Winning Ways: Wyeth Pharmaceuticals
February 06, 2008
Pharmaceutical company Wyeth’s healthy corporate culture uses scorecards to track, measure, and analyze almost every job and training program in some way.
By Holly Dolezalek
The bigger a corporation, the harder it is to make all of its parts work together while staying out of each other's way. That's why Wyeth, a pharmaceutical company based in Collegeville, PA, stands out among the companies that applied for this year's Training Top 125. It's not just that the company has interesting training programs or demonstrates a commitment to the ongoing development of its employees. Without that kind of commitment, it's not even possible to make the Top 125. But Wyeth is special because of the way all of its programs hang together. The company has a specific set of goals in mind for how the skills of its employees will be translated into success for both them and the company overall, and each of its training programs supports those goals—and supports the other programs that also support those goals.
There are two ideas that tie it all together. One is "every person, every job." The other is "Best Rep." The first phrase has to do with a commitment to make sure that every employee at Wyeth is getting opportunities to develop their skills, so ongoing learning and development is not only possible but actively happening. The second has to do with the sales representatives at Wyeth, who are the company's public face and have a huge impact on whether Wyeth's customers stay that way.
Keeping Track of It All
Wyeth has been using the Balanced Scorecard concept for years, but it's been getting even more serious about it for the last three years. This is one of those concepts where "every person, every job" comes into play, because the scorecards measure almost every job in some way. Financial metrics, HR-related metrics, training metrics, even participation in the Career Ladder program—practically every move the company makes, in the aggregate or the individual, is tracked and analyzed by way of some scorecard or other.
"This is a big shift across the organization, because every department has one and everybody values the scorecards because the metrics have become really robust," says Dave Jenkins, vice president of sales training and management development for Wyeth.
For example, the idea of the Career Ladder program is to make sure the company is encouraging ongoing development in all of its employees. But since the program is self-driven, and without analysis, the company would never know whether these efforts were succeeding. So there's a scorecard for the program, which measures several metrics, including the amount of participation across the organization. The scorecard showed Wyeth a few years ago that it was only getting 30 to 35 percent of employees to participate, and so some changes were made to the program (more on this later). Now, the scorecard tells the company that participation has rocketed to 72 percent.
The scorecards help monitor the health of other aspects of the business. New employees have to qualify to work for Wyeth by completing the FieldStart orientation, an intensive three-week course of training in product knowledge, policies, procedures, and regulatory compliance. There's a scorecard for that program, and metrics related to completion of that program help the company track the success of its hiring practices and the knowledge of its new employees.
Another scorecard tracks the success of the company's Best Rep program. Like any company whose lifeblood is sales, Wyeth wants to make sure its sales representatives are the best in the business (more on this later, too). But not every company is as specific or scientific about what "the best in the business" means. Not only does Wyeth state in simple and definite terms what the "Best Rep" does to make him or her the best, a scorecard based on customer satisfaction metrics tells Wyeth whether its reps are doing those things, and to what extent.
 Rotating for Development
The idea of job rotation is hardly revolutionary in the field of employee development, and Wyeth isn't the only company to use it. But the way Wyeth uses job rotation helps the company to develop its employees and bring out the leadership qualities that lurk in employees who just need a chance to show them.
The rotational training manager (RTM) program is a two-year sequence, in which sales reps and account managers get training and experience in how to be a trainer. Participants develop training, work with brand teams, and learn by doing to be better trainers and better leaders who can change the company's direction.
"You can always train someone to be a trainer," says Don Block, executive director of product and skills training. "But the program has gotten stronger because the focus is on training these people to be managers and leaders of tomorrow. The idea is to make people better trainers, give them the competencies they need, but also make them leaders by giving them the coaching, leadership, and management tools they need so their success will come sooner than other people's."
Of the 87 employees who have gone through the RTM program, 81 have been promoted, either to a district manager position or a position in marketing and sales operations. Not only that, but 18 of those who have been promoted have been promoted twice, and 22 have been promoted more than twice. When the program first went into effect, Block says they had to go out looking for people to ask to participate. But now they have up to a dozen people applying for each RTM position. "We're getting the cream of the crop," he says.
Best Rep Prep
The "Best Rep" initiative is the result of research Wyeth has conducted in several specialty groups to better understand what physicians value in a representative. Through this research, it was identified that physicians value the "Quality of Relationship" they have with their "Best Reps" and that these representatives demonstrate five key attributes: respects time, honest and trustworthy, knowledgeable, appropriately sells, and responsive.
Best Reps provide more value to their health-care provider, which ultimately benefits patients and ensures the appropriate use of Wyeth products. That's why it is so important to practice and coach these attributes, along with customer-focused selling skills, on every call. The foundation for success in being considered a Best Rep is the "Quality of Relationship" they form with their customer. Best Reps consistently exhibit the five Best Rep attributes; are a valuable resource to the practice; and are pleasant, knowledgeable, and understanding.
Here's where you can see that different aspects of development end up reinforcing each other at Wyeth. This was a huge change in direction for the company, and guess who helped create the training modules and drive it to success? Participants in the RTM program made the difference. "There's no larger project [than the Best Rep Training] where an RTM worked on something and changed the course of the corporation," Block says.
Once Wyeth knew what customers wanted from their reps, it set about transforming its sales training so that every rep behaved this way. "We train to those characteristics so everyone knows what they are, and we've presented video of role plays where the reps are displaying those characteristics and where they're not," Block says. "Reps see these at national meetings, in coaching classes, their sales training, and management development classes. So each of the business units uses these attributes in everything it does, and it's a hugely successful initiative."
