By Roberta Gogos, VP Marketing, Fuse.
With Cornish fashion and lifestyle brand Seasalt at the helm and Fuse as its anchor, the company went from nought to nearly 90% learning engagement in record-breaking time. Any company worth its salt would be envious of such adoption records, as well as the outstanding results Seasalt achieved in empowering its people to access knowledge in the flow of work.
We’ve got a fabulous case study that tells this story. It’s also where you’ll learn how Seasalt has been using Fuse to support transparent communication to build community during the pandemic.
However, there are a few other elements of the Seasalt L&D business use case that we felt deserved a deep dive, (last pun, promise) so sit back and read on while we explore how Seasalt is using Fuse to overcome several of the most common business challenges that many companies are grappling with: onboarding in a fast-growth environment, accessing knowledge at the point of need and measurability of learning-driven outcomes.
Onboarding is Everything
When it comes to onboarding employees and getting them up to speed and delivering value, speed is absolutely everything. Fuse CEO Luke Oubridge does a great job of explaining speed and agility in two of his recent blogs: The Startup Secrets for Success in Enterprise L&D and The Top 10 Metrics that Matter in L&D for Profitability.
As Luke points out, L&D is an area where our customers are moving faster than most other business units. The time to value is unparalleled, and the role Fuse plays in onboarding is a big part of this.
From Seasalt’s perspective, one of the biggest challenges the company wanted to overcome was onboarding employees in such a fast growth environment. Founded in 2008, the company now has 70 retail stores across the UK and Ireland, and sells to 157 countries online. It employs 1000 people and by 2018, it was opening between 10 and 15 new stores per year.
Picture being an onfloor sales person in such a high octane environment, or even a customer service agent responsible for assisting e-commerce based sales. Products change several times a season, and customers truly value a knowledgeable salesperson who knows their Killiow Tunic from their Trenwheal Coat. And it’s not just about distributing product knowledge to sales people: operationally, the company had an increasingly expanding supplier ecosystem that it needed to understand and communicate with.
As Seasalt’s Head of Engagement and Development James Hampton says: “The biggest, most overriding challenge was trying to onboard and train new employees in such a fast-growth environment.”
Before Fuse, Seasalt was onboarding its employees using face-to-face training which could take place in individual stores, but often took place at the head office in Cornwall.
Imagine the delay in getting product information if you are, for example, a Seasalt employee in Dundee or Belfast. A jaunt over to the head office isn’t just a train ride away.
With Fuse, Seasalt created five learning communities, and by the end of the first week of use, every single store had its own learning community that it had customised in-line with its own specific learning needs.
Measurability Mapped to Individual Learning Journeys
But wait a minute. Creating communities is nothing if no one is using them, right? This is the really phenomenal part: the L&D team saw amazing adoption at scale even in the very first days of Fuse, with its initial figures showing +83% active users (a number which was growing day upon day.)
With so many active communities, Seasalt had a ready-made onboarding environment that also empowered existing employees to access knowledge in the flow of work to drive performance. One store manager puts it best:
“We have a lot of great learning resources on the platform so I save a lot of time because people are now able to search for and find the knowledge they need themselves. That frees me up to focus on my own workload, but it also helps employees to feel empowered. It’s really an invaluable tool - and I personally use it a few times every day now.”
The ability to create bespoke learning communities and to map individual learning journeys means that Seasalt can create learning that appeals to its employees in a very personalised and individual way (hence the high uptake.) However, it also means that the company can measure the impact of learning on company performance.
Before Fuse, Seasalt admittedly had zero visibility of how well its employees were being onboarded, and, as James says, because of that, the company had no way to determine what was working and what could be improved from a learning point of view. We’re not knocking in-person learning, but when training is only done face to face, it can be difficult to measure.
Fuse can be part of a blended learning strategy, and features several digital tools that support employees who want to put into practice the knowledge they have gained and to receive feedback from their managers. We support formal and informal comprehension assessments, observational assessment and 1-2-1 coaching. All of this can be measured to assess how well learning is working within Fuse.
We also take measurability one step further. With our Universal Analytics, companies can track interactions - be that content views, engagement, social, or assessment data - it’s all there. Our users can get as granular as they like in tracking, measuring and making actionable insights in order to identify trends in how people are engaging with learning. If you’d like to know more, read our blog Why Universal Analytics in Fuse Trumps xAPI.
Ellie George, Seasalt’s Digital Learning Coordinator is looking forward to getting deep into the data. As she says: “The next step is digging into the data to prove that all-important link between learning engagement and improved business performance. It’s going to be a fun discovery process.”
If you’d like to learn more about the other ways Fuse is helping Seasalt to achieve its learning goals, download the case study today.
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