Training landscape:

As a market leader in financial and asset management services, our client operates a global in-house center (GIC) in India, with offices in Bengaluru and Chennai. These function as a microcosm of all businesses in the U.S. market, providing strong support to the global business as well as the customers. Hence, it comprises of large teams continually servicing internal and external clients located in several geographies. They were challenged with ensuring that their technically adept workforce is just at adept at understanding customer mindsets, expectations and being able to communicate in a manner that boosts incident resolution and enhances service efficiency and continuity.

Shradha HRD solution/training intervention:

In keeping with the clients vision of “CustomerObsession”, this learning intervention on decoding the customer mindset was designed to enhance both verbal and written communication skills along with a keen understanding of the customer’s expectations. This engaging and experiential workshop aimed to equip professionals with tools and insights to be establish meaningful connections with customers, structure written communication for impact, articulate confidently with key stakeholders and in turn achieve higher levels of personal and customer satisfaction.

Training Outcomes:

As an outcome of this training intervention, participants were equipped with insights and developed skills to take ownership, enhance Emotional Intelligence to comprehend stated and unstated customer needs and structure customer centric verbal and written responses to meet these expectations. This training program was extremely well received and has since been scaled to meet similar training needs of the various business units of the organization.

Training Landscape:

Our client being one of the top 4 Car manufacturers in India, operates its manufacturing plants in Bidadi Karnataka with an employee count over 6000 people. Our client industries is known world wide for being a learning organization through relentless reflection and continuous improvement. They develop exceptional people and teams who understand , follow and live the company’s philosophy. They also have a culture of such leaders moving into a mentoring and training roles and teaching employees, new recruits and trainees. Hence, it is critical for our clientto have a learning journey to enhance the facilitation skills of such trainers who have organically grown into their roles.

Shradha HRD Solution/Methodology:

With its keen understanding of Androgogy ( Adult learning) and its research in neuroscience and human behaviour, Shradha HRD designed, developed and delivered a training intervention to help learning facilitators with our client, enrich their overall training effectiveness. The highly interactive program equipped trainers with skills and tools to make their training sessions brain friendly, engaging and impactful.

Training Outcomes:

This training intervention equipped trainers with a keen understanding of the challenges of Androgogy (adult learning). With exposure to various tools and techniques based on brain science and Human psychology, participants learnt facilitation and training methodologies that will help them efficiently meet the different needs, expectations and challenges of adult learning.

Participant feedback post the training was that they felt far more confident of being able to engage their trainees, even when they were training on technical and often “dry” topics that have little room for engagement.

We conducted a large intervention for young executives at one of the top news media companies of the country. This was a very exciting intervention for us. We had an audience that included several young news anchors, managers that look after a program series on television, program editors etc.

The overarching program objective was to help participants:

• Reflect on the ever dynamic nature of our world & the exciting opportunities that are constantly being generated
• Define a clear vision on what success looks like for them
• Set clear career goals in line with their personal competencies and plan effectively to reach their goals

This program enabled participants to leverage the current information about the organization and future trends to create more realistic career development goals. The feedback from participants was that the program helped them achieve a greater sense of responsibility for managing their careers and take steps in an organized way to achieve their professional aspirations.

Our client, a global management consulting organization aims to be gender neutral by 2020. To achieve this objective, they engaged with Shradha HRD to design and deliver a series of initiatives to empower women executives and managers within the organization. This program series aimed to enable participants to break mental conditioning, to harness the power of the mind and to effectively develop interpersonal skills that they need to “Move Up”.

Some client testimonials – quoted verbatim

•  “This program helped me learn some really useful tips on striking work-life balance and take charge of my life”
• “After attending this training I am really inspired to challenge myself and not take people’s criticism to heart”

Shradha HRD trained the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) of a well-known Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management company this month. These SMEs conduct induction sessions for new joiners and are responsible for familiarizing them with the company’s policies and procedures around a number of areas like Finance, Compliance, HR, etc. The problem statement was how to make their sessions more engaging within the limited time of 30-40 minutes.

Training focus areas:

• Understand the scope of content that could go into each presentation
• Structure content for greater retention
• Build audience engagement by donning a trainer’s persona
• Making a professional power point presentation

By incorporating concepts like the principles of adult learning and storytelling, this program helped participants remarkably improve their overall presentation skills. During final presentations, there was a marked difference in the ability to structure subject matter, engage participants and increase the overall engagement levels in the training room.

The objective of the program was to help participants integrate their internal confidence to power-up their external behaviors.

In order to do this, the program was designed to help participants fine tune their personal operating style and exude the key executive presence skills of listening mindfully, speaking clearly, responding thoughtfully and asking great questions. This in turn, would help them successfully engage with people across all levels, both inside and outside of the organization.

