Achievements
-
33,000 video views added in a year
-
Over 200 qualified users
-
Efficient and widespread knowledge sharing
Overview
Ingersoll Rand is a diversified industrial company that advances quality of life by creating comfortable, sustainable, and efficient environments. Its family of brands, including Club Car®, Ingersoll Rand®, Thermo King®, and Trane®, enhance the quality and comfort of air in homes and buildings; transport and protect food and perishables; and increase industrial productivity and efficiency.
The company has hundreds of locations worldwide and serves customers in highly competitive industries and product and service categories. Consequently, the company consistently looks for new learning solutions across the breadth of the organization. Today, Ingersoll Rand is leveraging a new kind of video solution—one that enables the company to build employee skills and capabilities.
The company’s more than 46,000 employees work around the globe in hundreds of facilities, including offices, assembly plants, technology centers, warehouses, and distribution and repair centers.
As a global company with competitive offerings across its entire product spectrum, Ingersoll Rand competes against not only highly regarded global brands but also established regional and local suppliers. A dispersed and multilingual workforce, a multitude of work environments, and the diversified manufacturing of different product lines present training opportunities for the company.
To meet the needs of the employees, the company established a strategy of “creating a winning culture” as a core component of how it delivers premier performance. Ingersoll Rand defines a winning culture as one in which “the best people aspire to work, a place where employees feel connected with the company’s vision and empowered to do the right thing.”
To build upon a strong, winning culture, Ingersoll Rand utilizes Panopto, an enterprise video platform. The platform serves as an important tool used in learning and development to rapidly share knowledge and information across the organization.
Ingersoll Rand Employs the Power of Video
Ingersoll Rand selected video as a tool for learning, development, training, and engaging employees in a winning culture across the globe. With Panopto, Ingersoll Rand was able to offer self-produced, internal video creation as an option to complement the video work done by external video production companies.
For decades, the company had used video to record high-profile corporate events and training activities. These productions often involved expensive recording equipment, producers, editors, and outside vendors. The high costs and specialized expertise required made it difficult to utilize video at scale across an organization as large as Ingersoll Rand. Further complicating matters, budget and quality could extend the production time for recorded events and training classes by weeks or months, making video a less-than-ideal support tool for rapid communication and knowledge sharing.
However, as anyone who has watched viral videos online can attest, video’s power as a medium for spreading ideas is significant. The learning teams at Ingersoll Rand wanted to find a better way to leverage this power internally.
Ingersoll Rand’s leadership development team sought a video solution that could be used by professionals and nonexperts alike—one that would make video easy to capture, edit, and share; simplify the legal review process for videos; and accelerate the company’s ability to deliver key messages across the organization via online training. On the production side, the company would need to be able to insert presentation slides, additional videos, or other information into video recordings as well as to delete extraneous material from recorded events. Team members would need to be able to record video on any device (from personal smartphones to professional video cameras), automatically synchronize video feeds with\ presentation slides and live screen recordings, and create transcripts. The solution would also need to enable learning teams to download existing recordings for use in regional town hall or training settings all around the globe.
Ingersoll Rand also wanted to improve the viewers’ experience with intelligent and efficient navigation of the content inside long videos. The company sought a solution that would include both in-video navigation options such as a table of contents and slide thumbnails as well as a comprehensive video content search. With the right support for video search, viewers would be able to locate keywords or phrases spoken by presenters or shown on-screen and then instantly jump to specific, relevant moments in the video just as they could within a text-based document.
After researching the enterprise video market, Ingersoll Rand ultimately decided that the Panopto enterprise video platform best met the set of needs the company had identified. In 2015, Ingersoll Rand engaged with Panopto, choosing to deploy it in the cloud to streamline implementation and ensure maximum stability and reliability. The company then made plans to use that year’s internal annual leadership conference as a pilot test for Panopto.
The pilot test proved to be a success. During the company’s leadership conference, the company used Panopto to record the event. Within three days, company leaders were able to use the postevent video to continue cascading those messages across the organization.
A prominent search field in the video allowed users to locate terms contained within transcripts or speaker notes and provided active links to content.
