Background
Lyreco UK is part of a large family-owned office supplies group operating extensively in Europe, Canada and Asia. The group has businesses in 26 countries around the world, reporting to the privately-owned parent organisation in France. In the UK, the £270 millions business is run from the head office and distribution centre in Telford where, each day, 15,000 orders are processed, and 60,000 parcels are picked, packed and despatched across the UK for next-day delivery. The customer promise is “Yours tomorrow or yours free”. In the office supplies market Lyreco are currently number two, and it is no secret that they have ambitions to be the biggest and the best. Lyreco employ 1800 people in the UK; approximately 650 based at Telford in the head office & warehouse, 650 in sales working from home, and the remaining 500 making deliveries from 25 regional distribution centres.
The contribution of learning
Alistair Wood, the Logistics Director, is convinced that effective people development and learning strategies have been vital to the successful growth of the business. In the sophisticated and competitive distribution market in which Lyreco operates it is employees who create the difference by enabling the organisation to achieve sales growth. In the words of Ian Lawson, Training and Development Director, “You are only as good as the people you have got … you need the people to deliver the results”. Developing leaders and teams, and becoming an employer of choice, therefore, have been key components in the drive to increase market share and Alistair Wood sees a connection between sales and profit metrics with the organisation’s investment in developing people to meet the future needs of the business.
Whilst there have been new Managing Directors over the years, the commitment to developing people and to developing leaders hasn’t changed. A strategic approach to leadership development has recently been introduced at all levels in the organisation to enable the development and promotion of people from within the organisation. Fifty of the fifty five UK area sales managers have been developed internally, and 23 of the 24 distribution centre supervisors have been grown internally.
Learning investment and alignment processes
The Lyreco vision is for sales to hit £500 millions by 2010 and learning and development is vital to support this growth. Alistair Wood describes the process of aligning learning with business needs as rather like “putting parts for the jigsaw together”. Developing competitive edge through benchmarking what other distribution companies are doing, and by training the workforce are important pieces of the jigsaw.
Strategic alignment is achieved by the Training and Development Director being in the senior management team, in effect the UK board, alongside HR and reporting directly to the MD. In this way the learning function contributes to the 5-year planning process and the creation of the business plan for the current year, “… the directors are identifying what their challenges are, what their opportunities are, the people that they need, and also any learning that those people will need to be able to achieve the objectives” says Lawson.
At an operational level six learning support specialists, acting as internal consultants, meet with department heads each month to understand their issues and challenges, and add value by flagging up performance issues to be tackled and devising suitable development interventions.
Measuring and reporting on the value of learning
Metrics are a central part of all management processes at Lyreco and these inform the learning investment and planning processes. In field sales, measures include sales turnover, margin and new business, whilst in customer service the performance and productivity metrics include costs per line, abandoned call rate, average call time, and average wait time. Monthly performance results in all areas are scrutinised to identify areas for attention, and the learning and development team run learning sessions and activities aimed at helping people to improve their performance. When sales margin was identified as an area for attention, over 150 people attended focused workshops and subsequent performance results were tracked to measure improvements. Similarly, warehouse supervisors with the highest staff turnover attended learning programmes and as a consequence, staff turnover was at lowest ever levels in 2006 – “Managers are taking responsibility for their people seriously” says Ian Lawson. For the learning specialists, focusing on adding value is about understanding a person’s or a department’s needs.
Lyreco see measuring the learning function’s contribution as the “holy grail”. As Ian Lawson says, “Any kind of initiative that we get involved in has to support the (performance) ambitions and objectives”. Lyreco learning specialists measure return on investment by taking into account trainer time, cost of people away from the job, resources, and facilities, and the pay back in terms of productivity, increased sales, improved margin or retention of people. “As ever, you can be challenged to prove that it really was down to training, but I think that when the results have improved and nothing else has changed then you can be proud of the impact the learning has had” says Lawson.