Ingersoll Rand
How this diversified industrial company redesigned a modern workforce learning and training program
Achievements
200+ Qualified Users
Efficient Knowledge Sharing
33,000 Video Views in a Year
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, it consistently looks for new learning solutions across 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 worldwide 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 highly regarded global brands and established regional and local suppliers. A dispersed and multilingual workforce, many 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 delivering premier performance. Ingersoll Rand defines a winning culture as “the best people aspire to work, a place where employees feel connected with the company’s vision and empowered to do the right thing.”
Ingersoll Rand utilizes Panopto, an enterprise video platform, to build upon a strong, winning culture. The platform is an important tool in learning and development to rapidly share knowledge and information across the organization.
Ingersoll Rand Employes the Power of Video
Ingersoll Rand selected video as a tool for learning, development, training, and engaging employees in a winning culture worldwide. With Panopto, Ingersoll Rand could 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 and delete extraneous material from recorded events. Team members must 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 halls or training settings all around the globe.
Ingersoll Rand also wanted to improve the viewers’ experience by intelligently and efficiently navigating 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, and 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 company’s identified needs. In 2015, Ingersoll Rand engaged with Panopto, deploying 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, Panopto recorded the event. Within three days, company leaders were able to use the post-event 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 use to direct their learning.
“The on-demand video presentations from executives left a very
Learning Technology Manager, Ingersoll Rand
strong positive impression with our business leaders.”
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 always seek 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.
Before using Panopto, if a team member wanted to document a process or an opportunity in a video, they would need to bring equipment and a videographer.
Today, achieving operational excellence is easy. Team members participating in the Panopto program can 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 videos from their desks while traveling or at home.
Ingersoll Rand’s talent and organizational capability team also uses the new video platform to improve learning content delivery, including how the team trains its own trainers.
Ingersoll Rand offers sales excellence training led by in-house trainers and taught at locations worldwide. 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 and tailor future training toward areas they identify as 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, initially with just a dozen views. Within a week, 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 a complement to professionally produced videos for internal use. It realized it had found a flexible tool that could 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 of 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. 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, its demand 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 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, any location, or any time of day. Companies can achieve maximum effectiveness by creating searchable videos linked to other key information, including presentation slides. Implementing these capabilities can help organizations utilize video effectively as a learning resource.
