Who: A large retail company with more than 20,000 employees across multiple outlets
Challenges:
- Staff attrition more than 40%. Management trouble-shooted the problem and concluded that new joiners not onboarded properly tended to leave the company within 3 months.
- Company’s HR Team spent a lot of time, effort and money on recruiting, onboarding and training.
- New joiners had to wait for more joiners to form a class to be able to justify the time and logistics for an employee onboarding program to be conducted. This resulted in some who had not been inducted or oriented properly even after a month. This meant low productivity of a paid workforce. Moreover, the disengaged joiners developed a negative attitude towards the company.
- New joiners felt overwhelmed with excess information piled up on them and ended up not really being onboarded. Bite-sized information might have been more palatable.
- Some of the branches didn’t follow the onboarding framework set by the central HR Team. They perceived onboarding to be an unimportant chore and just directly channelled the workforce to the shop floor. This led to workers faced with lack of required knowledge of the company, the values, the philosophy, product knowledge and processes. Consequently, engagement issues cropped up leading to resignations.
Solutions:
- Recommendation: Start onboarding the new joiners 10 days prior to joining the company. The program continues for another 5 days after joining to be completely enabled to hit the ground running.
- A series of programs was created and pushed out to the smartphones of the new joiners who were drip=fed with learning content. Each of the programs was bite-sized (about 5 to 15 minutes) where they could read content, watch videos, do certain tasks, chat with peers, reflect on what they have learnt, capture selfies or shots of themselves whilst completing tasks as evidences, assessing themselves via quizzes, view certain infographics and comment on them and then write their own thoughts and recommendations. The programs covered various aspects of non-sensitive content.
- Once they had joined, confidential content was shared using the same mobile technology. In addition, customized programs with high level of interactivity and some element of VR were built. These were accessible through the desktops in the learning corners of the branches. These detailed programs with assessments complemented the mobile chunked learning.
Results:
- Engagement of staff and productivity increased.
- Staff attrition dropped by more than 50% in the first 6 months alone.
- Cost of running induction programs drastically reduced.
- Quantitative and qualitative learning analytics provided detailed insights on engagement rate, program effectiveness, happiness level, impact and completion. This dashboard gave a single point of view of progress made by all learners. Avvanz-Gnowbe exceeded on all metrics versus the original onboarding programs.