ANZ People Management Essentials Training 2023

By Steven Burrows, Senior Learning Executive, Cognizant Academy — Fri, 19 Jan, 2024

The Cognizant ANZ People Management Essentials (PME) program has delivered 10 offerings supporting 100+ participants in 2023. These offerings were organised and delivered by Steven Burrows with the support of the wider business for identifying some of the candidates. This blog introduces the local programs delivered and the results obtained as we near the end of the 2023 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 4 years across all of ANZ with approximate quarterly offerings in 2020-2022 and approximate monthly offerings in 2023. During these 4 years, the program has shifted from face-to-face to virtual due to the combination of 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 continued to receive updates in 2023. Many of these were triggered by a mid-year change to our intranet platform provider and therefore resulted in changes to the availability and location of supporting materials.

The strategy for enrolling participants has also varied over the last years too, now with a mixture of self and by-other enrolment taking place. From 2023, we have now taken the view that all people managers should attend the training at some point. We have been working our way through all eligible candidates with consideration towards start date and grade level to prioritise and achieve this.

The program is delivered as a 4-hour workshop and particularly suits associates that are new to people management or new to Cognizant. The target audience is also generally associates employed at the ‘manager’, ‘senior manager’ or ‘associate director’ levels. 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. Recently we have been applying the 2x2hr multi-day format over the 1x4hr single-day format to better cater for diverse time zones.

People Management Systems and Processes

During the middle of 2023, we had associates from the Servian and Contino businesses merge with Cognizant to be known as “Cognizant Servian”. This required a range of training programs to support the integration and People Management Essentials (PME) was one of them. The first offering was the regular workshop offered to a small group of 8 associates in attendance as a trial of sorts. Afterwards it was decided the remaining Cognizant Servian associates would receive a “reduced” version of the training, to lower the requirements towards the overall integration efforts. We called this version “People Management Systems and Processes” (PMSP), which was a 90-minute format attended by 134 associates. The content was shortened to serve as an information-driven rather than interactive format. Note that the organising group decided against a formal feedback collection process, so we don’t have the usual quantitative and qualitative feedback to share. But one kind participant commented that the training was the “best session at Cognizant thus far”. The remainder of this blog now reverts to PME.

Participation

The first table below summarises the participation data for the ten PME offerings in 2023. Attendance overall was moderate at 42%, which contrasts to high attendance in our agile programs at around 91%. The key difference is that our PME offerings are mostly nominees that have been put forward by the business rather than self-nominees. This means that the participants have not ‘bought in’ to the program in the same way as others. We have been looping in home managers more recently to engage further on this front.

The number of surveys returned was high at 98%. This is well above the 80% benchmark set by Learning & Development. We were able to achieve the high response by asking participants to complete the feedback surveys during the training itself at the end. The 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 4.53/5 and an NPS of 75. We also point out that we achieved a high instructor score of 4.65/5.

Qualitative Feedback

We captured written feedback in addition to the quantitative metrics reported above. Below follows some of the most articulate comments received:

• “It was a fantastic training covering all the relevant topics under people management with good amount of case studies and examples.”
• “The training was very good with lot of interactions and new insights which otherwise would have been just assumed. Though the content was more towards Cognizant way of working, some part was generic and will help to execute my role as expected.”
• “The trainer is a great facilitator and course instructor. The trainer made sure the course is interactive and everyone is involved, and that made very easy to gain the learning outcome. I would recommend this course to any budding people managers or existing managers.”
• “Valuable course, useful reminders on those parts I was already familiar with, learnt some new things, good interactivity with trainer and others on call. Wish I'd done this course as soon as I began managing a team.”

Conclusions

As mentioned at the start, the Cognizant ANZ People Management Essentials program has delivered 10 offerings supporting 100+ participants in 2023. The programs were regarded highly, with an overall rating of 4.53/5 and an NPS of 75, 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. We look forward to continuing PME training into 2024.