Business
Astellas Pharma Inc.
A pharmaceutical company with offices on three continents replaced CD-based training with something employees would actually use.
Communication barriers, and whole families relocating
Astellas employees move between offices in Japan, the United States, Germany and Brazil, and are frequently asked to fly to another hub to work, without much in the way of preparation for the language or the culture waiting there. Communication barriers were making it hard to collaborate across the offices at all.
Relocations rarely involve one person. Families move too, which multiplies the same problem and moves it out of the office and into a supermarket in a country nobody in the household has lived in before.
The challenge
Language training that arrived on discs
The company's existing language-learning software came on CDs and DVDs and needed installation and heavy training. The supplies and labor hours added up.
Worse, traditional software of that kind is not built for community usage, so tracking who was actually progressing was close to impossible, and without that, corporate library specialist Lauren Burke had no way to say whether any of it was worth the money.
In their words
What they told us
Lauren Burke
Corporate Library Specialist, Astellas Pharma Inc.
“The only instruction required is guiding the employee through the app download and sign-in. From there the learner picks up their course at their leisure, and progress tracking tells me whether Mango is a worthy investment.”
What they did
Lessons that travel, and download
Lauren heard about Mango through the Northern Illinois Special Librarians' Association and saw the company at several industry conventions before calling to ask whether it could help with the cultural integration problems she was seeing in the reassignment process.
The app let employees learn anywhere, on any device, and download lessons for the stretches of a travel schedule with no connection. Family Profiles extended that to relatives relocating with them, so a whole household could arrive with some of the language already in hand.
Integration turned out to be far less daunting than she expected. With cloud-based courses, the only instruction required of her is walking an employee through the download and sign-in; from there they work at their own pace.
What changed
A dashboard instead of a supply cupboard
Lauren began hearing regularly that the language and culture features were improving employees' ability to connect with colleagues across the globe.
The company retired the cost of its disc-based software, and the progress and usage tracking through the Mango Admin Portal gave her what she had been missing: a way to tell whether the investment was returning anything.
About Astellas Pharma Inc.
Astellas Pharma is a global pharmaceutical company based in Japan, with large satellite offices in the United States, Germany and Brazil. Employees relocate frequently between them. Lauren Burke is a corporate library specialist at Astellas, responsible for gathering and organizing the tools and resources that support every sector of the company.
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