Countrywide chose Saba initially to ensure consistent adherence to complex compliance ordinances. A few years later, the board of directors sought the ability to “socialize learning” to capture and share the breadth of its team’s expertise and skills. Moving to Saba Cloud, Countrywide has transformed its business from a sales-focused to a people-focused business, driving measurable and better engagement, and skills development which is helping them build their business.

As Countrywide PLC grew its 500-office real estate services business, its learning and development needs grew too.

Our board wanted to socialize learning. Not only to ensure we pushed out compliance, but that we also built skills and engaged our team to share their expertise. The right solution was Saba Cloud. Paul Buckland-White, Head of Learning and Development at Countrywide Lettings

Countrywide PLC provides services across the entire real estate chain: rentals, sales, mortgages and insurance under 50 different brands throughout Scotland, Wales and England. The Countrywide business is supported by a team of more than 14,000 professionals working in more than 500 offices.

In 2012, the company’s most profitable division, Countrywide Residential Lettings, looked for a way to further maximize the potential of its highly distributed rental properties team. They chose Saba to help them ensure better compliance with the heavy amount of regulation in their industry, using Saba’s easy-to-access eLearning format.

“Fifty pieces of legislation govern what we do on a day-to-day basis,” said Paul Buckland-White, head of learning and development at Countrywide Lettings. “It is hard to ensure that all of our staff are educated on all of those compliance issues. We needed a tool to help us keep our team informed about the latest in letting legislation and minimize the huge cost of formal face-to-face training. Saba was light years ahead of any competitor out there.”

CASE STUDY

Industry: Real Estate ServicesEmployees: 14,000Saba Solutions: Saba Cloud

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Saba’s easy adoption and high leverage capabilities allow Countrywide to deliver “bite-sized” learning consistently across its diverse staff, while saving tens of thousands of pounds in on-site training costs. This resulted in much easier and more timely assurance of compliance across the business.

“Saba has enabled us to have much greater accountability,” added Buckland-White. “Now, for example, we can report to legislators that 5,000 people took and passed a certain course within a few weeks.”

SOCIALIZING LEARNING IN THE CLOUD

Countrywide migrated its learning and development data to Saba Cloud in January 2015. Saba Cloud is a full talent management suite built on a robust platform that features intuitive collaborative functionality like blogs, discussion boards, topic workgroups and content tagging. It’s mobile-enabled and has built-in predictive analytics to help business leaders and individuals alike with personalized recommendations on programs, connections, content and courses of the best value.

We quickly realized once we started on Saba Cloud the ability to easily collaborate. This is changing our culture to better self-reliance. When someone has a question, the first response is: Have you checked Saba?

The learning and development team at Countrywide even leveraged the UK’s National Learning at Work Week to extend the change management around social learning and development. And they used the tools in Saba Cloud to make it more engaging.

“Every day, we showed people how to use new functionality, a new course of the day, and the like. And we used the learning badges in Saba as a digital reward to take classes. Typically, in corporate learning there is no carrot, just a stick. The gamification elements of learning in Saba are huge.”

Countrywide also created online social groups in Saba where team members across geographies can easily connect and collaborate. For example, there is one group dedicated to optimizing their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. In the group, people add ideas and upvote the most popular concepts, which their system director reviews to inform updates to the CRM system configuration. Certain bugs they never knew about are now being identified and fixed.

Every month, Countrywide’s people also engage in social groups around classes, where they share homework insights and feedback, and compare very different marketplaces to benefit from insight on other regional dynamics. Buckland-White says this type of exchange will develop the future leaders of the business, giving them the ability to see trends and perspectives beyond their own geographies.

After two years with Saba’s hosted solution, Saba Enterprise, Countrywide’s tech-savvy CEO and board of directors saw that the company could get even more value by moving to the Saba Cloud multi-tenant intelligent talent management solution.

“Our board wanted to socialize learning, to ensure that we not only pushed out compliance training, but that we also built skills and engaged our team to share their expertise. I have a board that trusts me to do what’s right for the business. The right solution was Saba Cloud.”

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People see they are playing a bigger part in the development of the company. We’d have never had this without Saba.

ANALYTICS DRIVE BETTER BUSINESS

Connecting its team was job one. But, understanding and communicating the business impact of that connection was pivotal for Countrywide.

