THE CHALLENGE: Enabling a Remote Workforce with Social Learning

 

With more than a thousand associates located across several states, Vision Hospitality Group must deliver effective training to a workforce that is spread out and includes everyone from front desk managers and accounting, to maintenance and housekeepers.

What’s more, the training that Vision Hospitality Group delivers is central to “what makes a hotel a Vision hotel,” explains Megan Brown, Vision Hospitality Group’s Director of Culture and Talent Development. Guest satisfaction is a critical metric for the success of their company, and Vision’s training addresses “all those little additional service touches, in addition to the things that are important to us as a management company.”

Vision had a learning management system (LMS) in place, but Megan had her sights set on taking advantage of the new opportunities in the social learning space and didn’t feel that the existing system was up to the task.

“It was just more challenging to manage than what I wanted,” says Megan about the old system. “I needed something that was going to be easier to manage, that was going to be user-friendly, and that was going to help us enable the social space a little bit better.”

When their contract was up, it was time for Vision Hospitality Group to see if there was another vendor that could better meet their future needs.

THE SOLUTION: Expanding Learning Opportunities Through a User-Friendly, Socially Enabled LMS

 

A MOBILE, INTUITIVE EXPERIENCE: Finding an LMS that was user-friendly was “absolutely critical” says Megan. She evaluated five different learning management systems before making her decision. “Docebo was clearly what we wanted, given the need for social, the need for an app, and for user flexibility,” she explains.

Knowing that Docebo’s training could be delivered from a smartphone or an iPad was one of the deciding factors for Megan and Vision Hospitality Group.

“There’s something that can potentially be a little intimidating for people who are not all that familiar with computers to sit them down in front of one for training. But if we can hand them the property’s iPad, it makes it a lot more accessible and a lot less intimidating — it makes it fun,” says Megan.

STREAMLINING END USER EXPERIENCE WITH SEAMLESS INTEGRATIONS: “The integrations have been really helpful,” says Megan. “When I saw the webinar integration I thought, ‘Ok, it’s going to take a lot to get me to walk away from this platform at this point!’”

Each month, Vision delivers a wide variety of webinars through GoToWebinar that address the needs of different employee audiences, from line-level associates to property managers. Previously, employees would have to switch between the LMS and GoToWebinar in order to register for and then attend a webinar. With Docebo, the entire experience has become much more streamlined, intuitive and user- friendly.

“Now participants are registering for the webinar in Docebo and they come back to Docebo to attend the class. So they’re not trying to go back and forth to a bunch of different platforms,” explains Megan. “This has made webinars so much easier to handle.”

GETTING SOCIAL WITH PEER-TO-PEER LEARNING: Another exciting aspect of Vision Hospitality Group’s new LMS was Docebo’s Coach and Share solution, which enables learners to take advantage of social and informal learning within learning management technology.

Megan says that there was a lot of enthusiasm for the social piece once she announced the ability to share videos of associates at different hotels doing what they do best.

“If your associates are the ones that make the best bed in the company, or the best breakfast buffet set-up, let’s showcase that!” Megan says, elaborating on some of the use cases. “The thing that I love about Coach and Share is that, for the associates, learning becomes peer-to-peer instead of something that gets pushed down from the home office,” she explains. “That all of a sudden makes it a lot more personal.”

For companies with multiple locations, Coach and Share can also have a positive impact on company culture, making employees feel as though they are part of something larger.

“Especially when we’re spread out as we are, it helps to foster that sense of community within the company,” says Megan. “You start to see the conversations go back and forth and it gives us a chance to see who’s involved out in the field that we may not have known about otherwise.”

“What Docebo is really doing for us is helping to move us on that path to becoming a learning organization.”

TACKLING A CRITICAL L&D CHALLENGE: How do you encourage adoption, especially with reluctant groups of employees?

 

GIVE EVERYONE A REASON TO LOG IN: Launching “Culture Refresh” training gave Megan a chance to drive everyone into the new Docebo learning management system early on. While this training is now a part of the onboarding program for all new associates, asking existing associates to complete this training as well gave them a chance to check out Docebo themselves. “Once they’re in there, they realize that there’s all this other content!” Megan explains.

