How a Staff Augmentation Strategy Powered a Large-Scale Learning Experience Design Deployment

SweetRush Co-Founder and Chairman Arturo Schwartzberg and learning innovator and Titans of Training author Cheryl Haga met on Mount Olympus to talk L&D staff augmentation strategy, leading with integrity, and the Olympic-worthy Cruise-SweetRush partnership. 

AS: Cheryl, this is exciting. You’ve been our client at Cruise, and you’re wonderful. Could you share a little bit about yourself and your background and your journey in L&D? 

CH: I've been in learning and development training since about 2012 officially. Prior to that, I ran a nonprofit. I was a high school teacher. I was a project manager. I did lots of different things but finally ended up in the corporate space. I started off in the utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric, the Bay Area's utility company.

That's where I really kind of cut my teeth on training and really understanding what it looks like and how to do it well. I moved over into the autonomous vehicle space in 2018 and have been here ever since, and I love it. It's exciting. It’s constantly changing. I like the high-tech, bleeding-edge technology stuff. It would be hard to go back into something less chaotic.

AS: That’s fantastic. It’s a whole new universe. So, you recently published a book. Can you talk a little bit about the essence of that book?

CH: Absolutely! It's about strategy. What I've learned over the years is that, because I usually work in the operations department, or really closely with operations leaders, they’ve been taught how to create strategies for whatever it is that they're doing. Whether it’s fleet management, gas pipelining, or anything else, they're always taught how to think about the strategy. And what I was finding as an L&D leader is that we're constantly reacting to their strategy, but I’d never been taught how to come up with a strategy. I was doing some stuff and hoping it worked. And despite going to all sorts of different classes and webinars, I just never felt that I was any good at it. I was just kind of flailing around and hoping for the best.

So I started talking with the chief strategists at a variety of different companies and learning how they did it. Then I figured out how to flip it so that I used the same exact processes that they were using in the businesses, adjusting slightly for L&D’s supportive role to the business strategy. 

I did not do it perfectly the first couple of times I did it, but I got better at it and felt more confident about it. And so, I figured that, with my 15 years of experience and all of my lessons learned, it might be good for me to write a book—not just for myself, but for anyone who can learn from my experience, avoid the mistakes I made, make some fresh mistakes of their own, and get their L&D strategy started faster.

AS: And your book is very timely, because L&D and technology are changing so much. You’re hitting the market at the right time, because so many L&D leaders are wondering how to create a strategy and effective vision for their training.

Let’s talk about your position at Cruise. What was your role there when you joined, and how did that change? And what were your initial goals?

CH: When I first started, my role was to own all of the operational training: everything within fleet management, drivers, customer remote assistance, etc. And when I first started, we had a great team of 23 subject matter experts, but they didn't all have expertise in training development. In short, we didn’t have true instructional designers. We didn't have senior instructional designers. We had expertise in the content, but not in how to actually create awesome training. So my number-one priority was to upskill the team I had, while also augmenting my team with temporary talent so that we could do the work that was required.

After about two years, I moved up to leading the L&D team, which meant the traditional communications and management training were under my purview. I found the same situation once again: We had a great team of expert program managers, but they weren't instructional designers. So all of these programs were expected to be purchased off the shelf or from a vendor. That’s fine for things like ladder safety, but off-the-shelf leadership development programs don’t always resonate. They’re more expensive; you can't customize them; and they don’t always speak to the business, especially when you're in a highly specialized field. To add another layer, at Cruise we needed to mirror the innovations in the technology in everything else that we do—including learning. 

Most leadership training is awesome; don't get me wrong! I've had some amazing leadership training courses, but they just weren't going to meet our needs. So once again, I needed to bring in more people who were highly skilled in instructional design to design that program for instead of buying it off the shelf.

AS: From my experiences with you, you’re very dynamic and effervescent, but also very driven to move things quickly. Based on your experience, how would you describe your leadership style?

CH: I think authenticity and integrity are a couple of the big ones. I think that everyone goes into leadership positions with the best-laid plans—really, everyone goes to work every day wanting to be awesome. No one goes to work saying, “I’m going to just totally mess up today.” Everybody goes in thinking they're going to be awesome; then the rubber hits the road and people get stressed out. They have too much work, not enough time, not enough of the right processes, not the right tools, whatever. Pick your poison. 

And that's when leaders just lose their minds and start doing things that are toxic and not great for their teams. And so from my perspective, it all comes down to being authentic and having high integrity. 

