Many front-line employees of the Claim division of Travelers insurance felt adrift. “As I traveled around,” said Doreen Spadorcia, Executive Vice President of Claim Services, “a question kept repeating itself: what is the vision for Claim? Where are we going? And how does what I do matter?” She and other Travelers executives found that out of the roughly 20,000 Claim employees, a growing number did not have a solid understanding of their place in the company, and as a result, they also had trouble engaging. The work of Claim employees would feel less disconnected if only they knew the vital impact they had every day on other departments and the health and future of the company. Applied Learning set out to make that happen.

Utilizing our previous experiences with helping employees understand their value chain and teaching financial acumen to non-financial employees, Applied Learning created a series of Knowledge Maps for the Claim division. Throughout its interviews with executives, managers, and employees, it received plenty of different perspectives and complex information about the business, which it then translated into storyboards, visual concepts and a conversational framework. Among other things, Applied Learning was able to explain the nature of the industry, the competition Travelers faced, the relationships between the Claim division and other parts of the company, the impact of the division on the profit stream, and the role that each employee would play in executing Travelers’ vision for the future. This vital information was explained in Knowledge Map sessions across the country, both at pre-existing events such as regional managers’ meetings and at the different offices. The learning cascaded through the company as select employees who experienced the Knowledge Maps were then trained to deliver that same learning to other employees in different Knowledge Map sessions.