Objective

The strength and success of our Group has been achieved by embracing our international diversity, yet collaboration across continents is not always a smooth operation. AB Sugar’s award-winning social collaboration approach firstly connects our businesses and the key people within them, and secondly, facilitates collective learning.

What we did

Instead of undertaking formal learning programmes to educate and improve our employees’ capability, we recognised that they could learn in an informal but highly effective way from other colleagues in the Group, who would be closer to their learning needs than any external trainer.

This led us to establish ‘Communities of Practice’ to link our employees together from across our Group who operate in similar operational functions and roles to share their problems, solutions and successes.  This involved setting up a social learning platform, ‘AB Sugar Community’ and developing activity plans that build capability and professional networks, delivered through webinars and face to face sessions.  A key factor in their success comes from the network of leaders, facilitators and local ‘community’ champions who provide energy, passion and process governance. Within the platform all information and resources are searchable, making it an invaluable tool to save time by finding solutions or people with the right expertise and knowledge quickly. This comes to the forefront when problems arise and the platform pulls together over 21,000+ years of industry experience to identify credible solutions that save both time and money.

In addition to this social platform, a range of complementary tools have been integrated across the business including Skype for Business, video conferencing and WebEx. Committed to promoting collaborative learning in all its guises, we also bolstered these tools with offline activities including an internal awards programme, sharing and mirroring the successful projects across the Group.

Taking a unique approach to understanding our businesses, organisational network analysis has provided further insight into our learning networks. Previously people may not have known or connected with those doing similar jobs elsewhere in the Group; however through undertaking the analysis this has led to connecting them together via new Communities of Practice and extending the reach of others.

Results

The scale of this project encompasses embedding a new way of working in six businesses across 10 countries and in multiple languages. This required monumental change from both a technical and cultural perspective. Yet the success has come from developing an integrated approach that has improved the connectivity within the Group and continues to develop key capabilities. 

In measuring the value of our communities, success is identified using both qualitative and quantitative data. This knowledge enables the project team to analyse the results and plan ongoing improvements.

The success of the initiative has been recognised by numerous industry awards including most recently the Brandon Hall Group Excellence in Learning Awards, where AB Sugar was awarded Silver in the ‘Best Use of Social/Collaborative Learning’ category.