Franke Holding
Group
Kitchen Systems, Food
Service, Industrial
Engineering
5 divisions operating
in 40 countries on 5
continents
>10,500
Franke Academy as
corporate L&D solution
ALU integrated Sharpist coaching into their leadership program to provide learners with a holistic learning experience.
The African Leadership University (ALU) is rated one of the top 50 most innovative companies in the world and is on its mission to produce 3 million young African leaders in the next 50 years. With its over 2,000 students, they are providing young talented and motivated learners with all the skills and education needed to shape Africa's future.
With an average satisfaction rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars, Sharpist does not only create value for Franke’s employees, but also pays close attention to serve the needs of HR professionals. “Measuring and evaluating the impact of our L&D solutions is extremely challenging”, says Malgorzata Warchol, Global Learning and Development Specialist at Franke Poland, “but Sharpist’s data-driven coaching approach gives me cohort-level insights and analytics about employee’s satisfaction, user progress, coaching effectiveness and developmental areas.
Sharpist even offers to fully customize the coaching and its evaluation specifically to our Franke evaluation criteria and values.” This supports employees to also follow and live up the Franke values and culture. Thereby, Sharpist ensures an approach that is tailored to employee’s individual needs, whilst simultaneously customized to Franke’s business expectations. This is highly important since L&D should never become a one size fits all approach.
Kirill is Group Head of Learning & Development at Franke Management AG, a world leading industrial manufacturer. Since he has been working at Franke for almost four years, he knows the organization, culture and structure of Franke particularly well. He is responsible for managing and developing all central learning and development related activities group-wide, including, for instance, leading the high potential programs and implementing the global Leadership Training architecture. His mission: “Give every single employee the opportunity to pick high quality L&D solutions that simultaneously match the company’s strategy as well as individual needs.”
The history of Franke resembles a story of success. Started as a family business in Switzerland in 1911, the organization has now become a world leading provider of smart kitchen and household systems and appliances. As of today, the Franke Holding Group unifies five divisions on five continents with more than 10,500 employees worldwide. What sets them apart from other businesses in the field is their strong focus on Swiss quality, innovative engineering and unique design. Franke’s vision: ‘Make it wonderful’.
But this vision does not only apply to Franke’s products and services, as it also defines their corporate culture. “At Franke, we know that our people make the difference. We want to create a ‘wonderful’ place to work - for all employees. This is reflected in our values, the five ‘Franke Values’: Enable people, foster teamwork, act entrepreneurial, deliver solutions and be accountable. We firmly believe that our strong culture is the driver of our success. Our competitive advantage derives from the right people’s behaviors”, says Kirill.
“But continuous growth made us face new challenges. Right now, our people are spread across 40 countries on five continents. We are a global organization with a comparably decentralized structure. This, of course, makes it much harder for us to build a uniform L&D strategy, especially considering that nearly all of our units have individual HR departments and budgets. The question that drives me everyday is: How can I ensure that all employees can learn and grow according to their needs to fulfil their potential? How can I ensure that everyone lives up to our values and thrives in our culture?”
Kirill is not the only one who faces this issue. Building up a centralized and sustainable L&D strategy is a challenge many globally operating companies have to deal with. But it is a challenge whose solution can provide a competitive edge, particularly during times where talent attraction and retention is key. “I strongly believe that effective L&D solutions that enhance the desired behaviors are important success drivers. Their positive impact on critical business indicators such as productivity, innovation, employee satisfaction and engagement has been demonstrated many times. That’s why we started our ‘Franke Academy’.” Offering a wide range of L&D solutions, Franke’s very own corporate academy is based on their prime value: Enable people at all levels.
However, different measures have different shortcomings. When it comes to employee development, the cost-benefit trade-off is a common challenge. Group formats, such as classroom training or seminars, are great for fostering networks and interaction, however, they do not always meet all the individual needs. Personalized solutions, such as in person coaching, are cost-intensive and therefore limited to a few.
The effectiveness of more affordable online programs suffers from low completion rates. In line with that, the ‘Franke Academy’ consisted of only a few entirely digital formats, mostly blended, but large classroom components and location-dependent measures. “Put together, we needed a solution that further supports a shift from a decentralized to a more centralized L&D approach. Ideally, it could be integrated into the ‘Franke Academy’ and complements the existing L&D formats.”
“When I first heard about the Sharpist L&D ecosystem, it sounded like a very good fit for our organization. However, we first wanted to test compatibility with an external L&D provider before agreeing on any form of long-term collaboration.”, Kirill admits.
Thus, in 2019, Franke rolled out a 3-month test period with Sharpist in order to see how well a digital coaching solution would match their expectations. Under the condition ‘first come, first serve’, 30 Franke managers could participate in this initial pilot project. “After all the positive feedback we received, we then decided to continue our contract and include Sharpist Business Coaching into the Franke Academy.”
The group-wide rollout of Sharpist allows every Franke employee worldwide to benefit from the Sharpist App: Professional coaching in their mother tongue via mobile device combined with personalized Micro Tasks and 24/7 user support from business psychologists. “This individual and digital approach perfectly complements our existing L&D measures, so that our people have the ideal blend of online and offline solutions. It enables them a holistic and continuous learning experience.” The collaboration between Sharpist and Franke works on-demand: Depending on how many of Franke’s employees wish to receive digital business coaching, the responsible HR manager can easily request a suitable package of licenses from Sharpist. “I value very much the flexibility that this allows. An on-demand approach turned out to be the perfect solution for us.
But this is not the only benefit.”, Kirill says. “In general, the collaboration with Sharpist was almost effortless.” Partnering with an external L&D provider can indeed save internal HR resources. To ensure this, Sharpist has their very own Implementation Consultants who accompany the HR manager through every step alongside their Sharpist journey, ensuring that HR has the least amount of effort possible.
Leadership
Feedback
Delegation
Mindfulness & Self-growth
Meetings
Communication
Goal Setting
Drivers & Motivators
Conflict Management
HR & Office Politics
With an average satisfaction rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars, Sharpist does not only create value for Franke’s employees, but also pays close attention to serve the needs of HR professionals. “Measuring and evaluating the impact of our L&D solutions is extremely challenging”, says Malgorzata Warchol, Global Learning and Development Specialist at Franke Poland, “but Sharpist’s data-driven coaching approach gives me cohort-level insights and analytics about employee’s satisfaction, user progress, coaching effectiveness and developmental areas. Sharpist even offers to fully customize the coaching and its evaluation specifically to our Franke evaluation criteria and values.” This supports employees to also follow and live up the Franke values and culture. Thereby, Sharpist ensures an approach that is tailored to employee’s individual needs, whilst simultaneously customized to Franke’s business expectations. This is highly important since L&D should never become a one size fits all approach.
Sharpist and ALU collaborated to provide 45 leaders with an extensive and holistic learning journey that complemented their internal 9 modules managers program. This program is tailored to the special needs of leaders.
Sharpist has supported the program from the beginning and has provided individual, targeted coaching to the leaders. In addition, they were supported by thematically relevant micro tasks to deepen their learning experience. Based on the Sharpist data on focus areas from ALU’s learners, ALU and Sharpist designed and facilitated an additional module to work more intensively on the topic of change management. To make the success of the partnership measurable, Sharpist conducted a survey based on the Sharpist leadership model before and after the program. There were improvements on all dimensions. The largest improvement was visible for the area of change management.
Results on collaboration with coaches also show that digital offerings, like Sharpist's, are in no way inferior to face-to-face coaching sessions.
satisfied with their Sharpist coach
find that their coach helped them achieve their defined goals
recommend coaching with Sharpist to their colleagues
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