L’Oréal's challenge
Eric de la Tour is responsible for commercial service excellence in L’Oréal France's professional products division. His mission: improve the skills of every sales team, support their transformation and, ultimately, guarantee their employability. That means 160 business partners who help client beauty salons grow, key account teams who negotiate and build business plans, and about thirty managers who need to act as coaches.
The big challenge: making learning stick. For years, time and budget constraints meant retention didn't get enough attention. And the clock is ticking: many experts say skills become obsolete after five years, so hard and soft skills have to be developed together.
- Make content stick, not just deliver it
- Develop hard and soft skills at the same time
- Train key account teams in negotiation and business planning
- Get each person to take charge of their own development
The solution
L’Oréal went for blended learning where every piece has a job. Before the course, digital exercises (self-diagnosis, a pre-information phase) set the scene. Then come one or two days of face-to-face training. To finish, managers provide field support, and one-hour learning capsules built into agency meetings handle the follow-up. Teams also have access to an off-the-shelf training catalog and MOOCs.
Game Strategies' game-based learning joined that mix through a pilot with a serious game. For Eric de la Tour, it's one more piece of the puzzle: the game trains negotiation, while face-to-face sessions and follow-ups anchor what's been learned. And for 2020, the plan was a performance learning app to validate acquired knowledge and measure each program's ROI.
In their own words
Playing is undoubtedly a key way to involve employees, regardless of their age. We are all players at heart.
In the training mix for improving negotiation skills, game based learning is a must that has to be anchored to other learning modalities, such as face to face meetings and follow-ups.
It is undoubtedly part of the puzzle, one of the elements of blended learning, without a doubt.
The results
The clearest verdict came from the participants themselves. The first words Eric de la Tour heard from the pilot team: an interactive, fun and addictive learning method (in the good sense), with clear, precise and concise training messages.
L’Oréal's conclusion is firm: in negotiation training, game-based learning isn't an extra, it's a must, as long as it's anchored to face-to-face meetings and follow-ups. And it fits the company's view of training: every employee should drive change and take charge of their own growth.
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