It’s been a few days since our webinar Leading the Retail Revolution: why forward-thinking L&D leaders are moving to Thrive, and we’re pausing to reflect on five key takeaways from the event.

Thrive’s Chief Sales Officer Josh Devanny led the discussion, joined by a panel of top L&D leaders in various retail businesses ranging from skincare to soft furnishings.
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The Panel

Nicola Kilner - CEO and co-founder at DECIEM

DECIEM - ‘The Abnormal Beauty Company’ - has garnered huge success with their family of brands including their biggest brand The Ordinary, which has over 100 retail stores worldwide and a dedicated online following. With word-of-mouth spreading organically through social media, DECIEM’s social strategy has become a massive part of their brand - so why shouldn’t it be part of their learning?
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Helen Robinson - Head of talent at Dunelm

As the UK’s leading home furnishings retailer with a team of over 10,000 learners, Dunhelm needs an L&D strategy suitable for a large, deskless workforce who are always on-the-go. How do you fit learning into a fast-paced retail role?
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Rob Harris - Head of L&D at Frasers Group

Frasers Group is a retail company comprising several well known brands - including Sports Direct, Flannels, GAME, Jack Wills and more. With a segmented workforce of over 35,000 people all with varying needs, how do you cultivate an effective learning and development strategy that suits everyone?
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Matt Brooks - Head of Learning at Westmorland Family

Westmorland is a family business that operates one-of-a-kind service stations, farm shops and kitchens throughout the country - and has always had storytelling at the core of its legacy. How do they marry their home-grown, family brand with a streamlined, digital L&D strategy?

With such a dynamic panel made up of L&D leaders with a huge range of differing expertise, it’s no surprise that there was some incredible advice given throughout the discussion.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into the five key takeaways we learned from this informative webinar:

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"For a start-up the culture of failing is something that comes very naturally, because you have many failures before you have one success."

Nicola from DECIEM commented on the difficulty start-ups can have with communication when it comes to rapid growth, and the idea of “failing fast.”

She explained that the great thing about a platform like Thrive is the communication element; how that creates a culture of community. As such, failures become successes. By learning from mistakes, we can eradicate blame culture and recognise failure as a sign of progress.
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“Have your colleagues at the front and centre. Have them at the heart of everything you do.”

Helen from Dunelm offered this as a piece of advice to keep in mind when implementing a new learning platform.

"Have the colleague at the very front and centre. What is the experience that they're going to have? That has ultimately driven how we've built the platform out. ... Have them at the heart of everything you do."

Helen’s main objective, she explained, has always been to make it as easy as possible for colleagues to find content relevant to them. There are a wide variety of diverse roles within the organisation, none of whom have very much spare time - so to be able to get quick and easy access to development is hugely important. They use Thrive’s Explore Page feature to categorise and break down content for colleagues so they can get where they need to go in a couple of clicks.

She explained that this - along with the look and feel of the platform - went a long way towards keeping their people engaged when compared with their previous platform.

"Be really clear about your intentions, and how you're going to measure success. There's so much you could do, so be really laser-focused on the things that are going to add the most value."

With 35,000 learners spread out across multiple brands, Frasers Group has to be very strategic about their learning. As Rob explained: "The scale and size of the group is one thing, but our large audience isn't necessarily the problem. ... It's across multiple brands, so it's the complexities within the audience [that matter.]"

Frasers Group uses Thrive to cut up their audience and segment who sees what, so when an individual learner logs in, they are only seeing content that is relevant to them.  

"We're building out our content and making sure that it's really impactful. We're a very commercially-focused business, and therefore we want to make sure that whatever we are going to do is going to add value, and have an impact on our people."

Rob recommended having “content champions” within the team: experts in their fields who the rest of the team are familiar with, so they can share their knowledge with the wider organisation. This encourages social learning, but maintains a laser-focus on the knowledge that is going to produce the best results.
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“Communication can be the hook to pull people in, then hit them with the learning.”

This quote came from Matt of Westmorland Family - but all our panellists seemed in agreement that leading with comms was a great strategy.

Westmorland launched Thrive just six months ago, and is already in the top five most engaged companies on the platform. So, how did they get their people to adopt Thrive so quickly?

Matt explained that in order to encourage everyone in the company to contribute and interact with the platform, they began by creating The VIC (The Very Important Colleagues Club.) This was made up of a select few Westmorland employees, who were tasked with testing out content before it went live. This helped everyone - from the stakeholders to the L&D team - understand how the platform worked, and how best to utilise it.

With this initial rush of activity, it wasn’t long before the rest of the team naturally wanted to follow suit: "When a few people have a go, everyone joins in - it's having those few brave souls who are going to step forward first... Once that happens and you're past the tipping point, it becomes normal."

Matt admitted that he was initially a little bit apprehensive about user-generated content, but it happened so naturally thanks to the core cohort of people (VIC’s!) that they engaged when first launching Thrive. It then unfolded organically, and now people are uploading a variety of high-quality learning materials - from written resources to podcasts. In the words of Matt: "People just seem to want to post!"

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"In a world where everything is social, why not bring that into your learning platform?"

Rob of Frasers Group offered this piece of wisdom as an answer to the question: “What advice would you give to other leaders who are hesitant about moving to Thrive?” while he was echoing the sentiments of Nicola from DECIEM. Nicola explained that with a workforce who skews young, DECIEM was making full use of Thrive's social capabilities.

She called attention to the way we all use social systems within our daily lives: “The line between work and home life is becoming more and more blurred with working from home, and with such a social platform people’s feelings of positivity, belonging and engagement have gone through the roof more than we ever could have anticipated.”

As a social-forward brand, DECIEM garners a great deal of engagement on Tik Tok with bitesize, informative videos that reach thousands of viewers. With Thrive they can seamlessly embed this social element into their learning strategy by pulling those videos straight through onto the platform, and colleagues can view the content on multiple devices - just like personal social media. This supports DECIEM’s strategy of social learning, and suits their largely Gen Z and Millennial workforce.

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Thanks for reading our round-up of five key takeaways from our retail webinar. We hope you’ve found a piece of wisdom that you can carry into your own learning strategy - and if you’re an L&D professional in the retail space, why not book a demo to see how Thrive could help you?

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