the company in the direction we had set out had improved. Now the downside -- the cost for the travel, external facility and consultants, as well as the time spent to travel and be away from the office were significant, and not sustainable to do continuously.
The Need for a “2.0” Executive Leadership Development Program
The Birth of an Immersive 3D Application for Business
A few months before our design began on a virtual executive leadership development program, Avaya had acquired the Enterprise division of Nortel, who themselves had recently acquired a small and innovative company called DiamondWare This acquisition (in conjunction with what was already in development) added to Avaya’s more traditional telecommunications products a cloud-based immersive collaboration platform for the enterprise called web.alive. As recently described by Wainhouse Research, “Avaya web.alive is a next-generation, browser-based immersive 3D application (also known as virtual reality or immersive worlds in some circles) that enables users to meet virtually in a 3D environment using avatars, spatial audio, and collaboration tools.”
HR Discovers Gold
When our Talent Management team saw web.alive in action our eyes immediately popped. For starters, we were having FUN dressing up our avatars, shaking hands with each other and feeling like we were sitting in a “real room with real people at a real meeting”. As the lead for designing the new exec program I thought, “Wow, web.alive is not only the best way I can imagine engaging our leaders in this program today, but it is clearly the way that learning and collaboration will be taking place for everyone in the future.”
The Design Begins But With Plenty of Challenges to Overcome
We got to work to design this leadership program using a new technology that would require the majority of about 200 senior executives to use a very new and futuristic tool. Web.Alive was being used in beta version at a few large customers but not yet officially launched – the launch happened at the beginning of 2011. So while some of our legacy Nortel employees had used web.alive already, very few of our Avaya leaders even knew it existed. Hence, a huge change management challenge to not only design meaningful learning content, but also get 200 executives and 18 facilitators onboard and comfortable with using the technology.
August 2010 – Face-to-Face Leadership Summit
Our executive population who would soon be invited to the new virtual leadership development program attended Avaya’s annual face-to-face Leadership Summit. Each leader sat a table with about 10 peers (intentionally designed for cross-functional and geographic diversity), forming the initial relationship with those who became part of their virtual Learning Teams for the coming year. In total, this resulted in 18 teams that were launched into a year-long program.
September 2010 – Design of virtual Learning Teams program
- Key objectives – In addition to setting up our senior leaders as company role models for learning and development, while sending the message to all that we are investing in developing strong leaders, the program is focused on three strategic objectives:
- Create a leadership community around the globe: Culture change starts at top
- Establish a common language for leadership at Avaya: Language drives culture
- Change our patterns to make a difference: Leaders role model the right behaviors for change to stick.
- Learning content and formats – We set out to find the right blend to include:
- Skill building on Avaya’s Leader Success Profiles (competency model)
- Self-paced learning via books, articles and “real world application”
- “Leader as Teacher” model of coaching/teaching from each learning team’s Executive Sponsor (all direct reports to our CEO, plus a few high performing senior leaders),
- Delivery by some external subject-matter experts plus internally selected facilitators
- Peer coaching element to encourage cross-functional learning, relationship building, internal networking.
October 2010 - Welcome Week
Our first goal was to get the executive population comfortable with using web.alive. Thankfully, the learning curve for most is relatively small – after about ten minutes most people understand the navigation and can easily “walk and talk” which are the only real requirements to attend a meeting or class in Web.Alive. After about thirty minutes most people say it feels natural to interact in a virtual world in the form of an avatar.
A few weeks before the learning content kicked off, we published a schedule with at least two timeslots per day (at various times to accommodate all time zones) that were “drop-in” opportunities for participants to learn how to use Web.Alive. We also encouraged people to go back into Web.Alive – which is as easy as going back to the URL – at any point to use it themselves for internal or customer purposes and conduct meetings ranging from a one-on-one or a larger team meeting. As a totally open environment that is “always on” it is easy to encourage on-going usage.
November 2010 - Exec Sponsor and Facilitator Prep Sessions
Our next goal was to ensure that the Executive Sponsor (direct reports to our CEO) and Facilitators for each team were comfortable with both the material they were going to lead during the sessions, and had an added expertise using web.alive. This was accomplished by conducting prep sessions in web.alive for both audiences, as well as a few drop-in “Study Hall Sessions” for additional guidance on either the learning content or facilitating a meeting in web.alive.
December 2010 - First Quarterly Learning Teams Session
Once everyone was up and running, our first teams began their quarterly two-hour session in web.alive. The content was focused on “Leaders as Strategic Storytellers” and the session ran like a typical live training class by blending lecture style with small group breakouts, then a large team debrief and a highly interactive dialogue between participants and facilitators.
February 2011 – Second Quarterly Learning Team Session
Participants worked on real-world application to apply their learnings from the first quarterly session, did some pre-work for this second session, and began meeting with their team’s Executive Sponsor in addition to a Peer Coach. The second quarter’s content was focused on “strategic agility” and included viewing a video that we showed on “TV screens” in web.alive that had our Corporate head of Strategy deliver a summarized view of the strategy and once again had many opportunities for participants to have meaningful dialogue and learning with each other and the facilitators.
April 2011 – First Virtual Leadership Summit
The web.alive traction amongst our executive population was getting stronger, when looking at our two quarters of team learning sessions and the noticeable increase in meetings that leaders opted to hold in web.alive instead of over the phone or webcast. We decided to hold our semi-annual leadership conference in web.alive instead of incurring upwards of $500K in travel and facility cost to have this event in person.
