How Serco Inc. Delivers Video Learning to 8,000 Employees Dispersed Across North America

Company Profile

Serco Inc., the North American division of UK-based Serco Group plc, is a public services company that serves federal, state, provincial, and local governments in the United States and Canada, as well as a number of commercial customers. Serco’s teams advise, design, integrate, and deliver service solutions that increase efficiency across areas such as defense, citizen services, and transportation.

Their 8,000 employees in the Americas work across 46 US states and four Canadian provinces with sites ranging from single individuals up to as many as 700 employees.

The Challenge: Finding New Ways to Reach Every Employee

With a large service remit and significant diversity of team configurations and locations, Serco’s HR team is focused on overcoming any obstacles to connecting with its employees. Corporate communications and employee training need to be delivered and understood with consistency. This becomes more complicated when the message is as likely to be received by individual employees working remotely in the field or from home as it is by offices full of broadband-equipped workers.

At the beginning of the 2010s, Serco’s vision was to enhance its relationship with all employees by looking beyond just email and other written channels. Serco saw the potential for internet video broadcasts as a particularly effective medium for its CEO presentations, even though the technology was then in its infancy in the corporate world.

During the last decade, Serco’s focus and its range of messages have evolved, but the logistical challenge remains broadly the same. There is still a corporate communication requirement, but thanks to their success, Serco’s HR team now communicates various project management, compliance, and onboarding training modules via video.

The Solution: A Long-Term Partnership Open to Growth and Evolution

In the early days of Serco’s exploration into internet video broadcasting, the organization selected a precursor to our own Instilled by PeopleFluent learning experience platform (a product then known as KZO). The decade-long collaboration between Serco HR and Instilled is a story that reflects the growth of both its team and the platform.

In addition to quarterly CEO broadcasts, the team produces regular 90-second updates, taking advantage of Instilled’s video-on-demand features to provide content in an easily-digestible format—essential for busy employees who may not always have reliable internet connections.

The Serco team also relies on the platform as a library for learning content. In addition to compliance videos, project management professional training is broadcast live and then archived via the platform, with a link to the content shared via various means with all relevant employees so they can watch whenever and wherever it’s convenient to do so.

Similarly, Serco has developed a three-hour new hire orientation series, delivered to all new employees via Instilled. Previously a hefty 200-slide PowerPoint document, this eight-chapter course is delivered primarily via pre-recorded video (with supplementary material in other formats). The series features a diverse group of presenters selected from within the company. It’s therefore considered a critical tool for presenting the corporate culture that Serco wants to project, a culture that smaller teams may otherwise feel disconnected from.

Instilled features and services critical to Serco’s corporate communications and training approach include:

• User roles and restrictions: Serco routinely communicates with three distinct tiers: leadership, frontline managers, and the wider business. Instilled ensures that sensitive information is shared with as few or as many employees as need to see it.
• Optimized delivery to any device: Instilled’s suitability for mobile use cases doesn’t begin and end at a responsive HTML5 interface. It intelligently recognizes bandwidth limitations and serves the best quality version of the content possible, adjusting to whether the user is at a desktop computer at head office or using a cellphone at a remote site.
• Robust video library and sharing: Instilled provides Serco with a single, simple venue for broadcasting, uploading, and sharing video content, audio content, eLearning, and other media types, including PDFs and PowerPoint presentations.
• Support and advice: Close collaboration with the Instilled team has lead to new production purchases and techniques at Serco

“Our video production capacity has grown significantly. We try our best to stay with the curve of what is considered engaging and professional in the corporate space and Instilled has been with us on that journey. The Instilled team has offered us invaluable help on equipment and processes. Our leadership is enthusiastic about video, and Instilled is definitely a factor in that. —Tim Neun, Director, Corporate Communications, Serco Inc.”

The Results: Boosting Participation and Cultural Messaging

Serco’s quarterly CEO video calls have achieved 80% participation despite the challenges of reaching remote employees. The team is always looking for ways to boost this number, although given time zones and work requirements, there will always be some who cannot attend calls live. By using Instilled to offer other ways to consume the content, the organization is confident that it’s doing everything it can to reach employees.

Among Serco’s training efforts, the orientation course has been particularly successful. Over five years, this has received 20,000 views. The Serco team considers it an indispensable company resource, especially as it provides a consistent orientation message rather than the previously disparate messages used in different offices. The course was recently refreshed with a new wave of presenters in order to capitalize on its messaging potential.

“We are extremely happy with the Instilled Learning Experience Platform and the long-standing relationship we have with the team behind it. We wouldn’t consider ourselves super-users—there’s a lot in the platform we haven’t started using yet, but the features that are critical to our corporate communications and training goals meet our needs perfectly. —Tim Neun, Director, Corporate Communications, Serco Inc.”