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Exactly three years ago, Eli Lilly and Co. launched a plan to overhaul training and development and create a virtual university to more efficiently and effectively serve its 29,000 employees around the world. In 1997, it saved almost $1 million in training costs.

By Stephenie Overman

Eli Lilly and Co. is a company with a long history and strong traditions — in business and employee development.

One of the oldest and best-known pharmaceutical companies, it was founded in Indianapolis, Ind., in 1876 by Col. Eli Lilly, a chemist who was frustrated by the poorly prepared, often ineffective medicines of his day. Over the next 127 years, Lilly introduced the first insulin product; developed and mass-produced the Salk polio vaccine for its first widespread clinical trials; and launched Prozac, the first of a major new class of drugs used to treat depression.

It also grew into a global company, with complex, far-flung training needs. Today, Lilly employs 29,000 people, including more than 14,000 employees outside the United States, and it has customers in 156 countries.

Two years ago, Lilly undertook a top-to-bottom examination of its current training and its future employee education needs. “Lilly wanted a major transformation,” explains Sandra Quesada, director of Global Training and Development. “A revolution was taking place in health care, and they wanted to make sure training and development could keep pace.”

Training at Lilly had evolved into a decentralized model, with about 60 training organizations globally. According to Quesada, a former clinical psychologist who joined the company in 1995, it was redundant, fragmented and almost always done in a classroom setting — a model ill-suited for taking the company into the 21st century.

In January 1996, the company set out to identify business needs and make sure the various training organizations were aligned with those needs. The Global Training and Development department created a new entity — the Global Learning Alliance — to eliminate redundant courses and processes and to deliver training programs that can be assessed around the world and delivered in multiple media.

“The Global Learning Alliance is both a system and a process designed to allow employees uniform access to information and courses around the world,” says Quesada. Courses are delivered through the new Virtual Learning Centre using a high-tech, user-friendly electronic system meant to make learning simple and direct. Lilly also set up a “governance network” made up of executives from various business units of the company to oversee the Global Learning Alliance’s activities and ensure they support business goals.

“Our approach is not really centralized or decentralized, it’s a blend of the two,” according to Quesada. “Decentralization works when you have local needs and have people who know the differences in the marketplace and the uniqueness of the culture.” Other activities, such as executive development, remain essentially centralized.

The solutions network

It is the governance network that sees to it that training at Lilly is integrated.

“The governance network was put together to launch strategy and get the right kind of people committed to getting Lilly’s training where it needed to go,” Quesada says. “Their initial study found major overlaps in content and process. Training was a flow-through job — it was a great way to learn, but training was not linked to the business strategy.”

Network members get an external perspective from an academic advisory board made up of scholars from Indiana University, Florida State and San Diego State University.

“They are our window to the outside,” according to Quesada. “They review our current projects and give us long-term direction.”

Regional councils bring together the training communities in Lilly’s four geographic regions — North America, EMA — Europe/Middle East/Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific/Japan.

“We’ve tried to move to common and shared processes and accountability through regional managers and regional councils. We couldn’t do this from a central location. They are closer to the business,” Quesada says.

Global functional councils also are being set up to handle areas such as manufacturing, sales, human resources, information technology and marketing. The first effort at putting a functional council in place is the global sales council (see related story). Quesada looks forward to being able “to identify performance requirements for having a world-class work force for sales in every geography. It will allow integration across all locations. It’s going to push us into new areas.”

Finally, there is the Learning Leadership Council, a group of senior executives within the governance network who provide an overarching internal perspective.

“They understand the geographic business units and the functional areas. They help with prioritizing and with linking training to business,” Quesada says.

Interestingly, the governance network members have never held a formal meeting. “We’ve never gotten all these people together — and I don’t foresee we will,” says Quesada. “But this way we’re all aligned. If you look at the Learning Leadership Council as Lilly-wide and the regional councils as being local and regional, you can use the functional councils as vertical intersections of all of them.”

Brenden Fox, president of Elanco Animal Health, a division of Lilly, is both a member of the governance network and a customer for training services.

As a customer, he asks: What are the corporate training services available? How do they fit our business needs? What is available at the corporate level? At the local level?

As a member of the network, he helps find the right answers.

“Previously, things were bottom up, with each area doing its own thing. Now it’s a lot more efficient. It addresses common needs. It has helped us define our needs better,” he says.

In the short term, that means sorting out immediate business priorities and setting a baseline, according to Fox. “I don’t think before we had collected information on how much we spent, how efficient we were, how we integrated training, which should we do this year and which should we do next.”

Solutions are reached after tough debates in formal and informal settings that bring trainers together with business leaders, he says. “Our role is to be a sounding board. We’re there to keep bringing in the business needs. We provide the street smarts. We try to help show [the trainers] how things may be viewed by senior management and what questions to anticipate.”

In the long term, “we need to define skills and capabilities in the next century in a regulated business that is changing rapidly,” he adds.

Fox is pleased that sales is the first area being addressed by a functional council. “It’s a common need, and the skills are transferable. We were thinking of having to do it ourselves. Now that corporate is doing it, it can be standardized and we can contribute what we were going to spend into the corporate pool.”

The leadership training being offered is important at all levels, particularly for first-line supervisors, according to Fox. “They are the sergeants in the organization; they are critical in the running of the company because of their influence on other people. Often in the past, the company assumed once you promoted them, off they would go. Now we think about how to prepare them for what is often their first time supervising people. We work on communication skills because we rely on them a lot.”

Center of learning

At the heart of Lilly’s training is the Virtual Learning Centre, which offers a variety of courses over the Eli Lilly Virtual Information System — ELVIS for short. Courses are distributed on diskette, CD-ROM, video and over the Internet. So far, 18,000 employees have access to ELVIS.

