Jon Lex – Sr. Solutions Consultant The 14,000-plus employees of Assurant Inc., a global provider of risk management products and services, are active in 21 countries and serve more than 300 million customers worldwide. In January 2019, Assurant began to explore how they might expand their customer care workforce. (Prior to this expansion, all customer care representatives worked from one of Assurant’s call center locations.)
To meet this challenge, the Global Learning and Development team, partnering with TiER1 Performance, embraced curiosity. We not only asked: How do we provide training Day 1 for new customer care employees if they cannot come into an office? We also asked: How might we improve retention and new hire success? How might we increase the number of connections with others and the organization? How might we clarify progress so new hires know what they’re doing now, and what comes next? How might we help new hires understand how they’re doing?
We weren’t interested in an experience that went virtual at the loss of quality—the team wanted to create an experience that was learner-centered and user-friendly, while also translating all the perks of a classroom experience into a virtual environment.
Strategic collaboration was at the heart of the entire process—collaboration with leadership at the organization, the IT organization, and most importantly, end users. We had a unique opportunity to impact the business model for talent acquisition and accelerate the growth of Assurant’s business, so we looked at everything from role structures to how we could use onboarding to drive greater adoption to existing tools and processes.
From this collaborative, strategic, and curious mindset, LearnAnywhere was born. LearnAnywhere is a virtual learning environment that allows Assurant’s Customer Care employees to onboard and train from anywhere in the world. An online portal built in SharePoint, LearnAnywhere brings together key tools, information, and platforms for new hires to jumpstart their career at Assurant.
“This is the best onboarding experience I’ve had,” says one participant. “I feel like I have a team supporting me,” says another.
TiER1 Performance and Assurant partnered over the course of 19 months to create the onboarding program, with the first pilot program launching in July 2020. The LearnAnywhere project won a 2021 Gold Brandon Hall Award for Best Unique or Innovative Development Program and a 2021 Silver Brandon Hall Award for Best New Hire Onboarding Program.
LearnAnywhere hosts an individualized learning curriculum, supports employee interactivity and engagement, and keeps new hires’ needs top-of-mind during every step of their development process. Here are the elements from LearnAnywhere that we love:
LearnAnywhere is anchored in addressing new hires’ needs for connection, progress, and performance, enabling them to build connections with other members of their cohort, their manager, and the Assurant organization. Throughout the experience, participants can clearly follow the learning journey timeline as well as identify what they need to work on and what they should work on next. Participants also can track their learning progress so that at any point in the training, they can answer the question, “How am I doing?”
LearnAnywhere provides tools that allow managers and facilitators to address issues proactively and track progress. In an in-person environment, facilitators can sense when people are lost by “reading” body language; with LearnAnywhere, if they notice an individual needs attention, they can contact the new hire via Teams, phone, or by sending a nudge, all of which only require the click of a button. These tools give facilitators a clearer view of performance and an easier way to work one-on-one when needed.
LearnAnywhere prepares new hires employees for Day 1 and beyond. After completing essential onboarding activities to learn about Assurant organizational practices, procedures, company values, and more, they then learn about Assurant’s customer care philosophy and overarching practices. Finally, new hires continue progressing through role-specific curriculum to learn about their unique responsibilities, and “practice” to complete activities specific to their role and then apply to real customer care calls.
LearnAnywhere scaffolds the experience with skill-based routing, so that new hires initially focus on specific call types with the opportunity to progress to more complex calls over time as they demonstrate competency. (Previously, customer care onboarding materials taught new hires the full spectrum of calls regardless of complexity.) This way, new employees can jump into calls with real customers more quickly, which increases efficiency, likelihood of success, and an employee’s sense of contribution.
LearnAnywhere is divided into milestones. Each milestone includes virtual instructor-led sessions as well as self-paced activities for new hires to complete on their own. Within milestones, they earn points for challenges—asynchronous, gamified learning opportunities that require a combination of skills and compounded application of previous lessons. Cohort members can track their points on a leaderboard. Features such as “My Cohort”, “Give Instant Feedback”, and “Give Someone a Nudge” encourage interactivity and connection with other cohort members, facilitators, and managers.
LearnAnywhere is a central hub that connects learning opportunities and key existing technologies in one place. Hosted on Assurant’s SharePoint site, new hires don’t have to navigate away from the LearnAnywhere portal to find courses, activities, challenges, and tasks. Everything they need is integrated within LearnAnywhere: All web-based training courses (which are housed in Assurant’s Workday LMS) are available as direct links in LearnAnywhere. Zoom is used for synchronous virtual sessions, and Microsoft Teams is leveraged for discussion and file storage.
As part of LearnAnywhere, the feature “My Profile” allows new hires to create a customized user profile, which is automatically pre-populated with information from each employee’s Microsoft 365 account. This creates opportunities for new hires, facilitators, and managers to become familiar with one another in the virtual classroom and create connections. Each participant also receives a OneNote notebook; filled with templates and guides, it serves as a reference for new hires to add notes and further personalize their experience.
The adoption and pilot testing of LearnAnywhere produced exceptional results and many measurable benefits. After completing LearnAnywhere, new hires transition into a virtual nesting environment, where they are supported by experienced customer care associates and managers. New hires will take live calls to gain more confidence before transitioning into the full production environment. This solution was successful in ensuring all newly onboarded customer care employees are location independent. It’s now becoming the platform for the learning experience across Assurant.
LearnAnywhere demonstrates the unique and powerful impact of leveraging Performance Experience Design and Design Thinking to create an onboarding experience that takes new hires’ needs into consideration.
You might be asked to “onboard remote employees,” but thinking holistically, with your end user at the center, allows you to come to the table with ideas for improving the business at large. That’s the value of collaboration and asking the right questions all along the way. Ultimately, it amplifies the value that we as leaders bring to the table for bringing a business’s strategy to life and impacting the broader performance experience. Collaborate and be curious, friends.
Want to connect with TiER1 to reimagine your onboarding experience? Drop us a line below.