The main focus areas of the program were:

• how to establish credibility in the long term
• business etiquette and developing one’s own style
• creating a personal brand that distinguishes oneself from others

This global management consulting firm engaged with Shradha HRD to conduct a program for their senior directors, who had come together for their bi-annual strategy meet. The brief for this program was learning and reflection on the planning process, fun and team bonding. The program methodology was completely experiential with learnings drawn from the activity debrief.

Through highly kinesthetic activities, this experiential training program helped participants to break mental barriers in order to think out of the box, develop a solutions mindset and improve multi-tasking.

Verbatim testimonial – “The training met all our expectations and beyond”.

Shradha Hrd created and conducted an extensive staggered intervention for associates at a large IT services company. Although technically competent, these associates lacked the “finesse” required to confidently work in a corporate environment.

The program imparted the essential corporate skills to them so that they graduated as “well rounded” executives who could communicate with confidence.

The key elements of the program were:

• English language enhancement
• Professional verbal communication: structuring a message, English language enhancement
• Professional non-verbal communication
• Corporate etiquette
• Cultural sensitization

The classroom feedback score for this intervention was above 96%.

Shradha HRD worked with a complete line of business at a large financial services technology and outsourcing services organization across their Bangalore and Chennai offices, on this intervention for enhancing Customer Centricity. We trained close to 50 participants through this intervention.

The objectives of this program were to:

• Improve customer centricity and customer connect through emails and phone
• improve the overall structure and format of writing to clients
• reduce grammatical errors and use of ‘Indianisms” – words/phrases that may be unfamiliar to non- Indian nationalities
• recognize cultural differences that lead to differences in communication styles

By the end of the intervention we observed a clear level 3 needle movement around the following areas:

• Taking ownership and going the extra mile to understand and comprehend the complete background and the unstated background of customer inquiry.
• Framing responses using a structured approach e.g. Numbers, tables, paragraphs, bullet points, etc. Confidential Shradha HRD Private Limited
• Better understanding and adaptation to an American style of writing.
• Dealing with difficult customer situations effectively: empathetic yet assertive approach.

For one of the verticals of a top IT education company, Shradha HRD conducted a training intervention for young managers. This program aimed at empowering new managers with the competencies required in their new roles.

Program Focus Areas:

• Personal effectiveness at the workplace
• Sensitization to group dynamics and working with emotional intelligence
• Feedback for growth
• How to structure communication effectively and handle difficult conversations

By the end of the training the participants felt that they gained very useful insights into
transitioning from a peer relationship to a leader relationship with their team members
that would help them succeed in their new role.

This was the year of Media for Shradha HRD. We conducted several interesting programs for different Media companies across India.

This particular program was rolled out across the country for individual contributors and managers from across functions and levels. This program provided them a refresher on e-mail writing, keeping the organizational perspective in mind. The broad topics covered during the program were:

• structuring clear and concise emails
• contextualize writing based on the readers and their needs
• communicating effectively in difficult situations and writing assertively

Some of the documented feedback for the program was:

“Has helped me develop skills on writing more courteous and concise e-mails”

“I am more confident of delivering bad news through e-mails”

“I loved the inverted pyramid model for writing e-mails

A series of programs for the entire service team was conceived, designed and executed by Shradha HRD. This exciting program was game based and completely experiential.

The key learnings drawn out from the program were:

• Understand the importance of planning and executing, as opposed to execution and planning
• Recognize the role Importance of each team member in achieving excellence in execution

We trained over 100 participants from across the country through this intervention. Every activity in the program was followed by a debriefing session through which participants drew out their learnings. Participants received feedback from the trainer and fellow team members, which helped them reflect on their working and execution style. This methodology helped them monitor the effectiveness of their plan, anticipate outcomes and develop contingency plans.

A Pan-India intervention covering over 90 senior directors and heads of businesses, was designed and delivered for a renowned IT organization. The program was a part of an organizational initiative to empower leaders to mentor their high-potential direct reports through structured career conversations. The Overreaching Objective was to establish a meaningful connect during such conversations instead of superficial interactions that are often a mere formality. This experiential program was contextualized to address some of the real life business challenges leaders face while conducting career conversations.

The feedback from the program was extremely positive and indicated that this training increased the participants’ understanding of the aims and objectives of career conversations and how to conduct them.

The training empowered them to carry out such conversations effectively by helping them prepare a toolkit for conducting career conversations.

We conducted a program on creativity and innovation where we trained their executives up to the middle management level on strategies to unlock their fullest creative potential & make creativity a way of life.

In order to overcome barriers to creativity, this program was designed to give practical insights on how to “think creatively” and work with a solutions mindset. The participants were trained on fundamentally understanding the creative process and structure it efficiently, so that they can be more spontaneous and come up with innovative solutions.

