success stories / A Unified Vision of HCM at Marsh & McLennan

A Unified Vision of HCM at Marsh & McLennan Companies

With new technology, MMC empowered individual business units to own their respective areas of learning. This created more efficient content development resulting in more relevant content for employees.

Summary

Finance and Learning

Marsh & McLennan Companies (MMC) is made up of four operating businesses and a corporate center, which has several thousand employees that support the operating businesses. In total, they have about 65,000 employees in over a hundred countries across the globe.

With no physical or digital products to offer, people are the business of MMC, so they have already invested significantly in learning and development. While some of these programs were successful, they only touched a few people relative to the size of the organization. So they invested in Degreed to create and launch the MMC Finance Academy, bringing together all of the disparate places employees were going to improve their skills.

COMPANY SNAPSHOT

Industry:

Professional Services

Headquarters:

United States

Company Size:

65,000

Challenges

The content MMC was providing its financial specialists was excellent. The problem was that the content was expensive and had a limited reach, which was concerning to leadership. MMC needed an efficient way to bring skills and knowledge to all 2,300 members of its finance community

Solutions

With the help of Degreed, the Finance Academy centralized all of its learning resources. Over the course of a year-and-a-half, the MMC Finance Community has been able to pull in all kinds of different content — some paid, much of it not.

“Instead of colleagues being on their email and getting pinged 12 times a day, or doing something else we don’t even know about, we now have everything in one place. Our colleagues can go there, they can find content that’s very relevant to them and they’re really engaging with it.”- Susan Meyer Head of Corporate Talent & Inclusion Strategy, MMC

In addition to centralizing learning content, MMC also empowered individual business units to own their respective areas of learning. This created more efficient content development resulting in more relevant content for employees.

Results

Since its launch, the Finance Academy has helped MMC break down barriers and create an ecosystem that is ripe for learning. According to Meyer, “Colleagues are building a culture of learning and they don’t even know it — people are sharing and exchanging knowledge.”

Matthew Cunningham, Chief Financial Officer at MMC subsidiary, Oliver Wyman, shared that the Degreed platform has been pivotal to the success of the program. “The openness of the platform increases relevance for the learner — recommendations from others in the organization is what provides the real value.”

Cunningham and Meyer both agree that MMC now has an efficient means of providing learning to their teams. The next horizon will be skill building and measuring skills. Cunningham stated, “We’re developing a core curriculum for the community to build the skills that they can see are important. Then, measuring what people are doing and being able to tie it to outcomes will let us hone the focus. It’ll take time, we’re at the beginning, but we’re very optimistic.” He also shares that, “By having data around skills, we don’t have to guess about where to invest content dollars, it’s an easier decision. Skill data can also inform talent acquisition — what gaps do we need to recruit for?” Additionally, “Colleagues now have their own currency of sharing what skills they have.”

While the program started as the Finance Academy, MMC ultimately has plans to expand it to other teams in the organization.

At the core, MMC took the most crucial step: recognizing that as a professional services firm, their greatest assets are their people. The bottom line of the business is dependent on human capital and they know that investing in, and ultimately retaining talent is an investment that will pay dividends.

“Most of the content that I read is recommended by someone in our finance organization that has seen an article or read a story, posted it and recommends it — that’s where the real value comes from.” – Matthew Cunningham Chief Financial Officer, Oliver Wyman