Four Questions...

For Patrick Stradiotto, National Training Manager for Best Buy Canada's 74 stores

Best Buy Canada is able to maintain a 95 percent completion rate for all learning courses assigned to its 7,000 employees. What's the "secret to your success"?

It is due to a number of factors:

>> We’ve made training easy to access. We’ve designed Learning Paths (similar to a learning program) specific to each employee’s role, which include all the courses they need to develop their skills — from a new employee, all the way up to a manager. Learning Paths are automatically assigned to new employees.

>> We’ve made reporting on courses easy for managers. We developed a reporting tool that pulls all the information we need from our LMS, and we post it online so managers can see exactly what their current completion rates are, and who has or has not completed the courses.

>> We’ve made the completion rates part of our National Scorecard. Like the old adage says, “What gets measured, gets done.” Stores are expected to maintain at least a 95 percent completion at all times. All courses are to be completed within a 30-day window.

WHAT BENEFITS HAVE YOU SEEN BECAUSE OF YOUR HIGH COMPLETION RATES?

We have solid numbers that show e-learning has been a contributing factor in the following ways:
>> Forty percent reduction in turnover since e-learning was introduced in 2005.

>> Higher product sales in stores with higher completion rates of a that specific product’s e-learning course.

>> Stores with higher completion rates perform better overall than stores with lower completion rates.

HOW IMPORTANT IS THE ELECTRONIC LEARNING COMPONENT OF YOUR OVERALL PROGRAM?

We still train our employees in a number of ways — instructor-led training, Webinars, peer-to-peer training — but there are many benefits to e-learning that other methods can’t deliver, like trackability, consistency and accessibility. If we want to ensure our employees are getting consistent training on a certain issue, and we want (or need) to track it, we use Saba Learning Centre. For compliance training, our LMS is essential so that we can track and report on our employees’ course completions. However, there is still a place for other types of training, and e-learning won’t ever be the answer to all training issues.

WHAT DIFFICULTIES HAVE YOU FACED IN IMPLEMENTING THE PROGRAM?

When we first switched over to our current LMS, it was a big cultural change for our stores. We had a number of technical issues, and we didn’t have an easy way to report on the courses our employees completed.

We were able to tackle these issues in a number of ways. We held LMS training Webinars with our leadership teams and created a number of job aids to help with the change management piece. We worked tirelessly with our IT department to solve all the technical issues. The reporting fix came a few months later when one of our store employees created the first version of our reporting tool. This shows how engaged our employees were in our e-learning program. We won a Chairman’s Efficiency & Effectiveness honorable mention award from the Best Buy Enterprise for this achievment.

Our greatest asset is in our people. E-learning provides us with a platform to develop proficiency and knowledge for our teams on a national scale.

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