The virtual summit started with a thirty minute “cocktail party”. When my avatar arrived in the virtual environment, it really had the energy and buzz that I would normally have when entering a large party room! As we typically have in our live conferences, our CEO kicked off the content and we had a nice blend of internal and external speakers with a good amount of audience interaction for a three hour event.
Summer 2011 and Beyond
Our key challenge was in a nutshell the need to get over 200 senior leaders feeling comfortable using a new technology. One that completely changes the way each person communicates, socializes, accesses multi-media, and learns. We overcame this by providing extra support (super users who can help with hands-on navigation advice) for each web.alive event that included a new or particularly influential audience. We also encouraged the participants to use web.alive on their own for any type of meeting or just to “play” and get comfortable with it. This possible since the technology is open, had plenty of meeting rooms and does not require a reservation.
More specific challenges that we documented are:
Size: 200 people in the training audience!
Scope: 18 facilitators and Executive Sponsors needed to be prepped each quarter
Technology: Not yet Mac enabled (coming later in 2011)
Learning Curve: Not everyone embraces new tools at the same speed
Engagement of Senior Leaders: Executives are busy, not all prioritize leadership development or embracing a new technology as we would hope
The key benefits of using a virtual immersive 3D technology like web.alive for an executive learning initiative include:
Looks and Feels So "Real": The avatar customization, facial details and ability to walk up close to someone really make for a very "real life" experience. Here's a sample of "the crowd" at our Leadership Summit.
Visually Engaging & Interactive: It is powerful to see who is in the room so that you know who is talking when and can literally walk up to someone to interact. The amount of relationships that can be built this way right from your desk is literally innumerable. The added benefit of using non-verbals like hand-raising, shaking heads and jumping in the air makes the technology both fun and highly engaging.
There are great analytics built into Web.Alive to track where people are located, who they are conversing with, how many minutes they are speaking, and so on. The "Images" section inlcudes a sample of the Visitor Analytics (availble via an adminstrator log-on).
Low Cost: No travel needed to connect all global leaders with low subscription cost for Web.Alive. We determined that for travel alone for our leadership training program we spent almost $500K and the same for the annual leadership summit. In comparision, our annual subscription cost for web.alive is about $10K. The "Images" section includes a screenshot of the section within the Analytics page that calculates approximate travel savings based on locations of those who attend a meeting.
Multi-media and Document Storage: Users can view presentations, see any website, watch videos and even share their computer desktop. And the audio is in there too. As a facilitator I really like the document storage capability too -- when participants click on a "drop box" they can open the workbook that was used for the training sessions.
Equalizing Social Environment: We hear comments like, “Hey the CEO is wearing the same suit as I am!” When everyone shows up in form of an avatar it seems to provide a social comfort zone. It enables something as simple as walking up to someone and shaking their hand to feel much more comfortable in a virtual world than it is for many when connecting in person.
HR as Innovation Leader: We knew we were ahead of the curve in championing the future of learning and collaboration. It was exciting for HR to play this role!
Culture Shift: I have a huge pet peeve for the high amount of tolerance that most organizations have for excessive multi-tasking and the lack of active engagement on the phone or webcasts. I ask "what questions do you have?" at the end of a conference call and usually get the sound of crickets. The fact that your avatar shows as "idle" after a certain amount of inactivity and that we could design the content with small breakout sessions and being able to "call on" people make lack of engagement culturally unacceptable during these sessions.
The “Fun Factor”: Avatar outfits and appearance can be easily customizable, avatars can jump and run around -- it never hurts to have a little fun at work!
Strong Internal Case Study: Once we saw the success and traction of the program and the virtual leadership summit, we realized we had a great story to tell our own customers on how we were making use of our own technology and how they can learn from our experiences.
Positive Internal Customer Feedback: As an example, for our Q2 Learning Teams program over 93% said they would recommend the program for others at Avaya – this was a combination of the tool use and the content. When asked, "How would you compare web.alive to virtual instructor led learning via Adobe Connect" 47% said "Excellent" and 27% said "Good".
"As Good as the Real Thing": When participants were asked "How would you compare web.alive to face-to-face classroom training?" 40% of respondents said, "Excellent" and 47% rated it as "Good".
- Don’t assume everyone has the same capacity for something that is new, fun and innovative – some people are less curious and patient to play with “new toys”.
- Murphy’s Law will take over when it comes to technology cooperating with you. Always have extra technical support on hand when using new technology, especially with your most influential stakeholders.
- Be bold and take risks for internal change that can pay off with external groups. There were plenty of challenges to overcome when deciding if we should hold our leadership summit in web.alive (with 200 leaders invited it was our largest synchronous event) but we learned from this experienced which helped a lot when TedX Boston was held in web.alive in June.
- When using a futuristic technology like web.alive, start with “low hanging fruit” needs like new hire orientation that can meet the very obvious needs of a critical audience, rather than a program or audience that might see their attendance as “optional.”
- Start small and pilot innovative programs like this, and try to do that with a strong “early adopter audience”.
- Provide a lot of help in the beginning to hand-hold use of a new and what may seem like an experimental technology.
The entire Learning Teams program was possible thanks to many hours and dedication from Avaya's HR and Web.Alive teams. It has been a very rewarding cross-organizational partnership!
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