A KEY ENABLER TO LUXOTTICA RETAIL’S
TALENT MANAGEMENT VISION
BY VALERIE NORVELL
Over the past four years, Luxottica Retail has grown
its employee base in North America from
approximately 23,000 associates to more than 36,000.
The vast majority of these associates work in more
than 5,400 retail outlets. Luxottica Retail’s growth
has been made possible by the collective performance
of our people — from store associates who drive
customer experience, to corporate staffers who
support store operations, to senior leaders who
direct company strategy. Therefore, finding,
retaining and developing a competent workforce is
key to providing exceptional customer experiences,
which ultimately drive shareholder value.
To manage our existing associate population and to
meet our long-term growth objectives, the
organization’s leadership recognizes the need to
more efficiently find, transfer, develop and promote
our diverse workforce. Consequently, Luxottica
Retail is in the midst of a multi-year rollout of
integrated talent management systems to associates
across all our brands (e.g., Sunglass Hut,
LensCrafters), as well as our corporate
headquarters.
For the organization, the implementation of these
systems and optimization of the processes they
enable (e.g., associate goal-setting, performance
reviews, training, etc.) help the organization
engage our associates, learn more about who they
are, and determine how best to leverage and develop
them. For the individual associate, these processes
are being continually improved and integrated to
provide him or her with a work environment in which
development and advancement are based on interests,
experience, goal achievement, formal education and
competencies exhibited on the job.
This environment is brought to life largely through
associate-manager and associate-peer relationships.
Our philosophy at Luxottica Retail is that our line-ofbusiness
leaders own talent management. However, it is up to
H.R. (of which Training & Development is a
functional component) to provide the tools,
policies, communications and programs to foster
these relationships. Take our LMS, for example.
Accessed through our intranet, it serves as the hub
used to better target training and development
opportunities to our associates and to provide
actionable information on the investments we make in
our learning programs.
A MARRIAGE OF NECESSITY
Our training and development function is housed
inside an H.R. Department committed to delivering on
promises of personalized learning and
enterprise-wide visibility into associate
development. To deliver on these promises, we need
to know basic information about our people. For
instance:
>>What
role does the associate play?
>>To
whom does he or she report?
>>In
what department does he or she work?
>>In
what region does he or she work?
Before we began our LMS implementation, we knew we
needed an interface between the LMS and our HRMS in
order to deliver on these promises. Therefore, a key
criterion in our LMS procurement process was the
ease with which the system would interface with our
HRMS. The vendors we evaluated explained to us that
the majority of their clients had either already
employed interfaces like this or were planning to do
so.
Once we selected a provider and moved into
implementation, dependencies on the integrity of
data housed in our HRMS quickly became apparent to
us. As system use continues to grow and we add
functionality to enrich our associate experience,
this appreciation has grown. The remainder of this
article discusses several examples of how sharing of
clean data between these systems delivers value to
the associate and to the organization.
PRESCRIPTIVE LEARNING
Luxottica Retail is a competency-driven culture. As
a large enterprise operating in a competitive
environment, we rely on well-defined job profiles to
help differentiate our greatest asset — the
workforce. These profiles are largely based on a
model that defines functional, managerial and
leadership competencies for each position across
brands.
These role-based competencies are part of the
bedrock of our integrated talent management strategy
(see figure on next page). They are key to Luxottica
Retail’s ability to integrate our talent management
processes. For example, we recruit against these
competencies based on organizational needs. We also
build and assign learning programs and informal
learning resources (e.g., job aids) to develop these
competencies in our associates based on performance
reviews and other tools we use to assess our talent.
From a systems point of view, these competencies
need to be mapped to job codes in our HRMS in order
to serve up role-specific learning via the LMS. For
example:
>>Job
codes tied to our opticians help us to keep tabs
on their compliance-relat-ed training and
licensing.
>>Job
codes tied to first-time managers also enable
skill-gap analysis and training assignment based
on competency assessments.
Our LMS allows us great flexibility by building
business rules that combine job code with other
employee-related fields managed by our HRMS. For
example, learning may be assigned based on a
specified number of days from start date in that job
code; a specific date based on job title and
location (e.g., optical licensure and compliance
differ from state-to-state); and/or a specified
number of days from date of hire.
Tip: Ask yourself if your competency model and
learning programs are defined enough to codify
before proceeding down the technical path of mapping
competencies to job roles. LMSs offer other means of
personalization (e.g., a browsable catalog) that can
be used to while you are making preparations to push
prescriptive learning mapped to competencies to your
employee population.
SUPERVISOR IDS
Organizational structure is a foundational element
to any enterprise system. This is especially true of
a system that touches virtually everyone inside the
organization — like an LMS. As “end-users,” our
associates and managers will ultimately drive the
value of the LMS by leveraging it to perform in
their current roles and the roles to which they
aspire. To do this, you need a basic piece of
information.
For the LMS to provide managers the ability to be
proactive about planning their team’s development
activities, the system needs to know who reports to
them. These reporting relationships are maintained
using the supervisor ID field housed in our HRMS. In
addition to planning, this field determines who can
nominate and/or approve requests for associate
training that requires approval (e.g., participation
in an executive development program). Supervisor IDs
also drive the appropriate permissions critical to
organizational training reports. For example, it
enables managers to search and access the transcript
of anyone within their reporting hierarchy.
Associate learning history is one component of our
H.R. analytics and enterprise business-intelligence
practices. Both of these strategies are built on the
concept of providing associates and managers
personalized access to information that will help
them make better decisions — not just about their
careers but about day-to-day operational concerns.
Therefore, leveraging a single organizational
hierarchy to drive role-based permissions to all
talent management systems and other systems (e.g.,
sales, financials, etc.) is a sensible approach.
Tip: Work with your H.R. colleagues to simplify the
job title structure and hierarchy as much as is
practical. Also, put into place standard operating
procedures (SOPs) for managers and employees to keep
employee reporting relationships as up-to-date as
practical. This includes SOPs for regular
maintenance dealing with new hires, promotions,
transfers and terminations. SOPs should also be in
place to deal with special events such as a
re-organization or a merger. Regardless of how you
care for titles and reporting hierarchy, accept the
fact that you will simply never have perfectly
clean, up-to-date information about your employees.
—Valerie Norvell is associate vice president of
training and development for Mason, Ohio-based
Luxottica Retail, an operating company that
comprises a collection of optical brands, including
Sunglass Hut LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears
Optical and Target Optical. Much of her time is
spent with Luxottica Retail’s brand leaders,
corporate executives and her fellow talent
management leaders on strategic initiatives such as
succession management, performance management and
leadership development.
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