Driving Learning Adoption Across a Diverse Workforce

How do you change the hearts and minds of a large, geographically and culturally diverse team? Welspun Group, a global conglomerate with a strong business presence in line pipes, home textiles, infrastructure, warehousing, oil and gas, steel, retail and flooring solutions needed to do that for over 35,000 employees.

While they had a learning program in place, it was primarily instructor–led. Classroom sessions were held with the help of both internal and external facilitators, but there were always attendance challenges due to work deadlines. Participation, curation of content and engagement of the learners was an ongoing challenge. Additionally, there was a lack of global reach across geographies. And, while each company might have business unit-based learning strategies that represented their interests, there was no one company-wide point of view.

One of Welspun’s core pillars is technological excellence, and as such, the company made a strategic decision to leverage digital learning to create a future–ready workforce. The advent of the Centre of Excellence started the process of crafting a global learning strategy– learning and Culture. This team built a cross–geography plan to execute the learning organization philosophy. Their goal was for employees to embrace self-learning and ownership of learning as a way of life at Welspun.

The project was an arduous task of collaboration across the various group businesses, HR, and IT teams. Frequent communication, updates and stakeholder feedback helped contribute to the robust and execution–ready plan to ensure the success of the learning platform they named “WeLearn.”

Through hard work and orchestration of many people, the team organized a 3-prong approach to roll out the new digital learning program across the globe with roadshows that addressed the leaders, front-line employees, with proper marketing and fanfare. Bolstered by a task force to bring it to life in parallel across continents, the result was adoption numbers beyond their imagination.