Citi's Internal Development Programme, #BeMore Inspires Colleagues

Citi's #BeMore programme has won a silver award at the e-learning awards for Best use of Social and Collaborative Learning Technologies. This is the first time Citi has won an award in recognition of our use of social technology to support the development of our own people.

Launched in May 2015 across EMEA, #BeMore is an internal development programme designed to empower our employees to take control of their own development. One of its unique features is its use of social learning to educate and engage people about how and what they learn, while providing a central access point for all things learning across the region.

Since the launch of the programme just 6 months ago, over 12,000 employees have actively participated via our Jive based social platform, Citi Collaborate. They have shared their learnings from an inspirational rota of speakers including British explorer and endurance runner Sir Ranulph Fiennes, University of Houston U.S. psychologist and expert on empathy Dr. Brene Brown and famed Russian film director Krill Serebrennikov, reflected on the personal stories of Citi's EMEA leaders, and employees created and shared their own '3EStory' to bring Citi's approach to connected learning to life.

The highlight of the programme was the 30 Day Development Challenge, which encouraged employees to complete thirty micro actions (one a day, for thirty days) designed to challenge them to perform an everyday activity differently, thereby building muscle memory and starting to form new habits. Each micro-action took less than ten minutes to accomplish, at home or in the workplace. Examples of such micro actions include:

• Going for a walk and talking to someone today
• Becoming more curious about how a different space enables a different quality of conversation
• Thinking about how a valuable piece of advice you've been given or that you have learned over the years has changed something important in your life. Your challenge becomes to pass that advice or that life lesson on to another person today

In the true spirit of social learning, participants were asked to share their learning with their colleagues via Citi Collaborate, prompting more than 4,500 people to upload comments and photos and liking and sharing their colleagues' contributions.

Across the region, #BeMore has had a meaningful and positive impact on the way our people think and plan for their development and has led to an increase in the number of completed Independent Development Plans.

"#BeMore has exceeded all expectations," observed Brian Murphy, EMEA's Head of Learning. "It's been incredible to watch the excitement and momentum grow across the company. The beauty of using social is the speed at which discussions and learning developed: across countries and business lines. Not an easy task in such large and complex organisation like ours."

''People were truly engaged with the challenges and learning to do things differently," commented Anca Lordache, Senior VP of Learning and the mastermind behind the 30 Day Development Challenge. "We were especially pleased to see our senior leaders demonstrating their personal support by completing the challenges and sharing their learning with colleagues."