“Like many corporations, we wanted every employee to take control of his/her development,” Quesada says. “We needed globally accessible learning solutions available in a structured way, with common processes and implementations of new technology.”

Technology has evolved over the last 20 years, and “now you can do it with greater speed and much less cost,” she said. To maximize the technology, Lilly needed to develop deeper training and development expertise, to identify common processes and to create some kind of global curriculum.

“In traditional classroom settings, you often think in one-hour chunks of learning. In the classroom, it’s linear. With technology, there may be a two- or three-minute learning exchange. When you use technology, there’s more individual learning and you have to think of multiple paths,” according to Quesada. “You have to structure things differently. It usually requires more advanced training specialists.”

As the result of the years of decentralization, a needs assessment found many redundant course offerings and projects. “There was a lot of overlap. Everybody was doing a separate supervisory workshop, for example.”

Everybody also was trying to implement separate computer training courses, according to Kelli Johnson, a senior training associate.

“We recognized that we needed a global solution for our Windows 95 rollout, and we had to get it out rapidly. We decided to use the intranet. In four months, we planned and implemented the system.”

A survey told Lilly’s trainers that eight out of 10 internal customers would prefer a classroom setting, if offered the choice. “Only 3% of training was using technology, so we knew we had a tough audience,” Johnson said.

To cope with that audience, the project team attended a “change mapping”‘ workshop developed by an external vendor. The team analyzed barriers and then set to work getting people to accept the change through various stages of information, demonstration and training, Johnson said.

“We didn’t do a formal survey per se, but we tested our change maps among ourselves and with the steering team. We looked at our audiences — the end user PC types and the IT professionals had different concerns, so there were different areas we had to address.”

Through the change mapping, “we identified who were going to be the earlier adopters, who were going to be the laggards,” Johnson said. “You use the early adapters to help communicate your method. Based upon that information, we decided who we should include in a pilot and in the initial kickoff.”

The team brought in a second external consultant to help convince everyone to buy in. For the employees who were most resistant to change, the team identified their fears and developed a communication plan to offset them.

“We learned how to ensure that [the new system] would be received the way we wanted it. The reaction was phenomenal. The first day, we had more than 1,000 people access the Web site. In the first 30 days, 6,000 people accessed it,” she said.

For now, courses are being offered in two categories — personal computing and IT professional training. As needs are identified, Lilly has a set of processes to determine which topics to add.

Because they didn’t know what the reaction would be, and because not everyone can access the network, Lilly also created multimedia labs and a library system. Copies of training materials are available on diskette, CD-ROM and video and can be shared with family members.

“We knew we needed to present multiple options,” Johnson said. “But people by far enjoy using the network, then they make use of the library. The least used is the multimedia lab.”

Multilingual learning

When it was launched in January 1997, the ELVIS Web site was only in English. “The feedback from five pilots in other countries was ‘We like the concept, but if you’re expecting all employees to use this, you need to offer it in their native language,'” Johnson recalls. “We had to do a lot of soul-searching, asking ourselves ‘Are we going to accommodate this?'”

The answer came last August when Lilly began offering a new multilingual home page. On the first page, the individual selects from English, German, Spanish, French and Portuguese, and all subsequent pages are in that language. Portuguese was one of the languages chosen because trainers in Brazil were creating a learning center of their own with a lab and library.

So far, Lilly is limited to what vendors have available in the various languages.

“We don’t have a lot of courses in the different languages,” according to Johnson, and “we don’t have the business need to say we should offer more languages right now.”

“The beauty of the Virtual Learning Centre is that it puts it in the hands of the learner,” said Reynold Kamphuis, training’s manager of operations, infrastructure and delivery support. “What has impressed me is the hall chatter. Whenever we refer to training in any way, VLC is always mentioned. People say they are glad to have the Virtual Learning Centre because they can learn at their own pace.

“The most positive thing for me as a 29-year employee is to see the change of attitude. People take responsibility; they’re eagerly going for things they don’t know.”

The positive aspect is the savings Lilly has achieved through the Virtual Learning Centre. In 1997, the company estimates that it saved more than $900,000 because operating costs were substantially reduced by the reusable delivery system. The funds were redirected to other areas, including research and development, the lifeblood of Lilly’s business.

The future

As 1998 begins, Lilly’s Global Training and Development is strengthening the business by developing a 360-degree feedback program and “moving more into the employee development role through a performance management system,” according to Quesada. “That’s the way to get individuals to align their objectives with the business strategy. That’s what training is always trying to do.”

All executive development came under the training department’s wing Jan. 1. Before, Global Training and Development was responsible for everyone except the top 200 senior managers.

“We’re working on a formal development review process for all executives. Each will have a customized development plan that is linked with the succession planning process,” Quesada says.

The 360-degree feedback is a development tool, not an evaluation tool, she stresses. “It will be used to profile an individual’s strength and development area, not to determine compensation,” she says. The individual manager, the manager’s boss, direct reports and internal customers all consider 10 performance dimensions and make behavior-specific recommendations.

The 360-degree feedback is for all managers “who have people responsibilities, who are building a team or sharing a vision. Our goal is that by the end of the year everyone in those positions would have completed 360-degree feedback within the last two years.”

The department also is setting up a formal mentoring system for senior executives and training “mentorees” how to take advantage of the system.

Today, Lilly has more than 200 training professionals, in both centralized and decentralized roles, Quesada says. “We try to maximize the best of both. The centralized role is the governance network. I have a team that reports to me on a solid line, but everybody reports on the dotted line.” The others report directly to the human resource department or to geographic or functional heads.

This new system frees trainers to do more than just deliver courses, according to Quesada. And it’s given training a radically different profile within the organization.

“Now, rather than just asking how often a course is offered, the questions about training at the business table have been elevated to ‘How do you think this will help Lilly?'”