Also, as discussed, a scorecard tracks the success of the program. In just more than a year, overall Best Rep performance has increased by 20 percent. That means customers are saying reps are doing a good job; and they're knowledgeable, professional, and selling the company's products in an appropriate manner.
The same sort of reciprocal reinforcement has come out in the manager-in-residence (MIR) program. When a home office team needs insights from one of the front-line managers, a manager is selected and works in the home office on the project with the team for eight weeks. The MIR is intended to give front-line managers an opportunity to provide input at the home office and develop their skills while networking with senior management. It also gives teams in the home office access to input from managers on the ground whose knowledge and insights about local conditions will help the team's project to be more successful.
It's a win-win situation for everyone. The front-line managers get to work on creating an actual deliverable and to become more skillful in presenting, such as when a participant in the program got to work with a brand team that was launching a new product. The manager helped in designing and implementing the launch meeting, and was involved in the planning, training, regulatory, legal, and HR aspects of it. Meanwhile, the front-line managers went back to their offices with a greater appreciation for what goes on at the home office.
"Some MIRs helped on the Best Rep program—they helped to create a leaders' guide, a booklet of do's and don'ts, a training process for managers to coach their reps in the Best Rep attributes, and a DVD of the scenarios that demonstrated those attributes," says Chris Goins, executive director of management development for Wyeth. Goins says the program's success can be seen in the projects that get done, but also in what happens to the participants afterward. With their improved skills, they're more prepared for their next role, and about one-third of MIR participants have been promoted.
Every Person, Every Job
As part of the emphasis on every person, every job, the Career Ladder program was revised this year. Before the revision, Career Ladder was intended to encourage ongoing personal development. But participation was limited in the sales force, only reaching about 30 to 35 percent. In part, that was because representatives' participation was contingent upon their sales results. That meant the top performers were involved, but the very sales reps whose performance could use improvement couldn't get involved.
Now, every full-time sales position is eligible for Career Ladder. It recognizes and rewards reps as they participate in more development opportunities. Reps can take courses from the American Management Association, the Certified Medical Representative Institute, and other sources of learning, and incentives were added to encourage them to do so.
"We've set the program up so that as you take courses, you get credit based on complexity of the learning, and at the end of the year, the number of a participant's credits is multiplied by his or her performance rating," says Goins. "It's similar to a university system, where you're working toward specific goals and milestones."
The obvious goals are to get employees to improve their skills and knowledge to improve their performance, which means they can bring more value to the company and its customers. Now that the program is annual, Goins says, learning is less sporadic, and the early indications are that a significant number of the people who participated last year did the maximum amount of learning allowed for the year.
The learning culture the company was hoping for took off in the sales force. Goins says in the first nine months of 2007, there was a 74 percent increase in the number of course registrations by people in the Career Ladder program.
Learning Together
The company promotes continuous learning in other ways, too. After all, the company that learns from everything—including itself—has a better chance of being successful. And the company that puts structures in place to capture all the learning that goes on is never going to lack for opportunities to learn.
Take, for example, the Operational Excellence (OE) community at Wyeth. This is a community of practice for the company's manufacturing arm. Employees in different areas of the company share best practices and solutions to problems they've faced. But the OE community is so much more than that.
What does Operational Excellence mean? "It's the tools and methodologies to make process improvements in all areas of the business, so we can become an organization that is consistently excellent," says Judy Vollmer, assistant vice president of organization learning for technical operations and product supply. "Its key focus is on building the capability of our workforce so our employees are empowered to make improvements."
With that in mind, Wyeth designed its own online training program in the principles of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma methodologies. The community also has formalized green and black belt Six Sigma programs so people who lead process improvement efforts get more training in how to go about it. There's also a knowledge Website called OE Net, where community members post process improvement projects and results, and what they learned in the process. Plus, there are discussions on key OE topics, and a list of experts in OE tools or methods.
At an annual OE conference, members share best practices. They also learn which project teams won Best Practice and Network Excellence awards. They attend Webinars and teleconferences to learn year-round how to come up with and execute ideas to make the company better or more efficient. "The question is how can we replicate our successes in other areas of the business?" says Vollmer. "We want to capture the learning and spread it around."
And, of course, it wouldn't be Wyeth if they weren't tracking the results. Vollmer notes the company has established targets for its cycle time metric, or the amount of time it takes for raw materials to be turned into a finished product. Two years ago, the cycle time was an average of 43 days across Wyeth's product lines, and today it is on target to hit its stretch goal of 31 days for 2007. "That metric has big implications for costs and efficiency, and we can say that OE has contributed to the effort to meet those targets."
Then there's Decision Excellence, another effort to institutionalize company smarts and make them contagious. "This was a challenge from our CEO a couple of years ago," says Rick Creasy, director of the learning and compliance group. "He asked us, 'Can we find a way to make decisions quicker or better, and make higher-quality decisions?'"
Based on an agreed-upon set of principles, including more accountability for individuals making decisions, Wyeth came up with a process for making decisions and began to train employees in it through a combination of Web-based and instructor-led training. Explains Creasy, "It's a way of organizing your thoughts and a set of triggers to prompt you to ask the right questions, such as 'What information do I need to make a high-quality decision?' and 'How will I know whether this was a good decision?'"
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