We need to own up to being leaders; we need to own up to where we are and what we're doing and be honest and transparent about that. And again, people want to show up and be the best in the world. Just give them the opportunity to be amazing, and they will consistently do that.

AS: I found you to be a great leader, and I heard everyone around you echoing that. It’s that combination of friendliness, energy, effervescence…but also this drive to get stuff done. 

Speaking of getting stuff done, when you issued your RFP—the one that SweetRush eventually won—what were your needs, and what was the challenge you were trying to solve?

CH: There were actually a couple of needs, and at the time they were challenging to articulate because I didn’t know their depth. It was pretty early; I'd only been with Cruise for three months at that point. 

The main problem was that we just had too much work. We simply needed more people who knew how to create training. 

But the other problem—and this was ultimately why I went with Sweet Rush—was that I wanted to upskill my full-time team. I needed my team because they were SMEs. They knew how everything worked, but they didn't have the skill set to create really effective training because they'd never been trained as instructional designers. 

I needed a team that could come in and not only get things done, but also show the existing team what good instructional design looks like and build up their skills and expectations. Meanwhile, I was looking at our processes and what to establish in terms of standards, because we had no standards yet. 

That includes design standards: I’m not good at creating PowerPoint templates. Mine look like a clown exploded! I needed people who had a good eye for design to create all those foundational templates, because that wasn't going to come from me. Those are just a few of the bits and pieces I needed to start building out a strong L&D team. I had amazing people, but none of us had all the needed skills, so I had to bring in experts who had skills that my existing team didn't have.

AS: I know we brought in upwards of 40 senior instructional designers. So you ended up with a team of 60 to 65 people. 

Originally, you chose a different L&D staff augmentation vendor. Out of curiosity, what made you decide they were not the right fit? 

CH: The one thing the other vendor had that SweetRush didn't originally have was the strong experience in safety-critical work; that is, how to create a task analysis in a way that was auditable by organizations like OSHA. 

But what I found was that, while they had that experience—which is phenomenal and challenging to find—they also had older models of doing everything. They just weren't as up-to-date as Sweet Rush. SweetRush came in with the modernization, the speed, the cutting-edge L&D practices, and all the cool bells and whistles. 

When I started to dive in a little bit more, I realized that I already knew how to do the documentation and could teach it to my team. I didn’t need someone else to do it. What I really needed was to bring in the modernization, the instructional and graphic design—the cool stuff. 

That was what finally brought me to SweetRush: realizing the skill set that I bring to the table and how to leverage it—and bringing in the skills I didn’t have. 

AS: So, when you turned to SweetRush, I know we had to move quickly to source those 40 instructional designers for your team. What was your experience of how SweetRush responded to make that happen?

CH: Absolutely amazing! There were three things that Sweet Rush did that consistently knocked my socks off:

• Talent Assessment and Retention: Sweet Rush did a fabulous job of vetting, finding staff augmentation talent who were phenomenal, and keeping them for as long as we needed their skill set. This was all done really quickly , and once we knew exactly who we were keeping and who was going to be transitioning off, Sweet Rush immediately brought in replacements who complemented who we already had.
• Understanding and Addressing Team Dynamics: At that point, we’d already had some staff augmentation talent who had worked with us for six to eight months. These folks already knew some of our hot spots: both strengths and areas of opportunity. SweetRush then took these insights and brought in specialists who can address the areas of opportunity to help us move faster. I don't know that other companies would have done that due diligence to understand both the individual talent and the overarching structure of the team. So you quickly pulled people that we already loved and then also made sure to supplement where we most needed, right off the bat.
• Efficiency and Flexibility: At first, we were very cautious. We were too hands-on with our temporary team members, because we were a little nervous. But we kept seeing the quality of the talent that SweetRush was bringing us: The people we got were consistently amazing, and they got up to speed quickly. 

And we always had options: Do we want to just bring in someone for a short time? Do we want to reassign some of the talent we already have? There were so many different options available that I never felt stuck. There was always another approach to try. 

AS: We always feel that one of our strengths is the fact that we do this work, so we know how incredibly important talent is. We know how important it is to get the right fit because everyone's circumstance is different. Every individual is different. 

I think another strength of ours is that we’re not transactional; we’re very concerned that each placement is successful. We try to stay close. 

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Frizzlefest (an homage to Ms. Valerie Frizzle, the adventurous elementary-school teacher who literally drives learning innovation in The Magic School Bus series), because it was so unique to bring in all the talent and then SweetRush leadership as a whole. 

CH: My idea for Frizzlefest was to get everyone together in a room and figure out what wow looks like, because there was no way I was going to come up with it by myself. 

