20/10/26

Acteon and Merck win Silver at Brandon Hall Excellence Awards

We’re thrilled that our partnership with Merck’s Center for Scientific Exchange Excellence (CSEE) has been recognised with a Silver Award at the prestigious Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards 2026, in the category of Best Team Development Program.

This award recognises the innovative approach used to build a global manager community, helping managers to learn from one another, share solutions and solve business challenges faster together.

It’s an endorsement of our ongoing collaboration with Merck, creating programmes that make a meaningful difference to people while helping the business respond to changing demands.

Ramesh V. Shingala, Associate Director, Learning Experience Designer

"Acteon was an exceptional partner in bringing MMA Mindshare to life, helping us unite Managers in Medical Affairs (MMAs) from around the world to solve shared business challenges through collaboration, peer learning, and knowledge exchange. Together, we created an award-winning learning experience that strengthened our global MMA Community and delivered meaningful business impact."

The challenge: building effective global teams

Managers of Merck’s field-based Medical Affairs teams play a vital role in generating insights that support better patient outcomes. They operate across multiple regions, time zones and systems. While they face many of the same challenges, opportunities to learn from peers and share solutions were limited.

If they could harness the expertise of their global community, they could find creative solutions quicker without duplicating work already done by peers. This meant creating an environment where managers could come together to share experiences and challenges openly, whilst managing the differences in time zone and local priorities.

The solution: peer-driven learning experiences

Acteon partnered with Merck to design a global virtual programme that was relevant, time efficient, and fostered psychological safety. The approach incorporated learning from previous programmes and centred on four key principles:

1. Creating a shared purpose: giving the programme a clear identity and ambition, so every piece of communication and content built a consistent narrative.
2. Designing with managers: building the learning experience around what managers actually needed, with their input from day one, to match their real business priorities.
3. Fostering psychological safety: training members of the community as facilitators to create psychologically safe environments where managers felt comfortable sharing challenges, experiences and ideas.
4. Bringing the global community to life: creating multiple opportunities for managers to connect, share experiences and solve challenges together.

- Using existing channels to promote the programme, resources and support

- Monthly virtual one-on-one peer meetings across regions, with prompts to get the conversation moving

- ‘Community Connectors’ in each region, responsible for helping colleagues build networks and stay involved

The programme featured a launch animation introducing the learning experience with information on how managers could get involved, alongside a wider communication campaign including real case studies shared by managers on the topic of the session.

During the sessions, managers explore business challenges crowdsourced from the community, such as operational efficiency, talent retention and scientific exchange excellence, bringing together perspectives from different markets and regulatory environments. Real case studies support discussion, helping managers co-create practical solutions that can be adapted across regions.

Insights and solutions from the sessions are captured and shared through the Teams channel, and a dedicated report,  helping managers learn from one another and extend conversations beyond the sessions themselves to support ongoing collaboration across the global community.

The impact: faster knowledge transfer, more peer learning, collective problem solving.

The results are impressive, demonstrating the value of creating a global community where managers can learn from one another and solve real business challenges together.

Activity within the manager Teams community increased by 50%, showing that more managers were using the community to connect, share ideas and learn from one another. In addition, 94% of managers said they had built stronger networks and now regularly share experiences with colleagues in other regions. The programme has created new opportunities for managers to connect with peers facing similar business challenges, increasing collaboration.

Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. 93% of participants said the case studies were relevant to their business needs and indicated they would attend future sessions.

Managers are now able to draw on expertise from peers facing similar challenges around the world, helping them solve problems more quickly and avoid reinventing solutions that already exist elsewhere in the business. The programme has strengthened global networks, increased collaboration and established a scalable model for peer learning that will continue to support problem-solving and capability development across the Medical Affairs community.

Philip Rooney, Director at Acteon commented:

“I'm delighted to see our work recognised by Brandon Hall for the second year in a row. It demonstrates how our commitment to working in close partnership with clients to jointly develop innovative learning solutions can help solve real business challenges”

Looking ahead:

Building on the success, Merck and Acteon are applying insights from the programme to inform future iterations and to further expand collaborative learning experiences and tools to help managers share their learning with their teams.

Winning another Brandon Hall Award is a proud moment for both Acteon and Merck. It reflects our ongoing commitment to creating learning experiences that help people thrive, build resilience and drive business objectives.