DIVERSITY TRAINING 24/7
Helping a D&I train more associates
CLIENT COMPASS GROUP NORTH AMERICA
BACKGROUND
Compass has a lot of associates. Like a LOT. Like to the tune of 278,000 unique individuals working together to build a business. And with that many people you’re bound to encompass many different ethnicities, nationalities, genders, sexual orientations, religious and perspectives. And while absolutely beautiful, this much diversity requires constant and intentional effort to ensure that teams are performing at their best.
And this day-in, day-out responsibility falls on the docket of the managers who are already pulled in more than a few directions. So how do we make diversity and Inclusion training simple and approachable.
That’s the question that the Compass Group D&I team cam to us with.
THE CHALLENGE
A growing Compass needed to find a way to administer Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) training to more associates, reduce cost, and ensure that the training was approachable and fun as opposed to burdensome.
THE OUTCOME
The initial hope was for 100 managers to go through the course in the first year. But the program defied all expectations and a whopping 8,000+ associates had enrolled in the course within the first 6 months of the release.
Prior to UPPER’s involvement Compass would host live D&I trainings around the country and invite salaried all manager within a 300 mile radius to attend the event.
This approach was expensive - travel costs, hotel stays - not to mention the setback that managers experienced from taking a full day out of the office.
With such a heavy price to pay, involvement was limited and many managers declined to participate. Even those who wanted to participate were sometimes unable to since it might be a year or more before a training was back in your area.
"We love Upper Creative and felt that they really helped us to get the exact words out that brought our company to life. "
Vickie Reilly, CEO
In working with the Compass team we quickly realized that first and foremost we needed to make D&I training accessible and allow for managers to engage the training on their own time. We also realized that it needed to be super practical - with activities that managers could implement with some immediate, measurable success.
UPPER ended up designing a five module e-Learning course with gamified content, elegant videos, printouts, interactivities to stimulate engagement, and quizzes to measure learning.
And since practical application was the goal, the course was designed to take managers on a 6 week learning journey with time in-between modules to practice what they’d learned and report back with their wins.
Success. The initial hope was for 100 managers to go through the course in the first year. But the program defied all expectations and a whopping 8,000+ associates had enrolled in the course within the first 6 months of the release.
The popularity of the course actually turned the e-learning course into a profit center for the Compass D&I team and allowed them to do even more to further and promote the D&I trainings.
As for Compass, in January 2018 Forbes Named Compass Group USA to 2018 Best Employers for Diversity and while I’m not saying that was because of UPPER… we kinda like to think we played a small part in their beautiful legacy.