We needed to bring the whole braintrust together for that, the whole team. Beyond just bringing in a whole bunch of individuals who are really good in all their different things, we wanted to leverage the whole SweetRush braintrust. So knowing all the stuff you had–even if we weren’t actively utilizing every modality–it’s still inspirational, even if we’re not going to do it. Maybe we do something close, and it still brings that innovation piece. 

No kidding, we got together on Wednesday, and when everyone left on Friday, every single team created prototypes that they launched the following week and executed two weeks later. It was inspiring. It was exciting. It was just fun, and it’s so easy to be creative when you’re having fun. 

It was an investment, but we truly saw the ROI from that one event. 

AS: Right, I thought Frizzlefest was brilliant on so many levels. It was empowering for everybody to be participating as a group at that level. And I know the Sweet Rush team learned so much from Frizzlefest, and so did I. 

I’d always known that we stayed close to our talent, but it really was an eye-opener for me as I had never fully grasped the degree to which our staff augmentation talent thought of themselves as Sweet Rush. I had to experience that on site to truly feel it. 

So, we’ve talked about how we partnered to augment and upskill your team, and it sounds like you really started to produce a lot of innovative work quickly.

CH: Right, because we brought in the 40 SweetRush IDs to help with our effectiveness team. Once we got our team up and running and understanding how to create good training and how to launch it, then we brought in and created our effectiveness team. That helped us create great stuff that went out and had an impact. It wasn’t just butts in seats. 

We were actually moving the needle on performance, reducing errors. After a lot of research, we found that we’d improved performance by 140%. 

So if the company gave us a dollar, we were going to give them $140 worth of productivity. And that was just one program. That was something we had never been able to produce before, and that we wouldn’t have been able to produce if it was just the internal team focused on pumping out curriculum. 

Just having that extra bandwidth to be able to prove our effectiveness helped to set us apart from any other training organization. Nobody should care if you’ve got a hundred butts in seats unless those hundred butts are actually improving the bottom line. Proving what we were doing was really impactful, and that was how we got additional budget to be able to do more. 

AS: That is a pearl and a half. We talk a lot about effectiveness and how too many organizations don’t invest the time or budget to build a measurement plan to do that. One of the biggest gaps that we have is proving effectiveness. It’s brilliant that you focused on that. 

Did you find any areas to improve? Did you make any changes as a result? 

CH: Big time. We made a lot of changes. For one thing, we thought the onboarding for our customer support organization was perfectly lovely. But after our effectiveness team went in and analyzed performance, learning, and NPS scores, we ended up completely reimagining that program and creating more of a hands-on coaching experience. 

We knew that other departments would show similar results. So we looked at a few key indicators, and then updated every single one of our onboarding programs from mostly classroom- and video-based learnings to no more than two to three hours of classroom training, followed by being out on the floor (or garage, depending on the work environment.) 

We saw a faster time to competency on our customer support team. We were just beginning to launch with our other teams, but we saw dramatic improvements. We saw 155% ROI on the onboarding for the driver support specialist team. 

One of their responsibilities is to go retrieve any cars that break down. So to onboard them Liz on the team created a gamified module using Storyline and Beyond. The story was that the learner was in a rocket that got stranded between the Earth and the moon, and the team had to go through different steps of a “mission” to save the rocket. It was really fun. Learners got into teams; it was so effective. You saw learners who looked like they’d been falling asleep in sessions before to now being up and engaging in races. They were literally coming up with their own games and competitions against the other teams. We saw huge engagement spikes afterward, looking at the data. 

AS: That’s wonderful; it’s kind of like when they do clinical trials and realise, “Wow, this drug is so effective. We have to get it out to people.” It sounds like you learned enough to recognize how to bring your findings into everything you were doing. 

Let’s talk about something uncomfortable: a time you describe as when “the world flew apart.” Cruise went through some dramatic changes that required layoffs. How was that experience for you?

CH: It was wrenching. I don't think I've ever cried more in a single week. I had to make those decisions that I knew would change people's lives, and there was nothing I could do about it. I wanted to be as empathetic as possible and help people as much as I possibly could. 

I also worked with Sweet Rush to make sure we knew what was going to happen with our contractors. I mirrored a lot of the processes that you do with your contractors. We had a bunch of all-hands meetings and we talked about ways to support people knowing what was coming. We did mock interviews, matched up resume buddies, just made sure that everybody was as prepared as possible and then just held on for dear life.

