Learning Design Tool 

Background

UK COAL is Britain's biggest producer of coal, supplying around 6% of the country's energy needs for electricity generation. The Group has four deep mines located in Central and Northern England with substantial reserves and employs 3,100 people. It has five active surface mines producing around 1.7 million tonnes of coal a year.

It is the Board's policy to manage the coal business to maximise the generation of cash and optimise the income and value creation from its property portfolio and power generation business.

“Before the programme Supervisors working on the same district rarely met, and it was during the running of the pilot that we noticed how the teams bonded and worked together on significant projects that targeted productivity improvements. The pilot was so successful that we are rolling it out across all 300 Supervisors, Shift and Under managers”.

Norman Haslam, Director of HR for UK Coal

Engagement with the Transforming Capability Team

Given the recent improvements in the market for renewable resources UK Coal’s Board wanted to take the opportunity offered to develop new ways of working across the company. Senior managers took part in a series of workshops facilitated by the Transforming Capability team. Using the Competitive Capability Framework to scope the overarching vision and strategy for the company in the medium term, it was agreed that a targeted learning intervention was needed and that:

• Initial focus should be placed on the development of Supervisors who manage teams at the coal-face  
• The priority for this group was to develop a learning intervention that would enhance their management / team leader skills
• The intervention would utilize a specific process - Analyse; Prepare; Diagnose; Plan; Do; Evaluate - based around an issue or challenge that Supervisors met daily in their working life

The intervention was delivered initially to 4 groups of 4 Supervisors who together manned a Development District over a 24 hour period at each of the 4 deep coal mines.

 

Outcomes

Initial discussion using the Transforming Capability toolset resulted in the development of a bespoke learning intervention that met the needs of the company as well as individual participants. The intervention was delivered on-site and at a pace that matched the resource constraints felt by the company. Developing Supervisors highlighted the need to support other levels of the management structure which has resulted in further programmes.

Using the Competitive Capability Analysis and the Business Impact Analysis tools in parallel with the Learning Design tool has resulted in increased output giving a payback on Investment over only 3 months.

 

 

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