A merger is an ideal opportunity for a company to take a close look at the effectiveness of its learning and development organization. Unfortunately, the organizational climate at such a time is usually not conducive to gauging said effectiveness in any r
by Kellye Whitney
March 1, 2006
A merger is an ideal opportunity for a company to take a close look at the effectiveness of its learning and development organization. Unfortunately, the organizational climate at such a time is usually not conducive to gauging said effectiveness in any reasonable way because there is too much to do, too much to learn and ultimately far too much to teach. Still, in the case of SBC merging with AT&T, Ken Fenoglio, vice president of Midwest Human Resources and National Training, found that there was no time like the present to create learning that would aid the transition, growth and performance of the new organization during this time of rapid change.
Fenoglio also found that his extensive human resources experience, while not often so closely linked, proved to be a natural complement to his new responsibilities as the head of learning and development for more than 200,000 employees.
Fenoglio began his career in the phone service industry in 1970 straight out of college. During the first half of his career, he migrated through several operations jobs learning how to run the company. He then moved to HR where he worked in virtually every kind of job role, including HR generalist, one of the bastions in the HR realm with responsibilities as broad as staffing and personnel, labor relations, benefits and mentoring.
“It’s kind of a neat thing,” Fenoglio said. “I was VP of HR for the Midwest already, but when I took on the additional responsibility of being head of all training—in other words, the CLO of all training for AT&T—I thought, ‘Holy Toledo, how am I going to give it justice and do this other job?’ It’s challenging, but it’s actually been a gift because it helps me do my national training job. It helps to ground me in the real world. I don’t sit at a training or learning palace somewhere isolated from operations, sales and the network people. I reside out in the field so that I meet and see all of the requirements of our business as it changes.”
The move from SBC to AT&T is not a new one for this particular phone company. The new AT&T organization has gone through many acquisitions: Pacific Bell in 1997, Southern New England in 1998 and Ameritech in 1999. All of those companies had best practices to share that could ease the merging of separate organizations into a new, stronger one. Exploiting the unique connection between human resources and learning has offered clear value in pursuit of a new and unified AT&T. Fenoglio understands firsthand how beneficial it can be to an organization when the two departments enjoy a close working partnership, though he admits that blending learning and HR comprises a model not often used in business.
“We could not be successful in the training organization unless we have total partnership with HR,” Fenoglio said. “Unless your HR partners are telling you where the opportunities are and giving you feedback, you can’t be successful. Our line managers and operations people are not shy. They will holler if they either need training or they’re not getting what they want, and we need to be responsive to that. However, we can be much more proactive by maintaining that partnership with the HR side of the house. They are at the table when business unit leadership is making their plans for next year, next quarter, for the next month. They are there. So if they keep their ears open, and we maintain a really good relationship with the HR generalists and others in the department, they will come to us and say, ‘Hey, did you know that there might be an opportunity for a training intervention in California because the California assembly just passed a new sexual harassment law for training that’s required?’ We knew about that well in advance, before it became a requirement. And because we did, we were able to get our designers looking at best practices to get the training done, put together a state-of-the-art Web-based training course as well as leader-led, to meet those needs in a way that’s much more strategic, responsive and proactive.”
Acquisition training began prior to the official, pre-Thanksgiving 2005 merger completion date and consisted of roughly 30 percent Web-based learning and the remainder instructor-led. Depending on an employee’s job title, the training interventions lasted anywhere from three days to three weeks and touched the sales side of the business first. SBC and AT&T employees were trained on each other’s products, services and the systems needed to sell them. It’s natural for some departments, particularly those unfamiliar with the technology, to resist Web-based training, but Fenoglio said that the traditional classroom paradigm had to shift due to rapidly changing business needs, shrinking budgets and the market competition and productivity issues in a global organization. Learning must happen quickly and be convenient as well as beneficial for the learner. All of this lends itself easily to a Web-based format, though currently the majority of learning offered at AT&T is still instructor-led. “A lot of our training is for the technical forces,” Fenoglio explained. “Our biggest department is the network department, which has the technicians that do the work in the central offices, out in the field. They’re the ones digging the trenches, splicing the wires, putting equipment out, and a lot of their training has to be hands-on. We have a vision that some of that we’ll be able to do virtually some day, but right now if you can’t splice a wire when you go out, it’s not something you can look at on a screen and go out and do competently. You have to get your hands dirty.”