“On the analytics side, migrating to Saba Cloud was a game changer for us,” said Buckland-White. “One of the biggest wins is the ease of using the analytics tool. There is nothing you can’t report on, and get better business insight. In our pre-Saba Cloud days the learning and development team ran compliance test reports. Now, we provide our regional directors with monthly information packets with analytics on skills-based learning, too, which empowers them to take ownership in developing our staff.

With Saba, they can see:

• Measurement on the baseline effectiveness of new staff orientation curricula

• Number of team members that qualify to take the next level of advanced classes

• Effectiveness in meeting timelines for completion of classes

• Compliance and development-based programs

“Now, we are much more sophisticated in our ability to ensure an environment of continual development. This has changed our culture. With Saba we can provide transparency on how we access and leverage development opportunities company-wide.”

EVOLVING TO A PEOPLE-FOCUSED BUSINESS

“We’re a sales business, so most things we report on have come from a culture where everything is measured in a pound,” says Buckland-White. “Now that we are looking at learning’s impact, too, we’ve started on the journey of becoming a people-focused business.”

On the numbers side, Buckland-White says the company’s course completions alone tell a different kind of business story a year after launching Saba Cloud. First, there is the scale: the business has more than doubled the amount of learning and development course completions since launching Saba Cloud, from 2,000 to 5,000 a month. Then there is context. While compliance learning had increased four-fold, 80 percent of the courses taken now are skill-level development. Countrywide is building its next leaders.

iLearning course completion summary report.

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I’m most excited to see how we’re building an appetite for learning. This is a culture change that has resulted from implementing an easy way to access content for people to advance in their roles.

Paul Buckland-White, Head of Learning and Development at Countrywide Lettings

Perhaps the best ROI of all: Countrywide’s attrition levels decreased dramatically for new hires in their first year at the firm. This is widely attributed to the focus on learning powered by Saba.

TECHNOLOGY-FIRST PAYS OFF AT COUNTRYWIDE

“People who try to fit any tech to existing strategies/process are often frustrated and stymied in their efforts,” said Buckland-White.

“We didn’t have strategy and process in place first. The Saba technology was proven to work in the field, so we leveraged it. We discovered so many things we could do once we discovered Saba, so it made our strategy more powerful.

“My wife also uses Saba in her company, and she’s quite envious about how we’re using it. They are starting to look at what the tool does and building their process around it. We talk about this a lot at home; we joke that the turkey on our dinner table is sponsored by Saba.”

THE VALUE OF COMMUNITY

Just like Saba has helped leverage the “native genius” of the Countrywide team, so too is the connected Saba customer community a terrific value to Buckland-White.

“The Saba customer community is key to our value. The Saba solution sells really well, but you never realize how powerful the community really is to the overall value proposition. Saba is a huge piece of technology; most people don’t realize how massive it is or how much more you can get out of it.

“Now, if I want to get a quick win in our business, I can reach out to the online community to ask about something like notifications, and within minutes I get answers. It is a brilliant thing; when people respond so quickly you feel a sense of community obligation to share when you have your own experience.”

One year after going live on Saba Cloud, Buckland- White says Countrywide is pretty self-sufficient, but that the community – both online and the local user group – and his Saba support team provide a great backup with quick, reliable responses.

Every company says they want to engage, motivate and inspire their people. As we see it, the problem is not that they can’t – it’s that they don’t have the environment that really enables their top talent to thrive. Saba creates that environment, with talent development solutions that put people and teams in the driver’s seat of their own experience, while staying aligned to your business goals. And delivering deep performance insights that connect people to business success, like no one else can. Saba. The Talent Development Company.

© 2018 Saba Software Inc. All rights reserved. Saba, the Saba logo, and the marks relating to Saba products and services referenced herein are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Saba Software, Inc. or its affiliates. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

(+1) 877.SABA.101 | www.saba.com 12/18

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BEFORE AND AFTER: DELIVERING ON A DEMOCRATIZED DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

A recent example that crystallizes the before- and after-Saba impact is how the solution helps Countrywide close the digital – and generational – divide.

After a recent acquisition, Buckland-White was on-site at a new office to field questions from the staff that had just been acquired. A 78-year-old woman in that office wanted to know the process to file an expense report. The reply: “Have you looked in Saba?”

She borrowed a colleague’s iPad in the meeting room, found the quick eLearning instruction, downloaded the form, and put what she learned right to work without leaving the room.

Saba helps me influence culture change one day at a time – to be much more sophisticated, meet needs of business and of employees as they are comfortable. I couldn’t do this without Saba.