Situation
In 2008, ConAgra Foods underwent dramatic changes – selling several operations to focus exclusively on packaged foods. As the company became “One ConAgra,” it launched Foundations of Leadership, a three-tier, multi-year curriculum to cultivate leaders aligned with the new corporate vision.
Approach
To evaluate the business impact of the Foundations of Leadership initiative, ConAgra partnered with Capital Analytics and its strategic ally, Bellevue University’s Human Capital LabSM. The study specifically looked at trained and untrained front-line plant supervisors to determine impact on leader retention, leader mobility, plant productivity, plant quality and plant safety. Capital Analytics included other factors in the evaluation to determine if such things as plant size and leader’s tenure with the company were influencing those metrics.
Conclusions
The business impact study analyzed the performance of 600 trained and 1,600 untrained supervisors across 65 U.S.-based plants. During the 12-month period under study, overall turnover of supervisors did drop significantly – from 12.7% to 9.4%. But was this attributable to the training?
Further examination confirmed that turnover among trained supervisors was 6.1 percentage points lower than untrained supervisors – a value of $2.3 million in Year One alone.
In assessing the training’s impact on safety, a clear difference was established between small and large plants. Small plants with “high” training penetration levels saw a 1.55 point increase on a 10-point scale. However, large plants with the same training level saw only a 0.2 point increase, highlighting the opportunity to seek other safety-improvement interventions in these environments.