We recently completed a training intervention on Consultative Selling for a large multinational electronics conglomerate. The program was designed for managers who coach and train front line sales floor associates to drive sales at the company’s dealerships and company owned retail outlets across India. The program objective was to personalizing the customer experience through consultative selling. This was in line with the company’s objective for the year to delight the customer and enhance brand visibility through consultative selling.

This intervention had 3 main steps:

• Conducting mystery audits across the company’s self-owned and multi-brand outlets. The results gathered from the experience and the discussions with the relevant stakeholders were used to contextualize the program.
• Conducting the classroom roll-out. The key take away’s for the program included exploring individual areas of strength and areas of opportunities through customized role plays and business simulations. Creation of personalized action plans for individual participants.
• Post program follow up. This included group coaching to track implementation of program learnings & find solutions for areas where participants had challenges in closing out action plan deliverables.

Post the program, the feedback from participants was extremely positive and encouraging, both for our client and for us as a team. Participants felt confident about applying consultative selling skills to their selling processes & coaching their team members on how to use this approach in different business situations.

This month we conducted a national level assessment for an automobile giant. A total of 144 contestants selected through regional contest from 18 regions across India. These participants were judged throughthe All India Selling skills contest. Our client was organizing the contest after a gap of almost five years. They wanted an innovative and unconventional assessment methodology for the contest, something that would help them create a new benchmark in their industry.

We devised fun and gamified versions for the assessments in the form of roleplays, audio-visuals, competition check, rapid fire, judges round, etc. The idea was to assess the contestants on the following sales qualities:

• Customer obsession
• Brand projection
• Transactional selling vs. experiential selling
• Objection handling
• Thinking out-of-the-box

There were separate evaluation parameters for each round and we had a mammoth task of making softer aspects of sales quantifiable to eliminate any subjectivity in assessment.

On the whole, the event was extremely engaging, well received and team Shradha HRD had a new feather of customer delight in its cap.

This quarter, we successfully completed two separate 1-on-1 coaching interventions for senior management level coachees.

The first coachee, belonged to a large consulting organization in the Finance domain. He had challenges around presenting to senior stakeholders, especially from other geographies. The challenges were largely aroundstructure of the presentation and inability to present the value proposition clearly & concisely, poor body language, monotonous voice quality. By the end of the coaching interventionthere was atremendous improvement overall presentation skills.Some of the quantifiable upgrades in performance were enhanced ability to structure presentations effectively and make them concise, elimination of monotony in speech, improved audibility and energy levels&body language in sync with the content of the presentations. This is feedback we received from the program sponsor who was the head of the business.

The second coaching intervention was for a prominent multinational bank. This intervention required us to help the coachee overcome challenges around English language including pronunciation, intonation and avoiding indianisms. Out of the 8 sound switches and corruptions observed in the pre-coaching assessment, we were able to get 2 completely eliminated and a remarkable reduction in the remaining 6. The coachee also received a lot of appreciation and positive feedback from his reporting managers in India and the UK

We conducted a series of Customer Centricity interventions across the country this year. Ouraudiencewas spread across organizations from varied sectors:  financial services technology, learning management outsourcing, business process outsourcing, engineering and project management consultancies. These interventions required us to design programs for both client-facing and back office employees. The audience profile ranged from entry-level team members to mid-level managers.

By the end of these interventions, the level 3 needle movement was observed around the following competencies:

• Taking ownership end to end
• Ability to take escalated calls in a completely satisfactory manner
• Communicate view point and influence the customer
• Build trust, rapport and come across as confident and credible
• Handling irate customers more effectively and de-escalate difficult customer situations better
• Building rapport in a virtual team environment with clients and key stakeholders

The advent of the New Year saw us designing and launching a 3-day induction program for a multinational recruitment company. This renowned company was launching its operations in India for the first time. They needed a robust induction program to acclimatize their employees with the culture of the company and its client base.

This was an end-to-end solution we designedfor our client. It included the training need analysis, developing the trainer’s kit, launching classroom sessions, conducting a Train the trainer program for the internal training team, reviewing sessions and final handover. Our team successfully reached each of these milestones. The results were so spectacular that this program which was originally meant for the new hires was extended to the experienced employees as well.

By the end of the three months of the project we hadestablished a strong induction program and had a hugely satisfied client.

Shradha HRD designed and conducted a week long learning event an Auto major this month. The dual objectives of the event were to create a buzz around company core values&build visibility for Learning & Development within the company.  The event was meant for the entire population of the company working out of four of their plant locations. It was important that the event was stimulating, engaging & fulfilled the learning objectives. so that everyone starting from the workmen to the top management could participate with equal enthusiasm.

The event as very well received across all levels. It ran very successfully across all plant locations. There was a lot of laughter and positive energy surrounding the event. We had over 2500 participant that participated enthusiastically in the event. At the same time, they went back with a reinforcement of company core values.