As the marketplace becomes more complex and

organizations expect employees to adapt more quickly,

learning organizations may need to change the way they
develop employees. To help learning organizations evolve
their perspectives, weve worked with a number of clients
to build an approach that engages employees at multiple
points, leverages different modalities to engage different
learning styles, and provides just-in-time support to remind
employees of key processes after they initially absorb
the information. This approach, learner-centric learning,
places the individual at the center of the scenario and uses
diverse methods to inform, engage, and reinforce the key
messaging. This approach can help to:
Communicate the purpose of the changes to employees
before the requirements become active and engage
learners across an extended time period.
Integrate multiple modalities to support all learning styles.
Provide just-in-time support to employees at the points
when they enter relevant transactions.
Embed risk management techniques to provide
real-time feedback to employees who enter inaccurate
or incomplete information.
This article explains an approach and outlines a specic
scenario that achieved dynamic results. This article is
constructed to:
Introduce the approach.
Explain how to implement and integrate the various
components of the approach.
Provide real-world examples of its integration.
Offer leading practices when implementing a learner-
centric learning approach.
To demonstrate the application of learner-centric learning,
this paper includes a case study that describes how we
worked with one of our clients to increase employee
awareness on a specic compliance topic. In this case,
we used the approach to help them address the topic
of transparency (the open disclosure of funds used for
marketing purposes to specic doctors). Organizations can
implement similar approaches for almost any learning need.
Learner-Centric Learning
An in-depth approach to facilitate
employee behavior change and
generate business outcomes
2
The Approach
A learner-centric approach is a dynamic method that
engages learners over an extended time period using
various modalities and feedback mechanisms to reinforce
key messaging and promote desired behavior changes.
As gure 1 shows, learner-centric learning involves ve
key components:
Consistent messaging that learners receive over a
predetermined period and access through a centralized
content repository.
Formal opportunities to increase content awareness
and communication of expectations.
On-demand support that walks learners through
activities they must complete independently.
Dynamic content that allows employees to access
information from subject matter experts and
pose questions to other learners through various
communications channels.
Risk mitigation feedback delivered to employees
and their managers when they enter non-compliant
transactions.
Though the learner sits at the middle of the model,
the success of the design relies heavily upon leadership
engagement and participation. When leaders involve
themselves at all stages of the approach, they demonstrate
the importance of the information, reinforce key
messaging, and coach employees who need additional
support. Their involvement also demonstrates the relevance
of the information to the learners work and opens
communication lines for both parties to deliver feedback to
one another. Though individuals can certainly benet from
a learner-centric learning approach without leadership
involvementit engages employees in the process and
demonstrates their leaders commitment to compliance.
Although learner-centric learning requires signicant
planning upfront and a tremendous effort to execute,
the cognitive and behavioral results often justify the effort.
Introducing key concepts long before changes occur
gives learners the opportunity to process and prepare for
the changes, including knowledge of tasks they need to
complete prior to the impending changes. Leveraging a
central content repository, such as an intranet page or
a SharePoint site, as part of the content release allows
learners to process the information at their own pace
and introduces a location to revisit once the organization
implements the changes. Formal learning opportunities,
heavily focused on content awareness rather than on
application, provide the context employees should have
to adapt to the new compliance requirements, and the
opportunities reinforce critical concepts they should know
to comply consistently.
E-learning courses provide a valuable vehicle through
which organizations can broadly deploy consistent content
to a large audience and track employee completions, while
team meetings allow leaders to personalize the information
and create meaningful connections for their team
members. On-demand support allows learners to access
task-related information in order to help accurately and
completely nish the required tasks. Paper-based content,
such as job aids that employees post at their desks, serve
as constant reminders of their tasks and provide instant
access to the steps they must complete. Interactive content
including simulations offers learners the opportunities to
complete tasks in safe environments and receive immediate
feedback. Finally, dynamic content reinforces key messages,
allows key compliance leaders to engage learners in an
open dialogue, and opens opportunities for employees to
clarify information. The creation of a well-designed social
media strategy gives organizations the opportunity to
dynamically inform employees as compliance requirements
evolve and gives learners the opportunity to pose questions
to organizational experts in the compliance area.
Effective learner-centric engagement incorporates the
following tactics:
1. The organization possesses and regularly leverages
multiple communication vehicles when sharing
information. Many organizations leverage email as
their primary communication vehicle when needing
to quickly communicate to large audiences. However,
given the large quantity of email employees receive in
todays business environment and changes to the way
we absorb information via email, employees actually
comprehend limited amounts of information via email.