I would never wish that experience on anyone. At the same time, I have to find a positive light, and I do think that it made all of us stronger. It definitely made me a tougher leader. I didn’t necessarily want to be a tougher leader, but I had to make really hard decisions, and I know I could do that again. 

I’ve been through four layoffs. During my first two, I didn’t feel empathy for my leadership team because I didn't understand what it was like on their side.

But I look at it now from a different perspective, understanding it a little bit more. And so I hope that I was able to provide my team—and that includes SweetRush—with the understanding that it wasn't something that they did wrong. It had nothing to do with anyone and if I had my decision, it certainly wouldn't have been that one, but I had to make those decisions. 

I hope that, from a leadership perspective, my team knew that I had to make the right decision for the business. I think that most did. As they have more experiences like this, they will probably look back with more understanding for leadership, just as I did.

AS: Like we were saying earlier, leadership is not just a walk in the park. Having to lay people off is one of the worst experiences you can possibly have. Fundamentally, I think people realize that you are a compassionate, caring leader, and it wasn’t something you enjoyed. 

What was your experience of how SweetRush partnered with you through that process?

I could not have asked for a better partner. At one point Rodrigo just texted me hearts, and I lost it. I was wildly impressed both times, because this was now twice that we’ve gone through this. 

I learned a lot of best practices from Rodrigo, Ann, and Cathy on the SweetRush Talent Solutions team, because they’ve had more experience with this kind of thing. In this round, I’d spoken with a bunch of people who had been laid off the last time about what we could have done differently to be more supportive. 

Then in this round, the amount of effort and constant support the team provided went on for months after the initial layoffs. I talked to Ann a few weeks later, and she had already found three or four people potential new roles. Clearly, SweetRush has love and care for their talent to stay on because they're really high performers. 

There was one individual who was a little more challenging from the first round of layoffs, and we've had numerous conversations about how to support that person. A year later, SweetRush was still reaching out to that individual to coach them and help them get out of their own way. 

SweetRush showed care and compassion for me personally, as well as the individuals who were impacted. That’s why SweetRush will always be my top pick, period. 

No matter what happens, it's not a tactical relationship with SweetRush. It’s a long-term, let's-all-be-successful, everybody-wins relationship. 

AS: I love that. We did come together as a team under difficult circumstances and really come up with a plan to do the best we could. I remember I reached out and met with everybody individually, so it was a full-court press to do our best in a difficult situation. 

I really appreciate everything you just said about the Talent Solutions team. I’m very proud of them and how they behaved. 

It’s easy when it’s easy, right? 

CH: Right. The other thing that I was really impressed with was obviously right after all of that happened, everyone who remained had a lot of survivor’s guilt. The SweetRush team addressed that directly and talked to the team about how to come together and support each other. That’s unique. I really appreciated that there was a lot of conversation about that and about keeping the team bonded and together. 

AS: Let me ask you this. Having all the experience you describe, if a peer came to you now and said, “Oh my gosh, Cheryl, I need to get 40 talented instructional designers on my team—and quickly,” what advice would you give them? 

CH: Call Rodrigo! Tell him what you need and then just be very open and honest about exactly what your challenges are. Be very open and transparent, and he'll help you figure it out. He’ll put you in touch with the right person, even if it’s not him. Just reach out to him; he’ll save you hours of time. 

AS: And finally, I wonder how you would characterize SweetRush’s partnership with you throughout the entire Cruise journey? 

CH: All caps and exclamation points to infinity. Again, if I had a challenge, I felt very comfortable airing my dirty laundry and saying, “This is my challenge. This is the situation.” I felt very comfortable having the team help me through the problems and challenges I was going through–even when I simply had an idea and needed a brain partner to ask, “Is this a good idea or not?” There was always someone at SweetRush I could talk to about absolutely anything. 

Even when I would meet a SweetRushian for the first time, it was always a lovely, welcoming conversation that felt natural and normal. I’ve got this amazing network of people who are now in the braintrust, and I feel that there’s nothing we can’t figure out and solve together. 

AS: I love that. Again, for us, it’s not transactional; it’s all about relationships. It’s all about truly understanding just how difficult this work can be and the kind of talent you need and the ways people need to be empowered and nurtured. I’m so glad you had that perception and that’s how we showed up for you. 

CH: And it wasn’t just me. Every single person on the team within the first three months of the SweetRush partnership came back to me and said, “Oh my God, they’re amazing.” It wasn’t because I was the leader; you guys showed up all the time. There was always that same high level of partnership for everyone on the team. 

AS: That’s awesome! Cheryl, you’re awesome. Thank you so much for the conversation.

‍