United Overseas Bank - Leadership Right By You
Name of Organization / Company: United Overseas Bank, Singapore
Category: Award for the Innovative Use of Technology in Human Resources > Financial Services Industries
Entry Title: Leadership Right By You: Leading Self – Trekking Towards Success
Essay:
In a climate of ever- evolving workforce demands, competition for talent, and pressure created by digital disruption, UOB—one of Asia's leading banks—has launched a range of initiatives across the bank to ensure its future readiness. One of these is a talent development initiative called “Leadership Right By You” (LRBY). This initiative is aimed at instilling the leadership culture and behaviors that UOB needs in its people and leaders to drive business. LRBY is a series of learning experiences targeted at managers of managers, first- line managers, and for the first time, individual contributors.
UOB wanted to develop leadership values of “care” and “courage” in their individual contributors, while also developing their capacity for self- awareness, collaboration, resilience, and learning agility. UOB identified that it needed a learning experience that could tap into new and emerging learning behaviors, accommodate cohorts of over 300, and eventually develop a population of over 10,000 individual contributors across Asia. UOB partnered with GP Strategies to determine how to meet the specificities of this challenge.
The solution was a 12- week learning experience for individual contributors, which combined the flexibility of the Intrepid learning platform with live, virtual, and experiential learning activities.
Learning and application were driven through a range of micro- siz ed, multi- modality activities, including custom and curated video/media, articles, assessments, missions, podcasts, HTML 5 applications, user- generated content, virtual coaching, social learning, on- the- job projects, and more. Live moderators and coaches kept tabs on and engaged in the learning discourse that resulted in a “living and breathing” learning experience where content and interactions could be generated on the fly based on the interests, usage data, and questions generated by any cohort moving through the experience. This blend, along with careful deployment of gamification and experience moderation across a huge population made this such an innovative talent development experience. Throughout the design process, GP Strategies engaged in rapid prototyping, performed regular “voice of the learner” sessions, and gained insights from across UOB’s business lines.
Below are some examples of the innovations with the talent development experience:
• The digital, self- led component of the experience was bookended by live kickoff and capstone events. The kickoff was designed to factor in change management, platform adoption, and learner engagement. It integrated live activities that triggered users to pick up their phones and use the learning platform in ways that would help build confidence, comfort, and familiarity.
• New learning unlocks were available each week, allowing learners to explore the diverse content in any order, flow, and timing they like.
• The entire experience was moderated and supported by SME coaches and a professional moderator.
• Progress and engagement were tracked and driven through light gamification elements.
• The participants formed “travel groups” and stayed connected through a combination of prompts from the experience and via WhatsApp and other social networks.
• A secondary travel group leaderboard was created to help develop competition and enhance the push/pull element of the experience.
• The capstone event was a half- day live session that served to bring learners together and share success stories.
UOB has over 24,000 employees and 83 years of history with a deep, ingrained culture. The level of innovation and achievement of the project is especially impressive. The team needed to be respectful of the unique culture and history while navigating the challenges inherent in introducing a whole new way of learning across such a diverse and dispersed population.
The team has negotiated this environment to build a highly successful, innovative program that continues to create a change in mindset of participants, has kickstarted a culture change around learning in the organization, and serves as a successful example of innovation and progress in learning in
Attachments/Links:
URL 1
https://players.brightcove.net/pages/v1/index.html?accountId=45664527030... 9d24- 4451-abe9- a8f664cb040b&videoId=5837076770001&autoplay=true