Quintiles Case Study: L&D Drives Business Success

Topics: 2011 GLC, Strategy Integration, Performance Consulting

Contents

Quintiles is a fully integrated biopharmaceutical services company offering clinical, commercial, consulting and capital solutions worldwide. The company has a network of more than 23,000 engaged professionals in 60 countries. In 2005, after a period of rapid growth, the company was having trouble growing revenues, and realized that one of the reasons was high turnover, particularly among new hires. The company was devoting a lot of time and money to hiring people to replace the people that were leaving, and it was keeping it from moving forward. 

The Global Learning and Development group at Quintiles conducted an employee engagement survey which revealed a gap between new hires' expectations about their ability to learn and grow at the company and what they found when they got there. They also felt that their managers did not have the time to devote to them. 

There would be no quick fix for these issues, but the L&D team looked at some of the underlying reasons for the issues they uncovered. They realized that their managers were each responsible for 20 or so direct reports, and, in addition, they were expected to devote a good percentage of their time to billable work, leaving them even less time to develop employees. L&D changed its emphasis, and added management training to the technical training that was the its primary focus. In addition, managers' workloads were dramatically adjusted to enable them to make sure that each employee had the right combination of on-the-job learning, peer learning and classroom training to succeed. A new performance management process, and training in how to use it, also improved manager's skills. 

Over the course of five years, in a stunning example of how the learning profit chain works, these changes led to a quadrupling of the company's revenue, an increase in retention to 90%, greater employee engagement at all levels, and in a strong position to incorporate further changes to its business model as needed.

Members of CorpU can watch the presentation and read more detail about these award-winning efforts.