At Brandon Hall Group’s recent HCM Excellence Conference, one of the most popular breakout sessions was based on one critical question: “Are You Addressing Employee Engagement the Right Way?”
Baker Hughes, a leading energy technology company with more than 55,000 employees, is one of the Excellence Award-winning organizations that answered that question with a resounding “yes.”
Baker Hughes’ global learning team launched its fully self-directed social community and knowledge-sharing experience, named CORE, focused on the company’s four core values of Lead, Care, Grow, and Collaborate. After operating at first without an existing virtual learning environment, CORE is now powered by the collaborative learning platform NovoEd.
Employee Engagement Case Study: Baker Hughes Revolution
The goal was to create immersive learning experiences that could rival the value of the face-to-face experiences that employees were starting to request again as the impact of COVID began to diminish. These experiences would also create a continuous learning thread necessary for:
- Rapid skill development at scale
- Alignment with company imperatives
- Centralized data for deeper insights
- Personalization for leaners
- Holistically informing strategic plans to sustain a long-term digital learning strategy
That seemed like a tall order for a learning community that was completely voluntary. But the learning team, operating on a small budget, was innovative and kept building on their initial concept.
Since its start as a small pilot project, CORE membership has swelled to more than 5,000 voluntary members in less than two years. A key component of the success has been the implementation of NovoEd, which allows CORE to deploy a seamless, social and cohort-based experience that drives learner engagement. NovoEd also has native and full-feature apps for iOS and Android, which allow CORE members who are frontline workers to participate from the field.
Because CORE is intended to be a continual experience and available at the point of need for any employee — and because Baker Hughes has four core values — the team decided to characterize the “program” as a community and focus the activities in the community on one value per quarter. Each year the content and activities for each value will refresh so that those who have been members for a while can continue to learn and grow and new members can begin participating at any time.
The CORE community centers engagement activities related to each value and its behaviors across three main categories each quarter: “Learn,” “Engage,” and “Deliver.” These categories were created as a brand-new learning framework started within CORE, which is now being adopted across other emerging communities within Baker Hughes.
The impact of CORE has exceeded all expectations. As Deanna Jones, EVP of People, Communications and Transformation for Baker Hughes, shared after a roundtable with some CORE participants: “I was almost brought to tears as some of the leaders on the call shared not only how the community was enhancing their work life but also how it was creating a difference in their personal life. Our cultural journey is one that is absolutely critical to the continued success and transformation of Baker Hughes. The CORE community is a great example of how we influence the middle and create change through the middle out.”
