Telecom Transformation

For communications companies, service is job one. While they offer a range of products from telephone and TV packages to broadband access for individuals and companies, a telecom’s main workforce management thrust is training the people who provide these services.

Like other people-intensive businesses, a high rate of turnover comes with the territory. Jim Lovie, executive vice president of sales, service and distribution at Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest communications companies, called this “the biggest challenge” his company faces in approaching learning.

“If you look at the pure numbers of people we have to train on an annual basis and the volume of information [on which] we have to train people on a weekly, monthly, annual basis, depending on which part of the organization they reside in, that comes with a whole host of challenges because such a high percentage of the training is for sales and service people and turnover rates [there] are generally higher,” Lovie said.

Tara Deakin, vice president of learning and enablement at Rogers, said the company has a baseline of 43,000 people they train at any given time, but that number is constantly in flux.

“[We have] an annual attrition rate in our high-volume roles between 30 and 60 percent,” she said. “So when you think of the actual learners we touch every year, it’s probably closer to 100,000.”

With this many people moving through the company’s customer-facing workforce, knowledge velocity is critical. As the company’s learning executive, Deakin leads Rogers’ effort to bring learning and development to market faster and more efficiently. For example, Deakin revitalized the company’s intensive coaching unit (ICU), an on-boarding program for employees in Rogers’ call centers.

“We were able to effectively transition people from training to their on-the-job performance and reduce days to productivity,” Deakin said. “So we are now able [to] get a call center representative to 80 percent of the productivity of a tenured [employee] within 60 days. It was typically closer to 180 days.”