Case study: How Molson Coors worked with Voco to empower employees to own their career development
The challenge
Redefining learning styles and objectives
Molson Coors is a well known, heritage beer company with operations across Europe, and a host of much-loved brands including Carling, Staropramen and Madri.
With many team members holding long tenure within the organisation, and well used to formal L&D programmes such as training and mentoring, the Molson Coors talent team wanted to experiment with something different to help build the values and mindset to equip talent for future success.
Key to that was looking outside the organisation in order to widen perspectives and expose people to different ways of tackling challenges, solving problems and building soft skills.
Another objective was to embed the idea of kindness and generosity in development, with team members encouraged to think about what they could offer others, as well as what they wanted to focus on for their own career growth.
Ensuring engagement and participation
Molson Coors has a well-established learning and development offering with a number of programmes already in play, so ensuring both initial engagement and ongoing participation in the face of multiple learning options was a key focus of the design of the programme.
Additionally, learning cultures vary across business units in 11 different European countries, with different communication styles, meaning the programme would need to recognise local nuances in order to ensure success.
Enabling ownership
The Molson Coors talent team wanted participants to feel ownership of the programme, their participation in it, and ultimately their own development. This required an approach suited to different markets, cultures, levels of seniority, and life contexts, regardless of the level of L&D support participants had received previously. Being able to flex the programme to their own needs was key to the value that participants would get from it.
“Our company was more on the traditional side, our people were viewing learning as education: a fancy workshop offsite or an e-learning course. But there was a big gap between their intentions and excitement about learning and the actions they took as a result.
“We would ask them later about what they’d done as a result and they would say they didn’t remember. We didn’t really integrate anything from the workshops into day-to-day work, so we knew something had to change and that we needed a new way of thinking and learning.”
- Anja Dobrosavljevic, Leadership Program Manager, Molson Coors EMEA
The solution
Meaningful matching
Voco’s social learning offering seamlessly connects individuals with relevant peers in different organisations, sectors and countries for structured, impactful conversations about career growth.
Molson Coors wanted to experiment with connecting their people with those outside the organisation to help achieve their objectives, and Voco’s platform provided an effortless and customisable way to do that.
Working together, Voco and Molson Coors launched Own Your Career, a peer-learning programme powered by Voco’s technology and utilising Voco’s novel approach to matchmaking.
Rather than simply connecting team members with peers based on functional, quantitative information, Voco’s proprietary algorithm, which uses over 150 data points, went beyond job titles and technical specialisms, by understanding who people really are in the context of their careers and the specific challenges they face at a particular point in time - such as transitioning to leadership or balancing work and home life.
This holistic approach created matches that promoted relevance yet also friendly-challenge, fresh perspectives but also deep understanding, as well as real empathy and support.
Peer partnerships were created across nine countries and two business units to drive a culture of shared social learning, giving Molson Coors participants access to valuable connections they would not have ordinarily encountered.
Molson Coors users were connected with relevant peers from a wide range of external organisations, from emerging tech companies such as Kigen and Kaluza to consumer goods brands including Reckitt and HelloFresh, and nonprofit organisations like the British Red Cross and the National Theatre.
Exposing Molson Coors team members to such a diverse range of organisations in different markets, with different functions and different ways of thinking, helped provide truly fresh ideas and insights, as well as safe spaces to explore the highs and lows of their own individual career journeys.
"I think it does make you realise we just all go through the same things. We all have the same difficulties. We've all got to at some point have a difficult conversation with an employee. And it does make you realise, actually it's not unique to me, how that makes me feel. Other people feel exactly the same. It's just part of the job." - Designer, UK
Maintaining momentum
Voco’s vibrant, brand-led platform provided an engaging user experience, and workshops - jointly hosted by Voco and Molson Coors’ talent team - helped win the hearts and minds of participants, driving excitement about the Own Your Career programme.
Voco’s platform led each participant on their own personal growth journey with carefully designed and structured learning content designed to keep conversations flowing and enable participants to challenge each other’s thinking, promoting increased reflection and personal growth.
This content focused on helping users and their matches find common ground and collaborate effectively, while building key career development and coaching skills, which they were able to hone together. It also gave them space to workshop their own challenges and opportunities in real time.
The users’ journeys were designed for continuity. Each conversation built on the previous one, and participants maintained either a monthly or two-monthly tempo of connection based on their individual needs and preferences.
Topics included those designed to build initial connection and empathy, such as career storytelling, goal identification, confidence, and vulnerability, and progress to more strategic themes that underpin leadership and soft skill development. All were designed to help users see challenges and opportunities from multiple perspectives.
Baked-in feedback
To ensure ongoing participation and engagement, Voco’s technology carefully orchestrated real-time feedback after each conversation, helping to constantly assess value and outcomes, while simultaneously promoting ongoing connection through ease of scheduling and cues for future conversations.
This feedback flywheel also gave participants time and space to reflect on the insights they’d gained from their conversations, and to document them on the platform via Voco’s confidential journaling functionality, thus locking in learnings for the long term.
“With Voco, it’s much easier to realise how you can solve your challenges, how you can use other experience on some specific topic, to think about some other way to approach things. The conversations help me see things from both sides and admit where I’m wrong, or where there might be a different way of doing something.” - Operations Director, Montenegro
Outcomes and impact
The Own Your Career programme saw sustained momentum and participation over its initial 12 months, with 89% of the pilot cohort of 53 users connecting with matches for multiple conversations.
Over 250 hours of deep conversation took place, with each user connecting with their match on average every two months. Some users amassed close to 15 hours of conversation time over the course of the programme.
As part of the continuous feedback loops baked into the Voco platform, users were asked to rate every conversation they participated in against key career growth outcomes, resulting in extremely high benchmarks being established for ongoing cycles of Own Your Career:
- 95% of conversations were rated excellent
- 95% of participants reported feeling clearer on their career direction
- 95% felt more confident and supported
- 93% felt they’d learned something that would improve their performance at work
- 77% overcame a specific career challenge
"I realised that having someone external made me think about things more. I've been here for 20 years and I don't need to explain what my development areas are or my strengths and so on. But when I met my match for the first time, I just had to articulate it. And then because I had to articulate all this, it made me think about it again and then put it in a different perspective. It was very beneficial for me.” - HR Manager, Serbia
As a result of the success and impact of Own Your Career within the business, the Molson Coors talent team has been able to launch two further social learning programmes powered by Voco, focused on connecting people internally to support knowledge exchange for line managers and high profile DEI use cases such as women in sales roles.
Own Your Career is now a key component of the organisation's refreshed talent development offering, which has been overhauled to reflect more of the principles of generosity, kindness and shared learning that the programme sought to instil at MCBC.
“People come to me and they say how this program really made them trust their voice more, that they feel more empowered. They’ve told me about new ideas they pitched because they had the support of a peer from another organisation, and that it is a safe space to practise new things. And how they’re empowering their teams more now as a result of their conversations.
“So we’re really excited about the movement we’re creating in Molson Coors with this approach - and it’s been fantastic to have Voco here with us on this new learning journey.”
- Anja Dobrosavljevic, Leadership Program Manager, Molson Coors EMEA
