Tesco Compliance Elearning

Thousands of Tesco employees worldwide take the specially designed Learning Leap every year as part of an award-winning compliance campaign delivering unprecedented levels of engagement.

Tesco runs an annual training programme, covering key compliance areas. The company was looking for a new way to make the experience better for its workforce and more effective for the business, and they wanted to make an impact.

Why did Tesco need global compliance training?

Like any large retailer, there are strict regulations to comply with. Previous compliance elearning courses at Tesco had not always been fully effective, with staff saying that they were too long, unengaging and, at times, not relevant to their role. With 11 countries to reach in just six weeks, the challenge was on to motivate staff and improve mandatory compliance training across the company.

Tesco were facing a few key challenges that we needed to consider:

• Reaching a large global workforce in a tight timescale
• Motivating employees to engage with the training
• Helping staff remember what they learn for longer

How did Sponge deliver rapid global compliance for Tesco?

Our vision for Tesco was ‘Learning Leap’ – a business-wide campaign to help employees embed good compliance behaviours in their daily work. The starting point was a detailed review of the feedback from staff on previous compliance elearning. They described the old training as ‘laborious’, ‘too long’ and ‘irrelevant’ while others complained the training was viewed as a once a year event and there was nothing to help refresh their knowledge.

At the heart of Learning Leap is a fun and easy to understand narrative. Using this engaging framework, a whole campaign around bite-sized modules was created.

Branded emails and other marketing communications encourage staff to take part. A real-time, animated leaderboard shows the number of learners at each stage of the training. It gives managers a visual update on progress and encourages healthy competition. The first finishers get a reward and line managers receive weekly emails telling them how well their team is doing. As part of this communication, managers can click on the names of those not yet completed and contact them directly with encouragement and support.

Once the main modules are completed, employees receive bi-monthly emails, known as ‘PiPs’, or ‘Putting into Practice’. These microlearning quizzes relate to the course topics and link to web pages containing further feedback and job aids. PiPs reinforce the learning and provide an opportunity for people to put their training into practice. Learning Leap continues as an annual programme and remains Tesco’s flagship compliance programme.

The results showed a giant leap ahead in global compliance training:

• 98% completion rate
• Head office workforce training completed in record time
• 92% prefer Learning Leap to previous training

Project award

• Best Use of Elearning to Ensure Compliance – Silver – Elearning Awards – 2014