Creating Graphics

from Excel Tables

This live Zoom training constitutes one piece of a year-long series offered at a multinational legal enterprise, covering a variety of Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Suite skills. The session focused on converting complex Excel data to easily digestible charts for Powerpoint. All company information and data are removed from the recording, which demonstrates a fully live, synchronous training. 

Audience: Self-selected employees and employees referred by their managers 

Responsibilities: Needs Assesment, Competency Mapping, Storyboard, Instructional Design

  Tools Used: Camtasia, Powerpoint, Excel, Zoom, Teams

AI Integrations: Chart creation, Microsoft Copilot, transcript to documentation translation, language translation support

Goal: To improve employee compliance with branding guidelines in self-created content by creating and delivering 24 lessons over the course of the year, each covering a bite-sized, readily usable skill for communicating complex information in powerpoint decks.

Launch Point: The design team reported dissatisfaction with inconsistent brand representation both internally and externally despite recent introduction of mandatory pre-made deck slides and content already fully compliant with branding guidelines. They cited the need for employees to be able to communicate complex data as the likely primary issue at the root of the inconsistencies because Microsoft products did not currently allow for flexible but branded chart and visual creation to meet the varied needs of teams across the enterprise.

Journey: We followed a traditional accelerated learning design lifecycle to ensure a quick, low-resource rollout while still providing easily accessible pre- and post- learning resources on Sharepoint and concise, time efficient sessions with accessible metrics to track program efficacy.

Our needs assessment consisted of two questions included in the quarterly employee work/ life engagement survey, as well as randomized 1:1 checks with a stratified sample of team managers across the enterprise representative of all business lines. We also asked the design team to review a random sample of 30 decks built using their premade slides from across the business to get a better picture of the scale of the problem.

Based on our findings, we chose to offer both voluntary enrollment and management referral into the training sessions, with attendence automatically shared to all team managers (referring and not). We found this allowed managers to incorporate referral expectations into their overall performance management plans with each attending employee as they saw fit. We also identified two teams with widespread brand representation issues, and worked with the managers of those teams to provide team-oriented sessions that maximized attendance for those teams.

Because the Talent Enablement team had already noted rising dissatisfaction across the enterprise with the recent increase in mandatory compliance training modules enacted over the past year in response to changes to GDPR and US state privacy laws, we elected to offer short, synchronous sessions rather than creating an e-learning module. We also focused on keeping sessions brief and accessible.

Topics and examples of the design issue were provided by the design team and used to inform 15 minute, hands-on training sessions with optional 5-15 minute Q&A/ help sessions following each. Each training video was uploaded to sharepoint and tagged for easy searchability, and a video related to each skill was added to a LinkedIn Learning playlist, as the enterprise offered LinkedIn Learning to all employees as a development benefit. We also created half page written guides for each skill, as some teams who evidenced need for the training regularly evidence a preference for text-based on-demand learning options.

At 30 day intervals after the beginning of the program, we asked the design team to recreate the earlier sampling process to help confirm the efficacy of the program. We were pleased to find that by the end of the first quarter, the issues identified had decreased by 5-40%, with two notable decreases of more than 60%. We also found that while most of those who accessed the video of the sessions online were those who already attended the sessions, the written documentations were also accessed by a wider audience who did not attend the live training, especially in the teams we had hoped to target based on their prediliction for written resources.

Results: Overall, we achieved an average improvement of 47% across all topics by 60 days after the final training session, with a 58% increase in teams with referring managers. The series also allowed us to build new learning champion relationships with referring managers and their team members that supported future talent development endeavors.