The case
CloudLinux stands out as the only commercially backed operating system meticulously tailored to cater to the unique needs of hosting service providers who oversee a substantial number of shared hosting accounts. Additionally, it serves as an asset for data centers that offer server solutions to enterprises and small-to-medium sized businesses. It delivers resource management capabilities, fortified security measures, and performance optimizations designed to thrive in multi-tenant hosting environments.
This specialized approach ensures efficient resource allocation, robust security, and optimal performance across multiple hosted accounts or tenants, all within a single server infrastructure. Additionally, CloudLinux enhances
server stability and enables higher density operations.
This case study explores the challenges faced by CloudLinux’s Global Customer Experience organization, the Innovorg platform solution, and future considerations for the ongoing relationship.
Challenges
Recruiting and onboarding talent with the appropriate skill sets for their roles is a formidable challenge in an industry that is constantly evolving. A compelling study by Leadership IQ underscores this issue, revealing that 46% of newly-hired employees fail within 18 months. This statistic underscores the urgent need for effective workforce management strategies.
In its collaboration with CloudLinux, Innovorg identified several areas to enhance new employee integration and success. Innovorg focused on the following critical areas:
- Establishing Standards: Define the technical, soft, and functional skills required for each role to ensure clarity and consistency.
- Enhancing Onboarding: Revamp the new employee onboarding and training processes to align with the evolving business needs and expectations.
- Systematizing Knowledge Assessment: Implement a structured approach to assess new hires’ knowledge on specialized topics.
Skills-based workforce development is a strategic approach that involves identifying individual skill gaps to cultivate expertise for both present and future needs. This approach significantly enhances employee satisfaction, streamlines day-to-day operations, and boosts productivity. However, implementing such a strategy is a complex and challenging endeavor. Forbes
Council reported that 87% of companies revealed they have skills gaps in the workplace or expect to have them within a few years.
- Administering Role Fit Visibility: Identify the skills gaps between roles and the individuals currently occupying them, and deliver the training needs analysis.
- Clarifying Skills Expectations: Offer employees clear expectations for their current roles, along with the right tools and content to develop their skills.
- Delivering Individual Employee Scorecards: Enable employees and managers to collaborate effectively based on comprehensive skills and learning data.
Solution
Retaining talent within a company can be challenging if growth opportunities are not clearly communicated. According to a study done by the Pew Research Center, the number two reason for people leaving their job in 2022 was lack of career advancement opportunities.
To enhance employee engagement and retention at CloudLinux, the following strategies were implemented using the Innovorg
platform:
- Create Clear Career Pathing: Enabled employees and managers to collaborate on individual development plans and explore internal opportunities.
- Offer Continuous Training and Upskilling: Provided ongoing training and upskilling to ensure talent remains engaged and continuously growing.
- Provide Proactive Learning Pathways: Facilitated the continuous development of deep technical expertise through structured learning pathways and learning campaigns.
Innovorg’s development of a comprehensive skills catalog, roles-to-skills mapping, employee scorecards, robust training and upskilling program, and minimum weekly learning targets enabled CloudLinux to elevate its workforce to a new level.
- Creating a Comprehensive Skills Catalog and Roles-to-Skills Maps: Innovorg helped CloudLinux identify the required skills for each role, highlighting significant soft skills gaps. This enabled CloudLinux to measure existing team skills and work towards closing those gaps effectively.
- Implementing a Robust Training Program: Using Innovorg’s modules, CloudLinux could gauge the adoption and effectiveness of training programs by analyzing data such as engagement levels, time spent learning, and quiz scores. Learning paths and campaigns delivered targeted training content to address specific skills gaps and provide on-demand product updates.
- Aggregating and Curating Content Automatically: Innovorg aggregates and curates content from top training providers based on the skills catalog and identified skills gaps. This automated process, enhanced with AI-driven quizzes, keeps the content fresh and engaging, eliminating the manual work associated with external content aggregation. It also frees up the Learning & Development team to focus on designing and developing high-quality proprietary content that gets indexed along with the external content to cover all the skills in the catalog.
- Establishing Minimum Weekly Learning Requirements: By setting minimum weekly training requirements of 1-2 hours, employees had clear expectations and time to grow, which significantly increased job satisfaction. This initiative also boosted customer satisfaction scores from the 70th percentile to the 90th percentile, as knowledgeable and engaged employees greatly enhance the customer experience.
- Referencing the Skills Catalog Regularly: Regular use of the skills catalog allowed CloudLinux to identify the necessary skill sets for each role, improving recruiting and identifying skill gaps. This tool also facilitated better information sharing among employees in different locations through features like content rating, comments, learning campaigns, and paths, helping teams perform more effectively even in a fully remote environment.
Impact
Before partnering with Innovorg, David Mello, the CXO of CloudLinux, identified systemic issues that led to lower job satisfaction among the Global Customer Experience (CX) team. The previous structure featured non-systematized training, unclear role expectations, and inconsistent performance measurement, causing employees to feel disengaged and undervalued. The collaboration with Innovorg brought about significant improvements.
With Innovorg’s support, along with the training program CloudLinux introduced a knowledge-centered service (KCS) approach that clarified company expectations and streamlined knowledge sharing processes. Employees now have a clear understanding of their roles and how to access necessary training. Additionally, enhanced information sharing across teams has had a profound impact, particularly given CloudLinux’s global workforce of over 300 remote employees.
Job satisfaction soared after implementing the new training program which included sharing knowledge, clear job scorecards, setting learning and development objectives, and tracking progress.
In a remote work setting, accountability, recruitment, and measuring job satisfaction are challenging tasks. By adopting a skills-based approach, CloudLinux aligned the team with common goals and fostered transparency through shared job scorecards. This not only addressed the challenges of remote work but also mitigated future issues.
Conclusion
Innovorg helped develop a comprehensive skills-based training and development program, fostering a culture of learning and knowledge sharing. This allowed CloudLinux to identify the skills needed for each role, implement a training and upskilling program to close skills gaps among existing employees, and identify when new talent was needed. A clear path for new employee onboarding was established, gradually raising the expertise of the CX staff and significantly improving both customer and employee satisfaction rates.
Future Considerations
Before Innovorg’s introduction, CloudLinux faced challenges within their CX organization, including difficulties in recruiting and developing talent with the appropriate technical skills, identifying individual skills gaps, closing soft skills gaps, and effectively managing a highly distributed remote workforce. The measures taken to address these problems yielded positive outcomes, demonstrating the value of Innovorg’s strategic approach.
I would emphasize this is not just a platform, this is what I would call a solution, which includes professional services that the Innovorg team provided to do a lot of the stuff we simply didn’t know how to do and would have taken us three times as long. The job satisfaction has soared compared to what it was.
David Mello
CXO of CloudLinux
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