To receive the full benets of an awareness campaign,
Learner
Consistent
Managing
Formal
Learning
Risk
Mitigation
Feedback
Social
Media
Presence
On-
Demand
Support
Leader
Engagement
Leader
Engagement
Leader
Engagement
Leader
Engagement
Leader
Engagement
Figure 1: Learning-centric engagement model
3
it helps to introduce only the most critical content and
drive employees to a centralized content repository
through emails. Its also helpful to avoid implementing
changes to communication styles while introducing
compliance requirements; use a recognizable
communication vehicle during this time.
2. The organization has processes or a formal system
in place to track dissemination of compliance
information. The agencies that monitor organizational
compliance require internal compliance groups to
provide analytics demonstrating their adherence.
When presenting their cases to governing bodies,
compliance leaders support their cases when
they openly demonstrate that they communicate
compliance requirements to employees and offer them
opportunities to engage with the information formally.
Organizations with signicant resources often rely upon
learning management systems to track the completion
of formal learning opportunities; organizations
without the luxury of learning management systems
most likely track attendance at meetings and broad
communications including emails.
3. The organization uses a content repository where
employees can access information about the
compliance requirements. Learning materials, meeting
presentations, and task-support materials must reside
somewhere, requiring the presence of a shared space
for employees to access information. It may be helpful
for the organizations post information on a shared drive,
site, or intranet page that employees easily access. The
ability to easily access available information encourages
learners to revisit the information consistently and
increases information clarity for the people who must
comply.
4. The organizations leaders commit to
communicating openly with employees about
compliance status and participate in conversations
when employees seek information and context. As
the approach shows, effective learner-centric learning
approaches involve heavy leadership participation.
When leaders engage learners in compliance-related
conversations, they demonstrate their own personal
compliance commitment and allow learners to clarify
expectations when confusion arises. At a minimum,
employees expect leaders to openly discuss compliance
requirements in team meetings and answer questions
when they arise. If leaders participate in conversations
on broad communication channels such as social media,
their participation further reinforces the importance of
compliance efforts.
While deployment of learner-centric learning approaches
varies some based on organizational conditions, these hints
can be helpful:
Assess organizational communication vehicles
and determine the modalities that employees most
commonly use.
Engage leaders early in the process, and provide them
with easy-to-use resources that they can deploy in
manners that best work for their teams.
Develop a communication strategy that leverages
various modalities and provides broad messaging across
the organization.
Create a central content repository that houses the
most current information and allows learners to review
when necessary.
Focus formal learning opportunities on awareness
of key concepts and utilize easily accessible support
materials to walk learners through critical
compliance tasks.
Generate opportunities for continued conversation
about key compliance topics, either through social
vehicles or in-person meetings.
Learner-centric learning approaches can increase
awareness of compliance issues, drive employees to
accessible resources, and demonstrate the organizations
commitment to compliance. Dissemination of compliance
information through commonly used communication
modalities provides contextual information employees
need to understand the purpose of the requirements.
Formal learning opportunities communicate expectations
and allow employees to engage with critical messaging.
Support materials that employees can access on demand
reinforce key concepts and allow them to rely upon the
materials when completing key compliance tasks. Ongoing,
informal communication opportunities, with leadership
involvement, keep learners up to date on relevant
compliance information and increase clarity of information.
When put together into a synchronous plan, this approach
can give employees the support they need before they
have to comply, while they complete required compliance
tasks, and, for the foreseeable future, while they change
the way they operate to establish ongoing compliance.
4
Implementing Learner-Centric Learning
In an effort to increase organizational awareness to
transparency compliance and prepare employees to
complete new transparency-related activities, we rst
assess the organizations preparedness for the change.
With a good understanding of organization-specic
needs, you can begin to plan out the ve key components
of the approach:
Awareness campaign
Formal learning
Performance support
Informal learning
Risk mitigation
Components of Effective Awareness Campaigns
To increase organizational awareness of transparency
regulations, reinforce key internal messaging, express the
importance of compliance tasks, and prepare employees
for the associated changes, compliance teams rst execute
in-depth awareness campaigns that engage employees at
several pre-determined times.
We decided the following elements would be important as
we launched an effective awareness campaign:
Core messaging architecture: Identies critical
messaging for consistency across all modalities and
simplies the release of information.
Intranet page: Creates a centralized content repository
where employees can easily access the most current
internal and external transparency content, as well as
support materials.
