DIY chain Silvan decided to introduce a faster and smoother onboarding.
Like most other retailers, do-it-yourself hardware chain Silvan find themselves spending considerable amounts of time and resources preparing newly hired employees to be fully operational. Each year 20 % of the organization’s men and women have their first day on the job in one of the stores.
Silvan’s most precious asset is skillful employees. Competence and the ability to sell and advise on solutions are key in the competition. About 2/3 of the staff are part-time workers. Although they are available for fewer hours, they need to be just as qualified as full-time employees.
The challenges for the HRÂ department may be basic but nevertheless difficult to handle. Onboarding is time consuming for everyone involved, employees lack the motivation required to adopt necessary learning, and the organization does not have the infrastructure in place to make onboarding and general learning & development effective.
Challenges:
- It’s time consuming to onboard new employees
- Part-time staffers make up the majority but are less available for training
- Employees lack motivation to see assigned or optional learning
- Silvan and the other DT Group divisions use different or no platforms for distribution of basic learning material
- There is no actionable process for following up on new hires with learning content and surveys nor for creating and assigning compliance initiatives
- Not all employees have job email and access to a computer
- Computer and Internet access in stores are to some extend limited
Related: Â Avoid Fails With the Great Onboarding IcebergÂ
Online Platform with No IT Involvement
Silvan together with the other builders’ merchants and DIY chains in DT Group covering more than 7000 employees in 258 stores across five countries conclude that an online learning & development platform is needed to build competences throughout the organization. However, because of scarce resources it is a precondition that the project will not take up any of the IT department’s time. Human Resources and the business units are then required to acquire and manage its new solution without the involvement of IT other than a formal security authorization.We now have a highly motivating platform to onboard and provide learning & development to colleagues with strong effect. And it’s not an IT project.
258 Stores Operational in 8 Weeks
After only 8 weeks eloomi’s cloud-based platform is launched for 7500 employees including part-time workers. Fully operational from day one the eloomi learning management solution (LMS) covers a number of features that are key to reach excellence across the retail stores:- Automatic assignment of onboarding courses and content based on job-roles
- Blended learning programs – each division is able to share or make their own content
- Course administration handling on-site classroom training, webinars, list of participants and waiting lists
- Centrally managed compliance training and tests
- Capability to scale functionality to include performance management
- Mobile friendly for employees to easily access the platform
- Multi-lingual
- User and organizational data imported automatically from internal DT Group system
- Free storage
- No IT involvement in the project and implementation.
We’re reducing our onboarding to approximately 1/3.
The onboarding process is now reduced to approximately 1/3 of what is was before. New hires can even get access to training content even before they have their first day at work. Tracking easily on employees’s progress in learning programs HR can then follow up and work on changing people’s behavior if necessary.
In a true DIY spirit, and in line with the current trend, the HR department is easily able to implement the solution and get its new platform in service for the collective benefit of the organization – without any involvement of the IT department.
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