mci group drives self-directed learning and boosts course completion by 30%

Challenge

Learning is a key part of mci group’s long-term strategy to address challenges and must-win battles. The marketing engagement agency identified key areas where learning needed to improve. But with an LMS that hadn’t changed since 2015, they needed a solution that would not only empower their 31 local markets to own their own training initiatives—but leverage generative AI to put employees in the driver’s seat of their own learning.

Outcome

In just two short months with Sana, mci group has significantly increased engagement levels, and made the Sana platform a key resource for scaling its knowledge-sharing efforts across its markets. The company is well on its way to reaching its biggest goal—decentralizing learning, and empowering each market to create its own learning agenda with the help of a powerful and interactive AI tool.

Embracing a strategic learning vision

The mci institute oversees the learning strategy for mci group and its 60+ offices across more than 30 countries. Recognizing the critical role that our employees' skills and knowledge play in our success as a service-based agency, we've made a strategic commitment to embed learning into the core of our organization. Our ultimate objective is not only to develop our talents, but also be the best in innovating our services, and creating value for our clients. This means we need to develop programmes and initiatives that help us meet our business objectives, and have the right technology to make it possible.

Our legacy Learning Management System (LMS)—in place since 2015—was outdated. It presented several challenges to improving our L&D efforts, and achieving our goal of putting employees in the driver’s seat of their own learning.

First, the system was cumbersome to use, which discouraged self-directed learning and led to low engagement. We discovered that our talents were primarily accessing the platform for mandatory compliance training, with little use beyond that. Additionally, the poor authoring tool forced us to rely on external solutions, making course creation and updates time-consuming. This diverted our group L&D team’s focus from more impactful tasks.

Second, our organization’s structure—with many brands and locations, supported by a small global L&D team of just four—posed a unique decentralization challenge that we believed the right technology could address. Moreover, empowering managers to promote their team’s learning journey was also a priority.

These challenges, among others, prompted us to explore alternative LMS solutions that could better meet our needs. This search ultimately led us to Sana.

Empowering local teams to develop their own learning material

The ease of using Sana’s platform has put us on the path to realizing one of our biggest goals—decentralizing learning. In addition to the global L&D opportunities, our aim was that each office, team or brand could address the specific development needs they had by developing their own content when needed.

This is now a reality for all of our offices. It takes as little as five minutes to create a course in Sana, compared to the 20 minutes it took before. Our Group L&D Team has capitalized on this to consistently produce high-quality courses for our talents.

Additionally, local HR teams and managers have begun creating their own learning materials, taking advantage of the simplicity of the authoring tool. They primarily use Sana’s generative AI to develop new training programs from existing PDFs. This feature transforms our existing materials into interactive courses in just a few minutes. People are amazed by this capability, and it’s been incredibly helpful. Simply upload the PDF, and 90% of the work is already done.

Teams are now creating a variety of content, including GDPR tutorials, leadership and team-management programs, DEI strategies for a more inclusive workplace, and more.

Revolutionizing onboarding and resource-sharing

Sana has also allowed us to elevate our onboarding workflow to a whole new level. We’re using the Programs feature to create a structured learning path for new hires, and the automated workflows are much easier to manage than they were with our previous provider. Additionally, we can accurately track and measure course completion and knowledge acquisition—an ability we did not have before.

We also see local teams leveraging Teamspaces. They have found it to be an effective way of onboarding new talent with team-specific information, procedures, and links to key documentation. Team leaders can track this process to ensure that newcomers are up to date with foundational knowledge.

They’re also using Teamspaces to curate and collect resources for their employees. And they’re doing it 70% faster than with the previous platform because of Sana’s categories, tags, image library, and fast interface. Additionally, they’re using Teamspaces to host customized learning journeys tailored to their specific needs, such as local regulations, certifications, or skill development in areas like time management.

I’ve been impressed by the adoption rate for using Sana among our employees so far. Our staff have created at least 45 Teamspaces across the organization, and it’s growing all the time. Even though we’re just two months into our journey with Sana, our local teams have already created more than 610 courses. That’s really impressive to me.

Scaling expert knowledge in an engaging, interactive way

As an organization with 1,600 full-time employees, it can be a challenge to create a baseline level of knowledge within important areas among all the employees. Within mci group, we have ample expert knowledge in specific areas, but we simply didn’t have an LMS that allowed us to scale it throughout the organization. Now we can share that knowledge efficiently, and in an engaging way that employees appreciate.

Before, we did that in a lot of slideshow presentations—both in-person and digitally. Now we are using Sana Now to make these live sessions more interactive and engaging. And reducing the amount of time we previously spent on creating, scheduling and hosting sessions.

Teams are hosting interactive online training programs, as well as in-person events, like local learning weeks. We’ve had two success cases so far. The first is our knowledge-sharing sessions, where our team engages internal subject-matter experts to create content, and facilitate live training programs on a variety of topics—sustainability, health and safety, cyber security, self-development or and other more niche industry topics related to marketing communications.

