by Kellye Whitney
December 23, 2006
Performance is often a key consideration when organizations attempt to align learning offerings with business needs. In fact, performance and learning frequently go hand in hand. JPMorgan Chase Card Services, a division of global financial firm JPMorgan Chase, has not only linked the two concepts, it has fused them together to ensure Card Services’ 20,000 associates have everything they need to serve the firms’ 110 million customers quickly and effectively.
“We exist to help our business partners meet or beat their scorecard goals,” said Eric Hicks, senior director of performance improvement. “Everything that we do around learning is linked to helping them meet or beat the business goals that they put together. These goals directly support the customer experience and business financial goals. Second, we have a number of performance improvement projects, where we really try to prove that what we’re doing either increases revenue or reduces cost. We look to continuously improve everything that we do.”
In order to effectively manage performance of the learning function, JPMorgan Chase Card Services holds its trainers accountable for the success of the employees they train, and they also are responsible for customer service and attrition rates, which are measured regularly.
“We see and understand the performance that our business partners have to attain, and we’re held accountable for the same measurements,” Hicks said. “We don’t want to become a great training department — that’s not our goal. Our goal is to make our business succeed. Our classroom trainers, for example, are not held accountable for how well their participants think of them. They’re held accountable for how well their participants do out on the job. The metrics that they pass from the transition phase out to the job are the same levels that they’d be required to do when they’re actually in position out on the job. It’s very performance-based. That’s what we do. We manage performance to a level where the experience in training matches the experience they’ll encounter out in the environment.”
Surveys and other data-gathering methods revealed customers don’t want to be on the phone longer than necessary. Rather, they want their issues resolved quickly, the first time they call, so they can spend less time on the phone. When financial service advisers are trained and begin taking calls, Hicks and his group look at metrics such as conversation quality and call handle time.
“We will actually measure and track those for our trainees at a certain time during their training,” Hicks said. “Their performance in those metrics reflects directly on the performance review of the trainer who’s involved. And as they go out into the environment, we’ll look at their attrition over a three- and six-month period. That will also reflect back on the trainer. Additionally, our customers will randomly receive surveys that ask them how their experience was with us. We track that back to the trainer that trained the adviser, and we give them feedback based on the survey results. We do have some subjective performance measures in place to make sure that trainer classroom skills are good, but most of it’s based on how the training performs out in the environment.”
With a SumTotal LMS in place, JPMorgan Chase Card Services trains employees to fill about 20 functions, and average training periods run between five and seven weeks with a 60-40 split between online and instructor-led training.
Hicks said metrics are not simply gathered to prove or disprove the validity of training — other factors play into a more umbrella view of performance success or point out areas in which improvements might be required.
“You’ve got selection and the quality of the individual that comes into the organization, you’ve got the training aspect, and then you’ve got the transition out to the job and the follow-up coaching and development,” Hicks said. “When we look at attrition, we don’t look at it just as a training issue — we look at it holistically across all of those phases. It’s pretty interconnected, so for me to say, ‘Because we put a certain training program in place, it lowered attrition,’ might not only be inaccurate, it would also not reflect the efforts of the entire HR, training and business teams working together. We have seen some very good success from where we were several years ago, but to be honest, we still have attrition challenges. Sometimes it has less to do with training. Sometimes it has more to do with training. Either way, we take ownership and accountability with our business partners to drive for improvement.”
– Kellye Whitney, kwhitney@clomedia.com