Back story
At Dannon U.S., a part of the France-based Danone Group, the odyssey of whole milk, from cow to the yogurt cooler, is called milk’s greatest journey. Dannon calls it the Milky Way, and it describes in detail the path of milk on its way to becoming yogurt. The Milky Way is a means of sharing the sophisticated and complex processes in yogurt production, underscoring the role all employees play in it and providing them with a common body of information so everyone is speaking the same language.
Dannon produces and sells six million cups of yogurt a day in dozens of flavors, styles and sizes. Founded by Isaac Carasso in 1919, the company began production in the United States in 1946. The parent company Danone provides leadership and strategic direction for the Dannon U.S. headquarters, located in New York. Three plants are located in the United States. While the work described here was produced for the Dannon plant in West Jordan, Utah, the modules will be used for Milky Way training throughout the company.
…milk is a precious commodity—a noble food deserving of utmost respect and careful handling.
Purpose
Dannon was seeking to develop a robust training program to assist employees in learning about the Milky Way. Before Maestro’s involvement, the training consisted of several hours of instructor-led training in PowerPoint format. This approach had been deemed to be ineffective due to the presentation format, the time required to share all necessary content and its inability to engage learners and hold their attention.
For Dannon, milk is a precious commodity—a noble food deserving of utmost respect and careful handling. They wanted every employee to understand the sensitive and fragile nature of milk. After all, a shipment of milk represents tens of thousands of dollars.
The client wanted Milky Way training that would drive these facts home to employees while making the necessary learning fun and engaging. Additionally, they saw elearning modules as a means of making training consistent and of tapping into, packaging and delivering the vast knowledge that resided with their internal subject matter experts.
Action
After conducting comprehensive discovery sessions on-site, Maestro created a series of backbones for eight separate modules. These, in turn, were used to create content outlines and eventually highly interactive elearning modules. Each module contains simple learning checks and a final learning assessment.
To differentiate Milky Way training and give it greater versatility and staying power, the Maestro team suggested the use of a “Dirty Jobs” point of view throughout the training modules.
This technique borrows from the television series of the same name which follows its funny, plain-speaking star (Mike Rowe) as he samples a series of challenging jobs. Its real power is in its engaging star spokesman. He is a likable and emphatic representative of everyone who has encountered similar jobs. Mike tells it like it is, and he does so with humor and down-to-earth explanations of whatever the task of the day is.
The Maestro message to Dannon was simple: Flavor the voiceover narration of the Milky Way training modules with the Dirty Jobs point of view. Make that portion of the training narration the voice of a typical plant floor veteran whose down-to-earth contributions appear randomly to emphasize a point, add perspective or perhaps amplify an explanation. Maestro asked Dannon to think of him as the folksy color analyst who chimes in during the running play-by-play of the formal narrator.
Another unique feature of the Milky Way training produced by Maestro is a provision for hands-on involvement of the learners, outside of the computer-based modules. Using an innovative Milky Way Discovery Kit, learners use items found in the kit for real-life activities in the plant and lab to enhance their computer-based learning.
Success
The new elearning modules for Dannon have transformed Milky Way training. No longer are employees simply talked to with the hope that they will learn. Now, they are fellow travelers who share an epic trek—milk’s greatest journey.
What’s more, a likable and approachable veteran, one of their own, is along for the ride. He makes learning fun, meaningful and enjoyable by speaking their language and sharing their point of view. While it is too early to have definitive data, both Dannon and Maestro expect employee performance on a number of key measures will improve with the new training modules.
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