Colgate-Palmolive opts for e-learning

Citation

(2004), "Colgate-Palmolive opts for e-learning", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 36 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2004.03736bab.002

Colgate-Palmolive opts for e-learning

Colgate-Palmolive opts for e-learning

Disseminating and explaining a new corporate strategy to thousands of employees worldwide, in as short a time as possible, posed a challenge for global consumer-products giant Colgate-Palmolive.

"Go to market strategy" (GtMS) was a new, company-wide marketing and sales initiative designed to help the organization to manage an increasingly complex trade environment.

"Our job was effectively to communicate our new philosophy and practices to a large and diverse sales and commercial community," said Paula Disberry, Colgate-Palmolive customer-marketing director, global sales. "We realized that traditional classroom-based training would not enable us to roll out our GtMS as quickly as we needed, and so we had to find an e-learning provider with the resources to deliver the project cost-effectively and quickly. Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) demonstrated both the commitment and credentials we required."

Colgate-Palmolive (CP) is a $9 billion, 38,000-employee company that sells products for oral care, personal care, household-surface care, fabric care and pet nutrition in 200 countries, and has an operational presence in 60 states around the world. The maker of such well-known brand names as Colgate, Palmolive, Mennen, Softsoap, Irish Spring, Protex, Sorriso, Kolynos, Ajax, Axion, Soupline, Suavitel and Fab, as well as Hill's Science Diet and Hill's Prescription Diet pet foods, the firm needed a standard, consistent, approach if the e-learning programme were to be successful.

"CP's primary goal was to ensure its global sales and marketing organization understood GtMS well enough to begin applying it," said Sambit Mohapatra, vice-president of TIS in the UK, Europe and the Middle East. "Since our target audience included CP staff at subsidiaries around the world, including some who speak English as their second language, we had to make sure our material was comprehensible to an unusually broad group of learners."

As Manisha Mohan, head of TIS's education division, explained: "When it comes to producing a programme for the international market, we have to be careful at the design stage to ensure that the characters use only 'general', rather than culture-specific, gestures."

Geetha Krishnan, who heads TIS's specialist 65-strong writing team within the company's senior specialist group, commented: "We have developed templates that, to some degree, help us to write and design programmes. But each client's requirements are different so, for each project, we carry out specific research to find and define the style of the resulting programme. Once we have this information, we try to determine why the content of the programme is relevant to the learner. Then we define how we will present the material we have to teach the learner. Whatever approach we take, we aim to engage the learner's interest and build upon it.

"If you want an e-learning programme to be successful – that is, popular with learners and effective – you must write that programme in language that the learner is used to and is happy to receive and respond to."

Sambit Mohapatra explained that, when beginning a project, TIS decides the most effective way to present the learning materials. It considers which is the most interesting and enjoyable way for the learners to acquire the desired knowledge and skills. The answer could lie with one – or a mixture – of approaches, including simulations, games, case-study or story-based learning.

"Here, the designers are not thinking so much about the cognitive aspects of the programme – that is, the knowledge we will be conveying – but, rather, the programme's affective aspects," said Sambit Mohapatra. "They want to find the best way of affecting the learners' psyche because, if they do, this is more likely to have a lasting effect on them and encourage the learners to change their behaviour and attitudes as a result of their new knowledge and skills – rather than merely give them new knowledge which they may or may not be inclined to apply."

Next, TIS decides how to test the learners, to ensure that they have learnt what they were intended to learn. Finally, it builds ways for evaluating the effectiveness of the programme, based on the industry-standard Kirkpatrick model.

"This part of the design process happens at the very beginning of a project," Sambit Mohapatra said. "Then we look at design from the micro level – or the level of the screen. When thinking about 'interactivity' we want to go beyond the stage of getting the learner to respond to on-screen questions by clicking the mouse. Our designers need to engage the learner intellectually – which may encourage learners to do their own research, either within other parts of the programme or even elsewhere, using other learning materials.

"Moreover, we ensure that our programmes enable learners to practise their new knowledge and skills and that the programmes provide feedback for them on their performance. We also try to present the learning content in an interesting way. This could mean developing a metaphor within the programme, such as 'disguising' the learning within a story line or a simulation, to engage the learners and motivate them to complete the programme."

TIS's 35-minute e-learning solution for CP used a highly visual, interactive teaching method to explain the six-step process of GtMS.

"We used a non-linear navigation strategy that enabled learners to click on a topic at random," said Sambit Mohapatra. "That way, users could finish a few topics, go back to their daily tasks, then come back to finish the rest of the course. Right from the outset, we emphasized the importance and benefits of GtMS to people's everyday work, so they would remain engaged despite their busy schedules."

Each module of the course was followed by multiple-choice or drag-and-drop exercises that were mapped to the objectives of that module. Clearly articulated learning outcomes, defined at the recall level, ensured that knowledge transfer was taking place.

Since the rollout of GtMS was not dependent on live training events, but rather on the "24/7", on-demand advantages of the Internet, CP's new sales and marketing strategy was disseminated faster and more consistently.

"TIS is unique in its project-management capability, its communication skills and its commitment to completing an assignment properly, regardless of its intricacy," commented Jean Heinzelmann, CP's channel manager, global sales.

"In partnership with TIS, we have developed a new way to communicate in simple terms with our organization," said Paula Disberry. "The product has been praised by management and users alike, and will become the template for communication going forward."

With an in-house team of 500 e-learning specialists, TIS has completed more than 550 custom-built content projects for over 200 clients across the world. They include British Airways, Royal Mail, Barclays Bank, Vodafone, BT, Deutsche Bank, the United Nations, Mannesmann Demag, McGraw-Hill, Glaxo and Unilever.