Case Study

Scandic: Empowering learning for a digital native workforce

February 2020
Reference: IMD-7-2092-1-2-3

In 2015 Scandic Hotels, the largest hotel chain in the Nordics, set itself a new vision, mission, and future states aspiration for 2020.

One of these future states was to have an inspiring and empowering culture. Within this new environment, one of the challenges the HR team faced was how to make learning relevant and empower its diverse and relatively young workforce. The chain was also expanding rapidly and new team members were constantly being onboarded.

Scandic’s training and Learning Management System was unfortunately outdated. Existing eLearning classes were long and usually less than 20% of employees completed the eLearnings. Compounding the problem was that most employees do not have ready access to a computer. And finally, the old way of top-down learning no longer seemed relevant as technological advances have changed the way people gathered information and learned.

How could Scandic keep its learning current and create a learning culture within an empowering company? Scandic’s journey shows how changing the culture of a company can have a rippling effect on learning and motivating employees, and vice versa – how learning methods can also reinforce the desired outcome of an organization’s cultural change.

Learning Objective
  1. Recognize ways a company could imbue ‘abstract’ values to learning to perpetuate a desired business culture and outcome.
  2. Explore how ways of learning have changed.
  3. Understand how technology and social learning could be leveraged to learn and motivate.
Settings
Europe, Sweden
Travel and Leisure
2016-2019
Type
Field Research
Copyright
© 2020
Available Languages
English
Case clearing houses
IMD case studies are distributed through case clearing houses. In order to browse the collection and purchase copies please visit the links below.

The Case Centre

Cranfield University

Wharley End Beds MK43 0JR, UK
Tel +44 (0)1234 750903
Email [email protected]

Harvard Business School Publishing

60 Harvard Way, Boston MA 02163, USA
Tel (800) 545-7685 Tel (617)-783-7600
Fax (617) 783-7666
Email [email protected]

Asia Pacific Case Center

NUCB Business School

1-3-1 Nishiki Naka
Nagoya Aichi, Japan 460-0003
Tel +81 52 20 38 111
Email [email protected]

Contact

Research Information & Knowledge Hub for additional information on IMD publications

Discover our latest research
IMD's faculty and research teams publish articles, case studies, books and reports on a wide range of topics