Employee Success at AMBOSS
On the need of a learning organization
AMBOSSians said it, we listened: more opportunities to grow and better leadership
In 2021, AMBOSSians were very clear about their willingness to learn, eagerness to be challenged, and wish to be mentored.
This is music to the ears of an organization that’s as mission-driven as AMBOSS is. This willingness and eagerness is what paves the way to innovate in the way we solve problems, deal with complexity, try new things, and fail.
You know that you’re on your way to be a learning organization when your people tell you they want to try things, and know that if they fail, they will learn something.
What have we done about it you might ask…
We’ve added a freshly baked Learning & Development team to the bigger People Team, and finally given form to what we believe can immensely contribute to delivering an excellent experience to AMBOSSians.
The “is-no-secret” of today’s workplace
Learning is a necessary part of the employee experience we want to deliver to AMBOSSians. We want to improve their experience by giving them the means to succeed in their profession and achieve their goals.
We want to ensure that, at AMBOSS, everyone has access to tools, processes, and systems that allow them to grow, overcome challenges, and feel empowered in their day-to-day work-life.
Learning and Development at AMBOSS
We’re one small team (Giuseppe and I) with one big mission, and an amazing network. We strive to empower individuals and teams in developing the skills and knowledge that enable growth today and in the future. We do this by providing impactful products and services that fit the needs of our people, and cultivate a culture of curiosity and continuous learning.
Our work goes into creating relevant, applicable, and inspiring solutions aligned with the AMBOSS values and business goals.
As Learning & Development professionals, we’ve heard our colleagues from the field loud and clear: workplace learning solutions need to be effective and non-disruptive, and so we’re focusing on learning in the flow of work.
We’re supporting managers and employees to apply knowledge at the different moments of need, from the first day to the moment they need to solve a problem, learn more or adapt to when change happens.
Our focus in 2021
After the team was created, the big question was, “Where do we start?”
Setting priorities when there are so many things you can work on is a challenge for everyone. But on the day Giuseppe and I were designing the research process to find out what we should do first, we had lunch with Meike Schmidt, our Director of Operations.
We were telling her about our plans when she brought up employee onboarding and how we hadn’t revamped the process in a long time. Meike already had a bunch of ideas on how we could strategically deliver content to our new joiners that allowed them to feel included in the organization.
So that was it! We started by auditing the current onboarding process, and learned a lot about its blind spots.
In collaboration with the Operations team who owned the content, we fully redesigned the onboarding process to cover the foundational knowledge of AMBOSS.
We now deliver content to our new joiners that covers our value proposition as an employer, an extensive discovery of who our users are, how we fulfill their needs with our products, what markets we target and why.
In the end, our goal was to deliver an excellent onboarding experience, making our new joiners feel welcome and have clarity about our mission and their role in it. We developed an Orientation Week mostly dedicated to exactly this!
During this week, our new joiners attend AMBOSS knowledge sessions, our feedback workshop, use the AMBOSS product as a medical student or a physician, meet with people from all over the organization, and much more. We can’t forget they also spend time their team, people manager, and onboarding buddy!
While revamping the onboarding process, we also prioritized the creation of an internal leadership development program from scratch in collaboration with
The Unleash program was born out of listening to our employees talk about leadership and the improvements we need to focus on.
Earlier in 2021, we implemented an engagement survey tool, Peakon, with the goal of understanding how we can improve and offer a successful and happy workplace to all AMBOSSians. Besides many other things, this allowed us to get clear insights into how we can grow our people managers and leaders.
The program allows for a modular and flexible series of learning activities that support leaders in developing skills that empower their teams and themselves.
What’s next
2022 will be an exciting year for us! We aim to improve our current Learning and Development solution offering and services, and expand on them through a global learning needs assessment.
This also means we’re striving to increase the impact of the annual learning budget we offer to our teams.
We’re so happy to put learning at the center of our work at AMBOSS as a People team and help us boost productivity, profitability, adaptability to change, and potential to innovate.
In the end, learning is fundamental because it makes people feel happier and more fulfilled in their careers and their lives.
We want to do that for all AMBOSSians!