ENABLE PEER-TO-PEER LEARNING: Enabling peer-to-peer learning with Coach and Share has also been a hit for Vision Hospitality Group. “It’s a fantastic opportunity for them to be able to show off what they’re aware of and help others learn at the same time,” says Megan. When employees realize that they are being given a chance to shine and share their knowledge, they’re more likely to buy in.

OFFER A PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCE: With the ability to configure dashboards for unique audiences, Megan’s found that she’s able to create a learning experience that fits the needs of different employee populations. “Now they log in and on their dashboard they see exactly what they need,” says Megan. As she puts it, “If I log in and have an experience that’s really adapted to me, it’s going to make me a lot more likely to come back!”

THE RESULTS: Empowered Employees, Satisfied Guests, and More Opportunities to Invest in Employee Success

 

SAVING TIME AND SERVING TRAINING AUDIENCES BETTER: Megan’s emphasis on finding a user-friendly platform has paid off for her and Vision’s employees. “This platform is super easy for me to manage,” she says. As one example, the time that it now takes Megan to release new training content to her users has decreased significantly. “Using Docebo has probably cut the amount of time it takes to deploy content in half,” Megan estimates.

In addition, “the fact that it’s such a user- friendly and configurable UI has been a huge win for our associates,” says Megan. “I love that I can create a dashboard just for our General Managers that looks completely different from what my hourly associates see.”

“That’s been really helpful because it helps me gear things towards different audiences,” Megan explains. “Now they log in and on their dashboard they see exactly what they need. They don’t have to do a lot of searching.”

CREATING LEARNING PLANS TO ENCOURAGE EMPLOYEE GROWTH: Docebo also provides the ability to design “learning plans” for employees who are interested in developing their skills in new areas. As Megan’s seen more Vision associates logging into the LMS because they’re motivated to move up in the organization, she’s been very excited to get more of these learning plans in place.

“It’s been so wonderful to be able to see,” says Megan. “We’re able to create learning plans to say, ‘Ok, you are a front office supervisor, you want to become a front desk manager, so here are the courses that you need to complete before you’re able to move into that role. Being able to prescribe that and help them guide their learning journey has been huge.”

INCREASING ENGAGEMENT WITH TRAINING RELATED TO GUEST SATISFACTION SCORES: Ultimately, “our guests have a better experience because our associates are trained well,” says Megan. “You train an associate and they become empowered to handle everything that has to do with their role in the hotel and their interactions with the guests. That drives our guest satisfaction scores.”

“I can look across our portfolio and see that there’s a strong correlation between hotels that are engaged in the Docebo training and high guest satisfaction scores, versus hotels that are still coming on board with the training program,” Megan elaborates. Conversely, Vision Hospitality Group is also able to see opportunities to help improve guest satisfaction scores by providing targeted training.

THE FUTURE: Diving Deeper into the Potential of Social Learning

 

Megan has big plans for Vision’s learning & development program in the upcoming year. “This is really going to be the year that we focus on the social component,” she explains. “I think the thing that I’m most proud of is that using Docebo Coach & Share gives us the chance to highlight the strengths and the skills of a thousand people. Now they’re all able to share their talents with each other, whereas before we did not have the capability to do that.”

In order to really capitalize on this new capability, Megan intends to expand upon the Q&A functionality within her LMS, the “coaching” aspect of Docebo Coach and Share.

“We’ve got a lot of wonderful people here who are super excited about the opportunity to share their knowledge, and this is goingto give them the opportunity to do that,” says Megan. “I love the ‘Ask the Experts’ component of Docebo because I think it’s something that really helps people get their hands on answers. It becomes a way to connect people.”

She sees a lot of possibility for social and informal learning in her industry in particular. After all, “the hospitality industry is all about taking care of people,” Megan points out. “You’ve got people that love helping others, and that really lends itself well to helping others learn.”

“Because we have Docebo and because we have that opportunity now, we can tap into the strengths of a huge family of associates and really showcase their talents, learn from each other, and truly follow through on our vision to become the best most respected hotel company in America.”