AT&T relies heavily on Level 1 and 2 evaluations to help determine whether training interventions have had a measurable impact on the business. Gathering feedback from learners as well as their line managers and supervisors in the field via interviews and surveys also are popular ways to examine learning metrics and measure knowledge transfer, but the company is moving steadily to a more ROI-motivated model. “It’s difficult,” Fenoglio said. “Employee retention, for instance, is very hard, but we do look at that to see if we can retain the employees, and perhaps even more critical, did we retain the customer? We’re getting better, but primarily we rely on business unit leadership to give us feedback. We’re represented at the table by the HR staff. They ask the client, ‘How did we do? Are we selling the products and services to your satisfaction? Tell us how to make adjustments.’ We ask them to give us that feedback every day as a way to earn that partnership.”
No merger is completed without a few bumps. Both AT&T and SBC had their own learning management systems, and Fenoglio employed quite a few tricks to avoid downtime and keep things moving fairly smoothly. The new organization hired plenty of training contractors to help, conducting train-the-trainer sessions to certify them before sending them out to engage others, and leveraged an existing relationship with IBM to use some of its training people. “It’s a huge load,” Fenoglio said. “You’ve got massive numbers of people taking massive numbers of courses all at one time. It stretches your resources for instructors, designers, operations people in training as well as the computers that you’re using. We pride ourselves on letting people sign up for their own training. You pick and choose and discuss and work things out with your boss, but when you do that it takes up so much capacity in the LMS. We pushed that aside temporarily and assigned everyone their training. If you’re a direct sales person and I wanted to get you training in certain AT&T products and services, I assigned you the training. Therefore, you didn’t have the ability to self-select when. However, I can get that system to do a whole lot more training if I batch-enroll people. It’s not the best way. It’s not our long-term strategy, but it was a really good short-term solution.”
“Without question Ken is one of the true dynamic leaders in our business,” said Gary Oliver, vice president human resources, AT&T. In terms of learning, he has been able to bring all of the disparate parts together in our business. Learning and training is going to be a key element in our future success. Almost every initiative that has been launched or that our leadership has begun to discuss openly has major training implications. We’re an experienced and professional training organization, but it’s going to require that we step it up a notch to deliver the type of training in terms of speed and quality that the organization is going to need going forward in the future.”
“We will evolve with the company,” Fenoglio said. “We’ll pull together the best and brightest from the two companies, and there will be new curriculum. As the marketing department looks at the marketplace to see what kinds of products and services we’ll have under the new company, the learning organization will be there to see what we need in order to move us further ahead. If we’re really going to be an Internet protocol, data company, we’re going to have a lot of opportunities for training interventions, not only technical, but on the management side. We’re going to have cultural change, and there will be a lot of leadership training. How do we treat people? What kind of relationships are we going to have with our customers? We’ll also have Lightspeed. We’re going to compete directly with the cable companies on TV. We have a technology that we’re deploying where we’ll be able to sell TV/video service to our customers.
“My training department is working very closely with project Lightspeed to come up with all of the technical training that we’re going to need because that’s something that we’ve never done before. We’ve got to retrain our technicians and salespeople on video products and strategy and how the network’s going to support that. There will be a lot of synergies like that—lots of new products and services that we’ll bring into the marketplace—and training will be right there to retool our employees and train them for the future.”
—Kellye Whitney, kellyew@clomedia.com
Name: Ken Fenoglio
Title: Vice President,
AT&T Training & Midwest HR
COMPANY: AT&T
Successes:
- Only successful when business units meet their bottom-line financial and service requirements.
- Successful when employees are empowered to handle their jobs, exceeding
the expectations of business unit management, shareholders and customers.
- Successful only when meeting all business expectations of training organization
and staying on budget.
- Successful when the training organization raises the bar for behavior changes needed to meet cultural changes expected by top leadership.