Cargill

Background

Cargill, Incorporated is a privately held American global food corporation based in Minnesota. Employing 160,000 professionals in 70 countries, Cargill combines 156 years of experience with new technologies and insights to bring together the worlds of food, agriculture, nutrition and risk management for customers in more than 125 countries.

Challenge

Cargill came to Learning Pool with two objectives:

1) Get better data

2) Inspire better employee decision making

“There’s a huge difference between training 1.0 (which is essentially employees demonstrating to us that they remember what ‘this word’ means, and what ‘that policy’ means) and training 2.0. Because now, compliance teams don’t want to just see that their employees know a policy, but that they can apply a policy and make good decisions for themselves,” says Cargill’s Christopher Annand, Director of Operations for Ethics and Compliance.

The team felt strongly about getting more insight into potential behavior problems, knowing that if they could learn more about employee behavior and decision-making, they can root out the causes of any risky decisions, and predict and remediate issues long before any compliance failure happens.

Solution

Creating a compliance ecosystem

Cargill and Learning Pool partnered to build out a training program that helped employees practice real-life scenarios and teach them when, how, and why to do the right thing. The end result was a full compliance training ecosystem – employing a set of products that work together to:

1) Guide every learner to topic mastery

2) Uncover any potential risk or blind spot

3) Shape the strategy for their future training program

Using Learning Pool Adaptive Content, Cargill’s compliance team was able to construct its training program around specific behavioral issues and relevant scenarios. IQ Analytics – a feature of Learning Pool Adaptive Content – draws deep behavioral insights from the learning data and helped the team respond to problem areas quickly and effectively, using these insights to craft a subsequent training plan. 

Between the learn-by-doing methodology, adaptivity and advanced behavioral insight within the platform, Cargill was now able to see how employees apply policies in practice, and where people had misconceptions and were making incorrect, risky decisions.

Given all this new insight, the Cargill compliance team was then able to sit down with business partners and work together to determine what the root of any problem was, and put together an action plan to proactively detect and prevent it, which helps make future training strategies purposeful and targeted.

Response

While Cargill finds value across various elements of their engagement with Learning Pool, what is central to its ongoing success as partners is the focus on providing the data our clients need in order to make an impact on their businesses.

Outcomes

Predictive and responsive data capture

The right training data can help compliance teams make correlations with other data at their disposal. For example, if the only data at a team’s disposal is around completions, that data isn’t going to prompt anyone to check incident data or policy systems to see how many times someone accessed a policy, or the last time a risk assessment was completed. All that data is going to tell the team is that a requirement was met to complete training – and Cargill wanted to go beyond that mindset.

Through partnering with Learning Pool, Cargill now had enough evidence  to highlight issues and give direction on where to drill down – by geography, business line, function and more.

In one of Cargill’s safety-focused trainings, they were able to uncover that factory workers thought it was acceptable to try to fix a particular mechanical issue before reporting it to a manager.

“We had an indicator that something was going wrong –  we thought we were providing good safety information but training data showed us that something was amiss. We looked at other data sources. Are we seeing any incident data on this issue? How many employees have accessed the policythat speaks to this requirement – has no one reviewed it in a while? Do we need a communications campaign?

Then we investigated risk assessment data. What did this business identify as a top risk? Is it employee safety or proper procedure? Is not enough attention being given because it’s a low risk on the totem pole?” – Christopher Annand, Director of Operations for Ethics and Compliance.

All of these data sources flow into what Cargill calls their Compliance Culture Dashboard which compares training data-points that may be a concern to all of their other data points. 

“Once we determined the issue, we had a Managing Director speak about it at the plant. We addressed the problem with really low-investment activities like repeated messaging and communications for a period of time, then planned on reanalyzing the data to see if the culture had shifted and if things had gotten better.”

“When we identify this type of thing, we address it. But we were now able to make risk-based decisions on the issue. We made compliance a collaborator with the business…it’s ultimately to everyone’s benefit.” – Christopher Annand.

Results Realized

30% reduction in learner seat time

Learning Pool was the first external learning technologies provider to help Cargill create a curriculum. This shift in strategy was enabled by Learning Pool Adaptive Content’s ability to analyze behavioral data and the ease of building out courses to meet specific goals by collaborating with a strong and proactive instructional design team.  

Cargill’s first year of ‘Code of Conduct’ training was taking between 45 and 50 minutes historically. Through the introduction of Learning Pool Adaptive Content, the average learner seat time was cut back to just 35 minutes – a significant reduction of 30% – in subsequent years and ultimately saving the company 10,000 revenue-generating hours. 

Additionally, Cargill leveraged the use of Learning Pool Authoring which enables the compliance team to make annual adjustments in the curriculum – largely based on course data from previous years – which had led to further time sayings for the team.

Stronger customer support

Providing the business actionable intelligence is a huge part of the output of the compliance teams. Cargill used its training platform to influence and measure compliance behavior at their company. They were able to answer the question to the business “what do I get for that?” Measuring compliance behavior is the next big step in compliance training… You have to have a platform that allows you to do it and report to the business leaders that need to know about it.

Cargill took this one step further by sharing their data driven approach with their sales organizations. For customers, knowing that they are hiring an organization that takes such diligent care in ensuring their people know how to do the right thing, is a tremendous confidence builder in trusting Cargill as a provider.