Background
VT Group plc is a British-based organisation employing more than 13,000 people world-wide and with a turnover of circa £1 billion. VT is known as a shipbuilding business and although this now represents less than 20% of the turnover it remains one of the world's largest warship manufacturers.
The business has changed significantly since its formation through a merger of Vosper and Thorneycroft in 1966. Whilst manufacturing and building ships remains important much of the company’s business is directed at the defence support services market, such as logistics, facilities management and training, to clients and governments around the world. In 2003 the company opened a brand-new, state of the art shipbuilding facility in Portsmouth and the Group Head Office is also in Hampshire, UK. However the business operates through five different operating groups, VT Communications, VT Defence, VT Education and Skills, VT Services Inc. and VT Shipbuilding, each based in a location appropriate for their particular business.
The organisation has experienced massive growth since 2002, trebling in size and transforming from a £350 millions business to a £1 billion business. The development and diversification of the business has set particular challenges for the organisation that traditionally employed long-serving, shipbuilding and engineering-orientated people.
The contribution of learning
Effective people strategies and learning in particular, has been vital to underpin the transformational growth and change that the business has experienced. Key issues for the business have been: identifying the people who were capable of growing with the business and ensuring that the organisation has the people capabilities it needs to allow the growth process to continue further into the future.
For Jo Robbins, the Human Resources Director, a key priority is to develop the performance culture necessary to sustain strategic growth. Whilst paying particular attention to the career development needs and retention issues of the VT ‘high performance talent pool’ learning is also fundamental to communicate the necessary values, behaviours and levels of performance needed from all employees if the business is to operate effectively and sustain the change and growth process through achieving profitable contracts and repeat business.
Paul Lester, the Group Chief Executive of VT plc has no doubt about the contribution that learning must make to the organisation:
“You have to invest in infrastructure and IT development and equipment but at the end of the day any service company is driven by the people. If a customer is very satisfied he will buy more from you, more services, and we’ll get rewarded better, and the people will get rewarded better. So hence we have a strong investment policy in people”.
Learning investment and alignment processes
The VT group vision is to be recognised as the number-one international government services group and VT’s people strategy is explicity aligned to this, aiming to ensure that the business has the required competence, commitment and performance focus to achieve its strategic targets.
Learning and development have a big part to play in this, through effective training and development, cross-business deployment, promoting employee engagement and developing a coaching culture throughout the group.
Paul Lester has no doubts about the importance of learning for the business and this helps to set the scene for a positive approach in the various operating companies. In a fast-growing and dynamic business like VT, the challenge is not just to achieve a financial investment in learning but to achieve the investment in time that is needed if a return on the learning investment is to be achieved.
Achieving alignment has to be an ongoing process and Jo Robbins works closely with the Group CEO as well as the Managing Directors and HR Directors of the five businesses as part of a regular business review process to find out how learning can add value to each of their businesses. As part of achieving the commitment of the operating companies to the VT learning vision Jo operates a very transparent budgeting process and places particular emphasis on achieving and articulating the value for money aspects of learning investments.
Much of the investment and alignment process, therefore, involves meeting with senior managers, reviewing business progress, and negotiating the resources necessary to enable an appropriate learning contribution to support the development of the business. Continuous formal and informal feedback from managers and customers is also needed to ensure that the learning investment remains aligned.
Measuring and reporting on the value of learning
Top decision makers at VT focus on business results when identifying the value of learning for their organisation. In particular VT focus on customer service measures and perceptions as well as employee performance and attitude measures.
VT is also aware that the real benefits of learning may take time to affect the ‘bottom line’. The new shipbuilding facility, for example, which cost £70 millions to build and establish involved massive amounts of training to get going. Three years later productivity was up by 30 percent and some large export orders are being won. Isolating the contribution of training, as separate from the investment in new IT systems and state of the art equipment, however, is unrealistic.
Like many organisations, VT would like to develop more Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for learning and development which will be influenced, to some extent, by broad benchmarking against practice in comparable business sectors. Like many large organisations, one of the challenges of developing and using learning value KPIs is a systems one, given the diverse nature of the various businesses. In addition, it is vital to ensure that the local context of each operating company is taken into account.
Informal and often anecdotal feedback of managers and employees also informs perceptions at the top of the business about the value of the contribution that learning is making and VT are developing other less quantifiable approaches to finding out about the value of learning for the organisation, for example, using focus groups, comprised of employees from different parts of the businesses, to help get a ‘feel’ for progress with issues like employee engagement.
Jo Robbins expresses the challenge like this: “You can’t prove absolutely everything, especially in learning”, but the process of trying can, perhaps, be as important as the outcome.