Great Places reaches 70% engagement for new starters.

Going from a traditional LMS to Thrive

With over 700 employees, Great Places attracts talent from all over the country. The launch of their new apprenticeship and graduate programme, Growing Greatness, saw Great Places experience a generational shift in their workforce.

They decided to review the technology they use across the company, and asked for feedback on their previous Totara LMS during their onboarding process. Employees felt the learning platform was outdated, difficult to use and didn’t provide an instinctive user experience. Great Places wanted to upgrade their onboarding experience by providing a platform that would impress new starters, offer an intuitive experience, and reflect the business’ social and collaborative learning culture.

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Great Places wanted to move away from a learning platform that encouraged a solely compliance-based culture and implement something that encouraged social learning. Their vision was to create a knowledge base for employees, where they could easily contribute and share content themselves. They chose Thrive to completely replace their Totara LMS, as it was the only learning platform that could perfectly match social learning features with the traditional LMS functionality they needed.

With the variety of roles at Great Places they needed to offer a completely unique learning experience for every learner. Personalisation and machine learning are central to Thrive, which means their employees are recommended different content based on their skills and interests. The ability to look and feel like a social media platform ticked the boxes for Great Places. Thrive is powerfully easy to use, and the team didn’t want a learning platform that needed detailed instructions to be able to use it.  Great Places’ migration process was straightforward and seamless; Thrive’s converter tool imported all their existing content and user data and ran it through their personalisation engine. So from day one, their learners were only seeing content relevant to them.

Transforming onboarding and induction training

Great Places partnered up with Equity, taking their employee count from 600 people to 725. Following the partnership, they needed an efficient way to onboard over a hundred new staff members at once. Using Thrive, they converted their face-to-face onboarding programme into a digital learning pathway in just two weeks. It included a range of curated and created content such as welcome and meet the team videos, resources that shared their values and vision, customer success stories and lots more.

Thrive’s comments and questions features meant that Great Places’ new learners had the ability to communicate with new and existing employees throughout their journey. The results? Over 70% of new starters were engaging in discussions or replying to content. This digital process saved the team a third of the time onboarding new starters, and has allowed them to easily review, adapt and evolve the journey as the company grows.

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Bringing social learning to life

Thrive has helped Great Places bring a social learning culture to life in just a few months. Since launch, there’s been a monumental shift in behavioural change as learners are engaging with 3,083% more content than their previous LMS.

“Since switching from Totara LMS we’ve seen some amazing results: 171% increase in engagement, saved 1/3 of time onboarding, 3,083% increase in average content completions and saved half of our annual L&D budget. It’s safe to say we’ve never looked back!”

- Naomi Edwards, L&D Administrator at Great Places Housing Group

Generating engagement has been a campaign-led approach for the team at Great Places. They’ve leveraged Thrive’s campaigns feature to promote and run a range of learning initiatives including wellbeing support, Black History Month, working and managing teams from home and even keeping the kids entertained during lockdown. Going forward Great Places plan to continue driving engagement through campaigns that employees can get involved in, along with competitions that utilise the points and gamification elements of their Learning Platform.

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