How to Align Learning Strategies with your Business Goals
Learning professionals struggle with aligning learning goals with the goals of the business. Learning has to mitigate and address concerns and meet the needs of the business. Movie theater company Cinemark has met the challenge head-on and has seen success since in doing so.
Cinemark is one of the country’s premier movie theater chains. They have 28,000 employees worldwide and invest heavily in their learning strategies. A key objective and a factor of success is measured by their culture and the ability to link their learning goals with the business strategy. In fact, Sid Srivastava, the Senior Vice President of Human Resources for the company, says not a single piece of their learning strategy is created without the implicit goal that it serves to support the business.
So, how does the company do that?
To help explain, Srivastava and Brandon Hobby, the Director of Organizational Capability, discussed three particular strategic business objectives and their corresponding learning objectives. For the purposes of this explanation, we’ll focus on the third set of objectives.
As you can see, Cinemark wanted to deliver consistent industry leading results. As a result, their subscription loyalty program, Cinemark Movie Club, was born.
As part of their Movie Club subscription, members receive one movie ticket per month for $8.99. If a member doesn’t use the ticket, it rolls over to the next month. Members also receive 20% off concessions, a benefit they can share with friends, and online fees are waived for additional tickets purchased. They currently have more than 400,000 members, an average of 1,200 per theater.
Cinemark was the first theater to create and implement such a program. As such, there was a huge amount of secrecy around its launch. So much so, employees did not receive training until right before its launch; to the tune of two weeks.
“So, that’s a huge challenge. How do you get that out there to the team,” Hobby said. “We were able to do that in a short period of time; get all of our employees and our management team prepared for the rollout of the program, understand how the program works and all of the ins and outs of how the program would be deployed.”
And the results of that training are positively staggering.
The company exceeded their target goal of 250,000 members within the first six months and, in fact, is on track to exceeding that target by 150% by the end of the year by signing up 500,000 members.
