Customer Story
Scaling Compliance, Enrollment, and Loyalty In a High-Turnover Fast Food Environment
Discover how Bridge LMS helped one of the UK’s biggest fast food chains to manage the learning experience of its expanded workforce in a pandemic-era boom.
For one of the UK’s most prominent fast food chains, quality frontline training courses and first-class managerial development programs are paramount—especially in the face of a rapidly growing workforce and a high-turnover environment. While business growth was a fantastic outcome for our customer, it came alongside a host of new and expanded eLearning-related challenges.
Fortunately, when the organization began to experience the effects of a pandemic-era boom in the fast food industry, it had recently incorporated Bridge LMS into its learning ecosystem.
The organization initially adopted Bridge due to a need to replace its insufficient legacy reporting with an intuitive and engaging modern interface. In the wake of its sudden and substantial growth since April 2020, however, Bridge has successfully facilitated a seamless learning experience for a workforce that expanded from 22,000 to 35,000 individuals in just over a year.
The Challenge
Keeping Learning Relevant and Consistent for an Expanding Workforce
While the growth of this customer’s employee base represented a welcome uptick in business, it also brought new training and development challenges to the table.
With 600 stores split among approximately 60 franchises, the customer experienced an increase in worker and manager fluidity as growing numbers of its student employees transferred to different stores in line with their location preferences, responsibilities, and life pathways.
While this arrangement is a vital way to reduce overall turnover, it also added a new degree of urgency to the task of maintaining and migrating historic training enrollment data. As workers hopped from store to store, the customer’s corporate team needed a centralized LMS capable of providing consistent coursework, high levels of accountability, and an easy way for employees to work inside the same learning ecosystem without repeating identical eLearning courses for each new location.
The customer also wanted to reduce turnover by ensuring that its eLearning content contributed to a strong employee experience that encouraged loyalty and a feeling of belonging.
In the face of a larger workforce, it was all the more necessary to instill a sense of what it means to work at a specific store or franchise, promoting stronger ties between workers and their working environments.
At the same time, the fast food industry is always going to involve a degree of churn, and the customer needed to ensure that the industry’s stringent compliance requirements were met by its new recruits.
With a more substantial workforce and a correspondingly high turnover rate, the customer had an even stronger incentive to ensure that its mandatory food and safety courses were completed promptly and consistently.
The Solution
Combining Automation and Analytics
In order to enable and encourage worker fluidity while maintaining robust enrollment data, the customer maintains a centralized learning ecosystem, allowing employees to switch stores without losing their learning progress or duplicating their efforts with every change.
Employees’ learner profiles are kept automatically up to date through the customer’s time and attendance tool, ensuring that they’re always aligned with the right curriculum for their job role and location. The customer also leverages Bridge’s smart group feature to automatically assign learning based on factors like each employee’s location and role.
This process keeps frontline workers and managers in the loop and up to date with their training, no matter which store they transfer to.
While every store has access to the same resources, Bridge supports the customer’s L&D team to personalize the learning experience by building store-specific learning Journeys. Similarly, Bridge’s sibling company, GP Strategies, created a custom food safety program that uses the customer’s own branding and uniforms.
These steps have provided the customer’s expanded workforce with learning journeys that emphasize the cultures of individual stores and regions, promoting a stronger sense of community among its employees.
Bridge’s Journeys feature has also met with a positive reception in relation to compliance. By spreading out the fast food chain’s 11 mandatory courses at manageable intervals, learners are less overwhelmed—making it much easier for them to hit compliance learning targets.
Plus, Bridge Analytics has provided the customer with a much-improved overview of its learning-related information by centralizing all analytics data inside a single tool, sidestepping the complexities involved in aggregating data from multiple versions of the same tool.
By taking full advantage of Bridge’s in-depth reporting, the customer has found it easier to keep each store and franchise accountable for its course completion rates.
The Results
Hitting Compliance Targets and Planning for Broader Adoption
Since the fast food chain adopted Bridge, its workforce has grown by 11,000 employees. Its turnover rate has increased correspondingly, meaning that the customer’s annual eLearning enrollments have escalated from 250,000 in 2020 to 360,000 in 2022.
Bridge has allowed the customer to scale its training offerings to accommodate a vastly expanded workforce. For example, the customer’s use of smart groups automates the process of assigning learning journeys to new hires. Since both the allocation process and the learning journeys themselves are entirely automated, the customer’s large volumes of new hires are prompted to complete mandatory training without additional administrative effort.
As a result, the customer has hit its required compliance targets. At least 80% of each store’s employees are completing 100% of their mandatory compliance training courses—and Bridge’s analytics features ensure that the customer is able to monitor each store’s compliance levels to maintain this achievement.
Due to the customer’s positive experiences with Bridge, the organization is planning to incorporate Bridge into its wider learning schemes. For manager-level employees, the organization offers a six-month career pathway progression program in which learners can earn a leadership and management certification. The customer is aiming to integrate Bridge into this valuable, college-level qualification as an eLearning component of the program.