Multimodal communications: Succinctly
communicates critical compliance information and
drives employees to other resources such as the intranet
page and the social media community.
Leadership toolkit and meeting presentations:
Provides additional contextual information to leaders
so they can openly discuss transparency with their
employees, communicate key messaging through their
preferred communication methods, and reinforce key
messaging from the course itself.
Learner-Centric Learning at Philips
The learner-centric learning approach Deloitte helped Philips implement involved ve
key components:
A multimodal awareness campaign that introduced key transparency concepts to
prepare employees to complete critical compliance tasks.
A dynamic e-learning course, focused on contextual information, which allowed
learners to engage with the content and assess their understanding at several points
in the course.
Performance support materials that allowed learners to access task steps at the
moment they needed to complete the tasks.
A social media community that created conversations between key compliance
leaders at Philips and employees worldwide.
Risk mitigation feedback that notied learners and their immediate supervisors when
their transactions did not meet expectations.
5
Building Transparency Awareness at Philips
Immediately upon launching the project, the team built a core messaging architecture. The core messaging architecture
covered four key topics: accountability, personal commitment, integrity, and employees roles. All communications,
regardless of modality and sender, addressed at least one of these topics, establishing consistency in all messages. In
addition to building a core messaging architecture, the Philips team assessed audience needs, categorized the teams
based on those needs, and leveraged multiple communication vehicles to meet the needs of specic audiences. Finally,
the team engaged leaders and shared key information with them rst, so they could lead in reinforcing key messages
and encouraging compliant behaviors. With the combination of these three techniques, the Philips team created
signicant buzz around the topic before the formal training went live and long before employees needed to begin
entering all transfers of value to covered recipients.
Formal Learning
After increasing awareness across the organization, teams
implementing learner-centric approaches should introduce
formal opportunities to educate employees about the
topic. Teams can launch formal learning opportunities
using a variety of modalities, but e-learning provides
a great reach and effective mechanism for capturing
completions. If the organization prefers to train people in
person, instructor-led training provides face-to-face contact
with employees to answer any questions, but this method
also requires manual attendance tracking.
To increase the value of the formal training opportunities,
limit the content to topics related to the compliance
requirements. Too often compliance training overwhelms
employees with too much detail about the laws themselves
and the actions they need to take. Accessing information
when they need it to do their job from the content
repository increases relevance to their roles and improves
information retention. For other topicssuch as specic
details about the laws, system tasks, and who to contact
with questionsinformation should be readily available for
employees in an easy-to-access format.
To reduce completion time and increase retention, limit
courses to approximately 30 minutes. Though this shifts
from the tendencies of many learning organizations,
employees often take away more from courses that focus
on key topics and assess their knowledge periodically
throughout the course. To further reinforce the trainings
importance and encourage quick completions, limit the
amount of time learners have to complete the course
to two weeks. Though new compliance requirements
certainly encourage employees to complete compliance
courses, limiting the course completion window creates
urgency in learners minds, and drove the results we
anticipated. In this case, it worked as planned.
6
Just-in-Time Performance Support
Rather than teaching people how to use systems or
complete specic tasks in e-learning courses, create
ancillary materials that walk learners through the steps
to complete various compliance tasks. The performance
support materials provide learners just-in-time support
that they access as they complete compliance tasks. This is
often more effective than expecting learners to remember
critical steps from a previously completed e-course.
The performance support artifacts may include:
Job Aids: Short one-page cards that walk participants
through just the actions required to complete the tasks.
Reference Guides: Longer guides that walk participants
through the steps with graphics demonstrating the
various system interactions.
Embedded Simulation: System simulations that allow
learners to practice tasks in a simulated environment
with immediate feedback before they begin completing
tasks in the live system.
Transparency Course at Philips
The transparency course built by the Philips team required users to complete a series of activities to directly
involve them in the learning process. The course included specic instructional techniques to help learners retain
the key messages:
Matching exercises
True/False questions
Scenarios requiring learner responses
Unit-ending mini-assessments to gauge understanding
A course assessment allowing learners to demonstrate the actions they would take to comply
Although the instructional design practices and course completion times certainly helped drive completions, reaching
the 85 percent completion rate target across required learners did not come without some additional effort. To
encourage completions, the team sent reminder emails from the Learning Management System (LMS) to learners who
did not complete the training before the deadline, analyzed completion data on a weekly basis, and communicated
with the leaders of lagging teams.
