The largest independent parcel delivery network in the UK, APC Overnight, opts for mobile training via eduMe to deliver ongoing HR, Health & Safety, DE&I and compliance training to head office and warehouse employees.
Logistics company APC Overnight has transitioned to digital training in partnership with market-leading mobile-based training tool eduMe. Through eduMe, learning & up-skilling opportunities are being provided to warehouse staff, drivers & corporate employees.
This serves to ensure the ongoing Health & Safety and compliance of all employees by covering topics such as manual handling, managing absences, mental wellbeing and more, as well as keeping all employees up-to-date with the latest company news and initiatives.
Engagement with the training is maximized through push notifications which employees receive whenever new content is available for them. Once APC’s workforce are in the app, they can scroll through a series of updates and company news, surfaced through eduMe’s Messages feature. Further engagement with content is promoted by the company’s recognition of ‘top performers’, something they are able to monitor on leaderboards provided as part of eduMe’s gamified learning experience.
To equip APC with the skills to successfully launch, implement and promote ongoing use of eduMe, APC enlisted the support of eduMe’s extensive Professional Services. This ensured the company was well placed to deliver on their business objectives and maximize ROI, following the transition.
We sat down with Corina Forman, HR Director, and Emma Fletcher, Head of HR, at APC Overnight, to hear how the company transitioned from an entirely in-person to digital system of training with eduMe’s support, and the results achieved so far.
How did you disseminate relevant information and upskill people before eduMe?
Emma: There were two approaches. Boardroom training presentations that lasted a couple of hours for colleagues in the head office - marketing, IT, HR and all the departments that manage the relationship we’ve got with privately owned depots. For the 80% of colleagues working on the operational side - all our transport and warehouse staff - we’d deliver ‘toolbox talks’ where trainers would walk around and deliver training on a particular topic, for example a new policy, or a new way of doing things.
Why was this method no longer fit for purpose?
Corina: The sector is rapidly changing and in order to evolve alongside it, we recognized we needed to create a learning culture. This is difficult to achieve when any time you want to communicate you’ve got to write a memo, email, or create a training pack and then disseminate it to 800+ people who all have different shift patterns. Dissemination aside, it was difficult to get buy-in - people are busy and unable to dedicate hours to training. We also had no access to meaningful insights - how much of our overall workforce were engaging with training.
How did eduMe enable you to do things better?
Corina: eduMe’s an easy and intuitive piece of software for digitizing training content and has provided us with an opportunity to deliver bite-sized chunks of information that are interactive, enjoyable, take minutes to complete yet enable us to communicate so much. It was an obvious choice as our night and operational staff are not tied to desks or computers - they’re in the warehouse, driving trucks, or in the yard. I can’t imagine us without eduMe now - it’s embedded in what we do, and how we do it.
What kind of training do you use eduMe to deliver?
Corina: We’ve been using eduMe to deliver training on our new HR system Oracle. In addition, a lot of Health & Safety, compliance, DE&I, employee wellbeing - some examples of lessons including: whistleblowing, safe driving, CoSHH, bullying and harassment. Beyond this, eduMe enables us to feed out messaging about who we are and what our values are as a business.
What features within eduMe have you found most useful?
Corina: The reporting functionality lets us see who is or isn’t engaging, what they're engaging with, and how much individuals have taken in. Having that quantified is very useful and we now report on these metrics weekly giving us company-wide visibility on levels of engagement and knowledge.
Why did eduMe stand out against other solutions?
Emma: For four reasons:
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The feel and look of your product
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The product’s adaptability to our needs
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The eduMe team
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The ease of implementation
We have our own jargon for everything so it's not easy to pick up off the shelf training and deliver it to our people - eduMe gave us a platform through which to make it culturally-appropriate for our business. Your approach was very personal and friendly, meetings were relaxed, and all our questions were answered very quickly. Another key factor was that we didn’t need any input from our own IT team to implement it - it was really easy to get it up and running without much internal resource.
What has the content creation experience been like?
Corina: To begin with it took longer, now it takes just an hour to create a lesson - no longer than writing a memo. You become really efficient at content writing the more regularly you use eduMe.
What was your experience using eduMe’s Professional Services?
Corina: The workshops were really useful - there were so many best practice ideas that came from your team. They provided us with a framework, and shaped our approach to the whole launch and implementation of eduMe. We still use the tools and disciplines covered in the workshops today.
And finally, what top tips would you recommend to others who are launching eduMe?
Emma: Communicate, communicate, communicate. You can’t talk about it enough. We had a structured comms plan and were blown away by how many people enrolled straight away. All of our messaging was very much focused around “we've invested in this for you - this is the way which you can get instant updates about the company. You can find out instantly what's going on. You can upgrade your skills, build your knowledge sets. It's empowering you to manage your own learning”. We kept the language and the communication centered around - “this is for you.” I think that in the long term, that will pay dividends.
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