Shortly thereafter, the learning technology team began experimenting with repackaging other video recordings into more novel communication products. For example, Meeting in a Box provides employees with the main takeaways from a meeting, which they can then use to direct their learning.
Promoting Operational Success
HR business partners began to inquire about using the video solution to help plant managers improve efficiency and share best practices. At Ingersoll Rand, plant managers are always seeking new ways to improve their lean manufacturing efficiency and operational excellence practices on the factory floor. Every new efficiency leads to cost-savings that directly impact the company’s bottom line.
Prior to using Panopto, if a team member wanted to document a process or an opportunity in a video, they would have needed to bring in equipment and a videographer.
Today, achieving operational excellence is easy. Team members participating in the Panopto program can simply record the process with any smartphone. Learning managers on the ground can quickly edit the video to add supplemental information such as a screen recording or presentation slides, and share the video almost instantly. Managers and other stakeholders can now watch a video from their desk, while traveling, or at home.
Ingersoll Rand’s talent and organizational capability team also uses the new video platform to improve delivery of learning content including how the team trains its own trainers.
Ingersoll Rand offers sales excellence training led by in-house trainers and taught at locations around the world. Originally, the train-the-trainer model for the program was simply to have new trainers physically attend an upcoming session.
Today those sessions are recorded with Panopto, which enables new trainers to go back at any time and watch as many previous sessions as they need to feel confident leading the session. They can even use the search function, which allows them to move quickly throughout the recorded training sessions to areas that answer specific questions they have while skipping the sections they are already familiar with.
Analyzing Success
Another advantage the video platform has provided the learning technology team is the ability to analyze usage data in order to fine-tune future learning materials. Panopto’s reporting features go far beyond cataloging unique visitors. For example, the analytics suite identifies specific parts of videos that are most frequently viewed and bookmarked. With this knowledge, the learning technology team can edit and improve existing training content to better engage viewers as well as tailor future training toward areas they identify to be of special interest.
The learning technology team also uses data analytics embedded within the platform to measure how quickly new messages are viewed. One video message was slow to build, with just a dozen views initially. Within a week’s time, that number spiked to more than 400 views, with more than 12,000 video-minutes delivered.
Business Impact
When Ingersoll Rand piloted its new video platform, it sought to find a complement to professionally produced videos for internal use. What it realized it had found was a flexible tool that could also help the company rapidly share its culture, strategy, and goals for the coming year beyond what a live event could reach. Executives felt that the impact from the video pilot was tangible, and the company’s HR team began expanding the use of its video platform.
Today, video viewership is rapidly increasing at Ingersoll Rand, and that has led to several benefits, including:
- Improved operational processes and procedures
- Efficient and widespread knowledge sharing
- Rapid and cost-effective development of corporate trainers
- Promotion of a shared culture
While the number of users for Ingersoll Rand’s video platform has expanded from just a few in 2015 to more than 200 in 2018, the company plans to grow its user base exponentially in 2019. At press time, most of the users are part of the wider HR organization, including corporate communications, learning and development, and HR business partners. However, as the tool is used more extensively throughout business units, demand for it continues to increase.
Looking to the future, one challenge for the learning technology team will be supporting a wider user base. So far, the key to the team’s success has been offering hands-on support and training. Rolling out the video platform more broadly means this team will need to scale its own training through both a proven train-the-trainer methodology and searchable on-demand video training materials.
Global organizations like Ingersoll Rand need the ability to spread information as fast as possible. And with operations that span time zones, continents, business units, and regional identities, they face even tougher challenges when it comes to spreading culture and knowledge.
Video is an obvious solution, but not all videos require production by teams of specialized experts. Leveraging technology that simplifies video content creation, production, and distribution can be a cost-effective and fast way to share information in a distributed organization.
To truly leverage the power of video and its ability to spread knowledge, companies must make video content accessible to their team members on any device, at any location, at any time of day. Companies can achieve maximum effectiveness by creating videos that are searchable and linked to other key information, including presentation slides. Implementing these capabilities can help organizations effectively utilize video as a true learning resource.
Geetika Dang, Senior Research Analyst
Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Julie Hiipakka, Vice President, Learning Research Leader
Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP