Technology, Learning and Communications with Natalia Shehadeh

Comtech

Natalia Shehadeh is a well-known compliance expert who worked in the energy sector for over a decade. She is now the Chief Integrity Officer at ABB, a multinational corporation in the robotics and process automation space. Natalia believes that using data and technology in compliance is no longer an option: “It is absolutely mission-critical to the proper functioning and success of our function and our mission,” she tells Tom Fox and Valerie Charles. In this week’s show, Natalia chats with Tom and Valerie about the importance of leading with data, including how to use data to measure cultural buy-in.

Building Culture with Data

“We are trying to look at opportunistically, how to leverage data for purposes of giving us real-time insights on the health of our integrity culture in the company; how to do so effectively and efficiently, and with a real keen eye towards innovation,” Natalia remarks. Her cross-functional team - which includes data professionals and business analytics experts - is a major reason they have been so successful in moving towards that goal, she says. Their focus is not only on monitoring from a risk perspective, but also measuring how effective their communications for learning purposes are. Valerie asks her about the data sets they use. She explains that they monitor internal social media posts as well as their learning assets to measure sentiment. “A lot of data we’re looking at and trying to get a feel for, Are we communicating effectively in the eyes of our employees? And how do we think that's moving the culture needle?” she tells Valerie.

Getting Cultural Buy-In

“Data analytics or tech solutions on their own aren't particularly useful without the cultural buy-in of the organization,” Valerie comments. She asks Natalia how she gets buy-in at ABB. Natalia responds that ABB is a data-focused organization, so they understand the importance of using data. However, she advises, it takes “care and feeding culturally” to get to the point where you have quality data sets that can provide rich insights.

Facilitating Learning Through Data

ABB is focused on “communicating learning in an effective way”, Natalia tells Tom and Valerie. To this end, they revamped their approach to employee training, focusing instead on a data-driven stratified approach. Traditional compliance and integrity training is no longer mandatory; instead, employees interact with learning assets as and when they need, similar to how they use Youtube to find a quick solution to a problem. “We really believe in inculcating an adult self-learning objective,” Natalia says. “...The concept is [to] create a simple learning approach where people will want to come back for more because it's easy, it answered the question that they had, and hopefully we can make it a little bit fun.”

Resources

Natalia Shehadeh on LinkedIn

ABB