We’re also hosting live sessions using Sana for a new internal coaching program PACE (Professional Advancement through Coaching Excellence). The feedback has been so positive, even though a lot of teams are still learning to use the platform’s features. My team is encouraging and teaching staff how to use the engagement functionalities—like quizzes, polls, and assessments that provide instant feedback to learners. It’s a process, and we’re still at the beginning.

Supercharging the learning experience at mci group

The learning experience at mci group has been transformed into a more interactive and valuable experience in just a couple of months. Almost 700 employees have been trained on the platform, and they’re using it to enhance their everyday work, efficiency and performance.

Participation and engagement have also gone up. In our previous LMS platform, we had a monthly active user base of about 500 employees. Within the first month with Sana, we surpassed that. Since the start, we’ve had a 77% increase in monthly active users. And this is an important number for us to track because participation was low before. People were just using the LMS for mandatory compliance training.

Our engagement numbers have also increased. In just two months, we’ve seen a 30% increase in completion rates for all of our courses. We think part of that is due to the interactive features that we can offer through Sana. Employees are able to capture and share their reflections with the rest of their team, a new habit that is promoting team learning, and a firmer grasp of the content we’re teaching through the platform.

Capturing these key takeaways and actions also kicks off this virtuous cycle. It allows us to build up a knowledge base on the Sana platform, which is a key step toward our goal of making it the central knowledge hub for the whole company. But then having these takeaways allows local teams to customize their meetings and sessions, making them even more relevant for employees and improving the experience. It’s incredible.

We’ve made a concerted effort to add as much knowledge as we can to the platform, so that we can utilize the power of Sana’s AI search functionality. Our knowledge base taps into multiple sources within mci group. And our employees are benefiting from an increasingly relevant “single source of truth”, where the right information can be found almost instantly. It’s so much more efficient.

Creating awareness key to unlocking the benefits of Sana

A big focus of my team has been creating awareness of what’s possible with Sana. And that awareness is almost as important as the actual capabilities of the platform. Without understanding the usefulness, we won’t be able to get the most impact from using the tool.

We decided to leverage an internal event we host each year called Business Academy for this purpose. Here we gather around 300 senior managers to network, exchange ideas, do strategic planning, and address our most pressing challenges as a leadership group.

This year, it was also an opportunity for us to introduce Sana to key stakeholders, show them its capabilities, and give them ideas for how to use it with their teams. We understood we couldn’t just send an email introducing them to a new platform. We have to turn them into internal champions, who understand its relevance and its capabilities.

We used the live interactive features for the event, particularly the interactive cards to raise the engagement level of the participants. We sent out AI-generated summaries immediately after the sessions. And it was a big success for us. The positive feedback from our senior managers was instant. When they went back to their offices, they were all hyped up with this tool. And we see in the numbers that managers are using it with their teams.

In my experience, a key insight for other L&D professionals is the importance of creating awareness. It’s crucial for adoption. Sana has been a great partner in this effort, helping us make customisations to the platform in order to increase awareness and adoption within mci group.

Decentralizing the data for local teams

We are saving a tremendous amount of time when it comes to accessing and tracking the data around completion rates, and what employees are learning. The power of the platform is that local HR teams can now access the data they need independently, without relying on our central L&D team.

Before, we spent a lot of time generating reports for HR. We created a few tutorials in Sana that teach local HR teams how to use the Insights functionality on their own. And in five minutes, our team creates and shares a custom dashboard with the relevant data for them. It allows us to redistribute that time, and use it to focus on bigger strategic challenges.

And the Insight functionally has had a positive impact on the work of our HR teams. In some markets, there are local regulations that require our employees to complete specific courses and training. With Sana, HR can follow employees’ progress, and quickly see which courses have been completed. Based on those insights, they can even assign employees additional tasks so the training requirements are met.

In our previous platform, you couldn’t track employees’ training or report on what they completed. With full control over that data, the job of the local teams is much easier, and we’ve heard good feedback. They’re happy with what they’re able to do.

One central hub for self-directed learning

In just a few short months, we’ve modernized our digital learning ecosystem and delivered tangible benefits—boosting user engagement, improving learning outcomes, and saving significant time. And it’s allowing us to live up to our commitment to fostering a culture of continuous learning and development.

Moving forward, our vision is to make learning with Sana second-nature for our employees. Our aim is to gather all of our knowledge and resources in the Sana platform, and make it a smart, central hub thanks to Sana’s AI capabilities. Allowing employees to find whatever info they need with a simple search will be very powerful for us.

We also see a lot of potential for skill development at mci group with new Sana features—like the Skills Future. We have created the right frameworks for employees to follow for their own learning journeys. But those can only be found on Excel spreadsheets that are tucked away somewhere.

The Skills Future feature will allow us to connect learning content to specific skills, and give our employees clarity on what’s ahead of them on their learning journey. Having a clear cut path in front of them—clearly showing how and what to develop—is an incredible benefit. It puts them firmly in the driver’s seat of their own learning, which is empowering.

We’re on the path of making learning and development at mci group a self-directed and decentralized experience. And it feels good to give them the tools they need to take charge of this on their own. It’s helping us stay ahead by keeping our employees agile, and ready for future challenges.