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Case On Learning Development

Mars & Meiji is a 150-year-old global confectionery business that has prioritized streamlining and cost reduction. While traditionally focused on developing employees, learning and development is now assessing return on investment and connecting training to strategic needs. Senior management wants to create a culture of continuous improvement and empower workers to implement small changes. Training has typically been gap-led and identified for, not by, workers. Large training events are seen as inefficient and outdated, but the company has not evaluated training impact. Apprenticeship and graduate programs are under review for value provided versus employee turnover.

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50 views2 pages

Case On Learning Development

Mars & Meiji is a 150-year-old global confectionery business that has prioritized streamlining and cost reduction. While traditionally focused on developing employees, learning and development is now assessing return on investment and connecting training to strategic needs. Senior management wants to create a culture of continuous improvement and empower workers to implement small changes. Training has typically been gap-led and identified for, not by, workers. Large training events are seen as inefficient and outdated, but the company has not evaluated training impact. Apprenticeship and graduate programs are under review for value provided versus employee turnover.

Uploaded by

mak
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CASE STUDY

LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT AT MARS & MEIJI

Suppose Mars & Meiji is one of the world's largest confectionery businesses with significant
market share in many of the world's biggest confectionery markets, including many emerging
markets. It has a long and proud tradition, stretching back more than 150 years, including a long
history of developing its employees, which has remained part of its ethos during its progress to
becoming a global company.

Despite very positive sales figures over the last 12 months, Mars & Meiji has prioritized
streamlining the business to make it more competitive and has placed a strong emphasis on
reducing cost over the next 18 months. Despite being keen to preserve its longstanding reputation
as a firm that is committed to developing all its employees, in respect of learning and development,
this ‘streamlining’ activity has focused on:

 ensuring a clear return on investment in training activities


 changing the way that learning programs are delivered and being more creative in
developing approaches to learning
 connecting training activities to the strategic needs of the firm.

The most important driver of the assessment of its training provision at Mars & Meiji is change.
Whilst performing well in the marketplace, senior management continue to express discontent with
levels of productivity and employee performance. Moreover, senior management has determined
that the company needs to become more flexible and adaptable to respond to change in its market
context, for example by an ability to adapt organizational structures to meet new business needs
or through the introduction of technological innovation. However, as a traditionally minded
employer, and with low levels of employee turnover at shop-floor level, Mars & Meiji appears to
have instilled in its workers a mindset of stability and steady progress, which is at odds with
competition in a rapidly changing global economy. Therefore, Mars & Meiji wants to move
towards a system of continuous improvement by creating a culture whereby workers are
empowered to implement small incremental changes, rather than have substantial change imposed
on them from time to time.

Training Need Assessment


Traditionally, training needs assessment at Mars & Meiji has been ‘gap-led’. In other words,
training tends to be focused where Mars & Meiji identifies a gap in capability – for example, where
the introduction of new technology requires worker skill to be updated, company policy is changed
or a key worker leaves the firm, requiring training to be provided to their replacement. Typically,
this gap-led identification of need is conducted at a local level, with little reference made to the
wider national or international workforce.

Whilst workers can put themselves forward for training courses, including those provided by local
education providers, there is no formal channel for doing this and access to such training often
comes down to personal relationships and the constraints imposed by departmental budgets. The
culture at Mars & Meiji is very much one in which training needs are typically
identified for workers rather than by workers.
Delivery of Training
Currently, the company runs a number of large training events each year designed to update
manufacturing staff on everything from health and safety changes, business strategy and company
performance to the adoption of new production technology. This is sometimes coupled with skills
training for these workers as and when appropriate. This has traditionally been done at the
specialist training center at their largest production facility, which doubles as the company’s
headquarters. This practice partly stems from a time when the company only operated two
production facilities in the country. It now operates across six geographically dispersed locations.
Workers tend to view these training events as a bit of a waste of time, particularly when they are
delivered by consultants with little real understanding of working processes at Mars & Meiji It is
not unknown for workers to claim that the training they receive is outdated and tells them nothing
that they don’t already know.

The Head of Learning and Development, responding to a call to cut costs from the CHRO, is now
of the opinion, however, that such long training programs, often of up to three or four days, are no
longer the most cost-effective and efficient means by which to develop the staff. Such training has
the dual problem of requiring regular investment and repeat sessions to cover workers on different
shifts or at different plants, as well as leading to undesirable downtime of certain aspects of
production. In particular, the Head of L&D is keen to reduce a reliance on external training
providers to design and deliver interventions to different workforce groups, from senior
management to shop floor workers.

Moreover, the company has historically not evaluated the impact of these events. In the new era
of cost-cutting and added value, however, the company is keen to ensure that the impact of all
training interventions, however big or small, is measured.

Employee Development Programs


A major investment in L&D at Mars & Meiji is in its manufacturing apprenticeship scheme and
graduate development program, both of which are widely viewed as models of good practice in
the industry and beyond. These programs are, however, under significant scrutiny by senior
management to better understand the extent to which this investment provides value to the firm.
One particular area under review is the turnover of employees who complete these programs and
then leave to work at other firms.

Ray Barbie, the head of learning and development at Mars & Meiji recently attended a seminar at
a local university on ‘the changing nature of workplace HRD’. He was slightly alarmed to find out
that much of the company’s practice was seen as outdated. In particular, he was interested in
examining how some more contemporary approaches and techniques in HRD could help the
company both reduce costs and better performance through continuous improvement.

In view of the above, answer the following questions:


1. What changes would you recommend that Mars & Meiji makes to their current learning
and development provision in order to reduce costs and improve performance?
2. Discuss how e-learning, competency frameworks and improved knowledge-sharing at
Mars & Meiji might help to cut-costs and make the HRD activity at Mars & Meiji more
strategic.
3. How might the firm seek to ensure a return on investment for its learning and development
activity?

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