Performance Support Plan at Philips
By separating the system support from the awareness learning, Philips was able to drive the appropriate behaviors. For
systems in which the team could directly embed the support materials, learners accessed the information at the exact
time it was needed. For systems in which the team could not embed the support materials, learners accessed support
materials at the intranet page that they visited throughout the awareness campaign.
To simplify access, the team placed a link to the job aids, reference guides, and simulations directly on the Transparency
home page. After the team created home page links, the number of employees who clicked through to the system
resources rose signicantly.
7
Creating an Ongoing Dialogue
To reinforce key messages and create opportunities for
ongoing transparency dialogues between learners and
subject matter experts, your team can create a social media
community. A community may contain links to additional
resources, as well as provide a discussion forum to allow
learners to communicate directly with transparency
experts. Much of the early activity will involve subject
matter experts posting transparency-related comments and
sharing links to external information to build the sites user
population. As the community evolves, learners can post
questions to the community, with the intent of receiving
answers from organizational experts and their fellow
community members.
Building a solid community takes time and effort. To
encourage participation, site administrators should create
a draw that inspires potential members to visit the site
and communicate with other community members. The
draw may come from executive participation or strong
content derived from internal subject matter experts, but
ultimately the users need to feel there is a reason to join
the community.
If members do not immediately join the community,
the team may want to create a separate mini change
management plan for the social media launch, encourage
leaders to actively participate early in the communitys
evolution, and communicate broadly about the value of
community membership.
Risk Mitigation to Close the Feedback Loop
Effective learning programs incorporate ongoing feedback
from their own leaders and the organizations compliance
leaders to reinforce the behaviors they expect. This
feedback can come directly from leaders who interact with
the employees regularly or from organizational leaders who
employees view as subject matter experts.
Using Social Learning to Continue the Transparency Dialogue at Philips
The Philips team created the community with the hope of reinforcing key messages,
answering questions that confused learners, offering a safe space in which they could
pose transparency-related questions, and providing compliance experts the ability to
track the types of questions posed by learners.
However, the social community did not gain the traction the team initially hoped. At the
time of publication, the community membership consisted of the client team, a few key
opinion leaders, and a handful of learners. In retrospect, taking additional actions would
have made the community more successful:
Engage employees early and communicate the shift away from the functional email
account and to the community.
Ask senior leaders and inuential opinion leaders to participate in the site to drive
interested employees to the community.
Broadly communicate the communitys creation and purpose to invite more
people to join.
8
Given the large quantity of transparency-related data,
it helps to create an automated mechanism to audit
transactions and provide feedback to employees who
have non-compliant transactions. When the auditing
system recognizes a non-compliant transaction, it ags the
transaction, sends a request to the employee to correct
that transaction, and copies the employees immediate
supervisor on the email. If the employee does not respond
within a reasonable timeframe, the system can then send
the manager an email directly asking him or her to provide
the feedback to the employee directly. With this type of
loop created, employees receive feedback directly from
the compliance team and from their managers, who also
receive notications of non-compliant transactions.
Feedback from various parties closes the loop for learners
and reinforces compliant behaviors. The employees receive
information about the new expectations throughout
the awareness campaign, specic information about the
regulations in the formal learning program, on-demand
support from the performance support materials, answers
to their questions on the social media community,
and feedback from two different parties through the
audit system. With this type of information loop, many
employees quickly change their behaviors to meet the
new expectations.
Leading Practice
Evaluation of the learner-centric learning work at Philips
can be condensed to a set of leading practices:
Communicate early and often, using as many
modalities as possible. The teams strategic email
deployment every two weeks kept transparency relevant
in the eyes of the learners and encouraged them to
complete upcoming compliance tasks (i.e., training).
Engage leaders early, often, and specically. The
decision to communicate openly with leaders and
provide resources they would use to communicate with
their teams increased their comfort with the topic and
helped them commit to and champion the effort.
Create a central content repository in a familiar
location. The creation of the page on the Philips
intranet system allowed learners to easily access
information, and aligning the look of the site to other
successful intranet pages made learner navigation
simple.
Make formal learning opportunities engaging.
Regardless of the modality used to deliver the training,
engaging learning excites learners and forces them to
interact with the content rather than statically receive it.
Shorten the window to complete the course to
create urgency. While compliance does not always
generate motivated responses, learners take compliance
requirements seriously because of the potential
consequences of noncompliance. Shortening the
window to comply with the learning requirements
creates urgency and encourages learners to complete
the courses.
Make system support easy to use. Throughout the
project, the team engaged with end users to test system
knowledge and the quality of the support materials. The
end users gave great feedback, which helped the team
deliver high-quality, usable resources.
Risk Mitigation Feedback at Philips
To close the loop on transparency compliance, the Philips team brought in a risk
mitigation specialist to create a set of expectations that employees needed to follow
and an audit process that ensured continuous compliance. With the expectations
communicated and audit processes in place, employees received feedback on their
transactions that did not comply with expectations.
Risk mitigation feedback at Philips did not come without system upgrades. The
Philips team built a business intelligence system to consolidate transparency-related
transactions from four disparate systems and assess the validity of the information it
received. From there, a risk management professional on the team received reports
that included all non-compliant transactions and notied those employees of their
transactions that required edits.
The feedback closed the loop on the learner-centric learning process. Employees
received communications about the new expectations early in the process, learned
about the specics through the e-learning course, received on-demand support from
the performance support, discussed the topic on the social media site, and received
feedback when transactions did not meet organizational expectations. By engaging
employees throughout the learning process and helping them understand changes they
needed to make to their transactions, the team embedded a sense of correctness and
completeness in transparency transactions.
9
Results at Philips
At the end of the campaign, the results spoke for themselves. In the rst month after
the launch of the intranet page, more than 1,800 targeted employees visited and spent
time on the site. After receiving emails, the team received numerous requests from
organizational leaders asking for resources to reinforce the campaigns key messaging.
In addition, the awareness campaign yielded great results in terms of training
completions: Within two weeks of the launch of the training course, more than 60
percent of required learners completed the course. In the end, taking the time to build
a strategy, develop core messaging, and deliver content over an extended time period
demonstrated itself valuable to increasing transparency.
In addition to the leading practices, the team learned
important lessons that may expand on the programs
initial success:
Launching multiple changes simultaneously
requires clear communication about each change.
The situation with the audit system provides a nice
case study for the challenges of multiple changes at
the same time. In retrospect, the team could have
communicated separately about each of the system
changes and additions instead of incorporating all of
the changes into a single communication.
Social media community launches require their
own awareness campaigns. Successful communities
typically possess great content and signicant leadership
participation. In retrospect, lining up subject matter
experts, feeding them with immediate content to
post, and encouraging learners to join the community
may have helped the community experience greater
participation and depth of conversations.
Notication of incomplete training should be sent
directly to leaders of lagging groups. Frequent
reminders were sent to employees who had not
completed the training as the deadline approached
and passed. While many organizations consider LMS
notications a valuable practice for driving compliance
training completions, the notications were not well-
received. While Deloitte still advocates the practice,
notications should also go to the leaders of lagging
teams in an effort to create some local accountability
for the learners.
Conclusion
The learner-centric learning approach designed and
implemented as part of Philips transparency compliance
efforts delivered effective results. The initial communication
campaign, including the emails and intranet page,
signicantly increased learners transparency awareness,
drove learners to available resources, and helped the
organization hit its target 85 percent completion rate on
the training course. The formal learning opportunities,
including the e-learning and meeting presentations,
received high acclaim from learners, and the challenging
knowledge assessment provided Philips with data that
the company can use to demonstrate the learners
understanding of key compliance topics. The performance
support materials provided learners with the information
they needed to accurately complete transparency-related
tasks. Although nal data on the value of the resources
will not be available until after the time of this papers
publication, website analytics show impressive numbers of
targeted learners have clicked through the performance
support materials and spent time reviewing the materials.
While low awareness to the organizations social media
platform at Philips has been a challenge, the learner-
centric approach appears to be a success. It signicantly
improved awareness to transparency compliance, educated
employees on the organizations expectations, and created
the desired behavioral changes. As employees continue to
integrate the expected behavior changes, they can further
improve their understanding of transparency compliance
and hold their colleagues accountable for their behaviors
to help ensure that Philips achieves its transparency
compliance objectives.
Contacts
Josh Haims
Principal
Deloitte Consulting LLP
jhaims@deloitte.com
Burt Rea
Director
Deloitte Consulting LLP
brea@deloitte.com
Jennifer Stempel
Senior Manager
Deloitte Consulting LLP
jstempel@deloitte.com
Bob Buckler (Deloitte Consulting LLP) also contributed to this article.
As used in this document, Deloitte means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a
detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules
and regulations of public accounting.
This publication contains general information only, and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, nancial,
investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should
it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your
business, you should consult a qualied professional advisor.
Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication.
Copyright 2014 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.
Member of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited