ANZ People Management Essentials Training 2022

By Steven Burrows, Senior Learning Executive, Cognizant Academy — Mon, 21 Nov, 2022

The Cognizant ANZ People Management Essentials (PME) program has delivered 4 offerings supporting 50 participants in 2022. These offerings were organized and delivered by Steven Burrows with the support of our local People & Culture team for identifying candidates. This blog introduces the local programs delivered and the results obtained as we near the end of the 2022 calendar year.

Program Overview

People Management Essentials (PME) is a long-running program for people management enablement for the ANZ region. The program was run by local People & Culture representatives in both Melbourne and Sydney up to and including 2019. The program has since been delivered by Learning & Development over the last 3 years with 5 offerings in 2020, 4 offerings in 2021, and 4 offerings in 2022. During these 3 years, the program has shifted from instructor-led to virtual instructor-led training due to COVID-19 and a more geographically dispersed workforce.

The learning materials have also evolved to keep pace with latest policies and best practices. Stakeholder involvement has included People & Culture, Global Leadership Development, People Squads, and Learning & Development at various times. We are pleased to share that the learning materials have been fully updated again in 2022, targeting all content, engagement, presentation, and branding dimensions. These updates were prompted by the energy created by our local 2022 “career month” activities and all the new related work that was going on at the time.

The strategy for enrolling participants has also varied over the last years too, with a mixture of self-enrolment and enrolment via others taking place. Sometimes we have had requests from business unit and community leaders to enroll their people managers in groups. At other times, the enrolments have included names put forward by the People & Culture team, to involve new starters among others, which is current practice.

The program is delivered as a 4-hour workshop and particularly targets associates new to people management and/or new to Cognizant. The target audience is also generally associates employed at the ‘manager’ level or above. The workshop is structured into 8 topics mostly framed around the “people management lifecycle”, which is designed to cover everything from onboarding to offboarding and in between. Additionally, the workshop is designed to be very interactive and includes activities supported by a workbook and ‘pop quiz’ questions among others.

Participation

The first table below summarizes the participation data for the four offerings in 2022 at time of writing. Attendance overall was moderate at 50%, which contrasts to high attendance in our agile programs at around 85%. The key difference is that our PME offerings are usually made up of nominees that have been put forward by the business rather than self-nominations. This means that the participants have not ‘bought in’ to the program in the same way as others, which provides an opportunity to try different strategies going forward to gain more participation.

We also had a high number of surveys returned with 96% returned. The rate of surveys returned is well above the 80% benchmark set by Learning & Development. We were able to achieve a high number of surveys returned by asking participants to complete the feedback surveys during the training itself at the end. The high rate of feedback has also helped to inform the program performance as per the next section.

Performance

The training performance was measured by the feedback surveys administered at the end of the workshops. The surveys measured the instructor, courseware, environment, learning support and overall sentiment on questions using a five-point Likert scale, with 1 meaning “strongly disagree” up to 5 meaning “strongly agree”. We also used the Net Promotor Score as a measure of “customer satisfaction” on a 1-10 scale.

The benchmark scores set by Learning & Development are 4.35/5 for the Likert questions and 40 for NPS. We are pleased to share that the ratings across the offerings have consistently exceeded the benchmarks. The most noteworthy scores to report are the overall score of 4.63/5 and an NPS of 71. We also point out that we achieved a high instructor score of 4.66/5.

Qualitative Feedback

We captured written feedback in addition to the quantitative metrics reported above. Below follows some descriptive comments for PME regarding aspects that were most liked:

• “Overall content of the course, this is very informative and provides clear concepts for people management.”
• “I liked the structure of the training and having all people management aspects covered in one session was useful.”
• “The spacing was great with breaks. Normally a 9-1 workshop will have me drained and losing attention, but this kept me engaged.”
• “The trainer is an amazing communicator. Very clear, eloquent, and straight to the point. The trainer has also clearly practiced and structured this presentation very deliberately which is appreciated.”

Conclusions

As mentioned at the start, the Cognizant ANZ People Management Essentials program has delivered 4 offerings supporting 50 participants in 2022. The programs were regarded highly, with an overall rating of 4.63/5 and an NPS of 71, which both well exceeded our performance benchmarks. The program has enabled all active participants to become more effective in people management.

We thank all colleagues both past and present that have supported the People Management Essentials program. In particular, we acknowledge the most recent support provided by our local People & Culture team, including Paige Carter regarding nominations, and Kylie Blair regarding leadership. We look forward to continuing PME training for the upcoming summer period and more into 2023.