Achieving 99% new manager onboarding success

Challenge 1: Building a development culture

With a diverse workforce of 2,000 employees and a keen focus on agility and results, they needed to build a learning and development culture that catered to their key challenge of ensuring that all employees, not just specific divisions, had access to tailored learning paths for their professional growth.

MadeiraMadeira’s initial challenge lay in their hands-on culture, coupled with the relative novelty of their development area.

Their first course of action involved mapping the existing development practices across the company’s various teams, revealing that certain divisions had already established Learning Management Systems (LMS), training structures, and onboarding procedures.

Before they adopted Valamis, MadeiraMadeira operated with two distinct LMS platforms, each serving separate functional areas – one for the physical store division and another for the Customer Experience team.

While these individual divisions developed their own training procedures, the majority of other departments operated with limited autonomy and lacked structured development initiatives, underscoring the need for a more cohesive and comprehensive learning and development strategy.

Armed with this invaluable insight, they embarked on a pivotal project to consolidate and harmonize the organization’s learning and development initiatives.

Challenge 2: Streamlining and unifying L&D within one platform

In 2022, as part of their effort to unify learning and development across the company, MadeiraMadeira discovered Valamis. This discovery marked a turning point in their journey towards a comprehensive learning and development culture.

MadeiraMadeira’s journey to having a division dedicated to talent management began in 2021.

The initial goal was to have a single, organized system to make all actions and processes related to talent acquisition, performance, and development more efficient. Today, the division has become a pillar of their corporate development.

MadeiraMadeira’s criteria for selecting a learning platform encompassed having a dual role as an LMS and LXP, the ability to create and customize content, platform customization, seamless API integration for interconnectivity with other tools and platforms, cost-effectiveness, and the capacity to track critical indicators and KPIs.

Valamis met these requirements and has become the cornerstone of their learning ecosystem, offering a range of indispensable features such as Lesson Manager, Lesson Studio, Learning Paths, and reporting capabilities.

Furthermore, the platform’s scalability to accommodate the expanding MadeiraMadeira team, including expansion into linguistically diverse markets, was paramount.

In their evaluation of various options, Valamis stood out due to its exceptional flexibility in terms of customization and personalization, both within the platform itself and in the content it offered. This choice positioned MadeiraMadeira to advance its learning and development culture in a way that is uniquely tailored to their needs and responsive to their growth.

A KPI that matters: percentage of completion of mandatory Learning Paths

MadeiraMadeira’s foremost objective in their L&D endeavors revolved around achieving turnover – a central performance indicator pertaining to the completion rate of mandatory training, which is facilitated through leadership development learning paths.

This pivotal KPI, referred to as the “Percentage of Completion” of the mandatory learning paths, was strategically chosen to underpin the cultivation of a robust learning and development culture. Recognizing that completion holds greater significance than mere login frequency and access statistics, MadeiraMadeira established this metric as the focal point of their progress assessment.

Building upon this fundamental metric, they further developed a range of supplementary monitoring indicators, encompassing metrics such as user-specific login frequencies, the monthly creation of training modules, and community/academy engagement, among others.

The primary utilization of Valamis at MadeiraMadeira revolves around learning management, encompassing content creation, administration, and comprehensive monitoring through detailed reports. Their focus areas encompass skill development, onboarding, collaboration, leadership, and cultural enhancement.

The platform’s most frequently leveraged features include Lesson Manager, Lesson Studio, Learning Paths, Reports (spanning individual paths, lessons, evaluation, adoption, audience targeting such as Audiences, Organizations, and User Groups), Question Bank, Assignments, Event Calendar, and a suite of Widgets and portlets including web content publisher, blogs, forums, and feed integration, along with Certification functionalities.

A unified platform that is succeeding all expectations

MadeiraMadeira’s success in having a unified platform with Valamis became evident upon the initiation of their learning and development endeavors. At the outset of the year, 360 leaders were onboarded onto the platform. Of this group, 180 actively engaged in exclusive training sessions, capitalizing on Valamis’ synchronous and asynchronous capabilities.

This training was structured with approximately ten tailored learning paths designed specifically for these 180 leaders, resulting in an exceptional completion rate of 63%YTD. The commitment to continuous improvement is evident in their platform access statistics, with leadership demonstrating a commendable average of three logins or accesses daily, yielding an access rate of 69%, attesting to the platform’s user-friendliness.

Demonstrating their dedication to quality content development, MadeiraMadeira saw a significant surge in original content production, starting with 300 pieces in January and scaling to an impressive 1,048 pieces—an astounding 210% increase. Remarkably, all this content was created in-house, showcasing their self-sufficiency without relying on external providers. Furthermore, an astounding 99% of new managers have successfully completed their asynchronous onboarding via the platform.

In a significant achievement, MadeiraMadeira surpassed its 2023 success indicator goal, targeting a 60% completion rate for mandatory training and ultimately achieving an outstanding 63% completion rate.

Success through learning data, CEO engagement and tailored learning paths

MadeiraMadeira’s success strategy extended to involving their CEO in communications and closely monitoring the completion rate Key Performance Indicator (KPI) through a dedicated business areas’ monitoring dashboard. Their approach to customizing learning paths, designed to address real pain points for their managers, incorporated a blend of synchronous training for skill development and asynchronous content delivery and assessment.
This strategic alignment with Valamis has fostered an environment of learning and development and yielded impressive results that underline their commitment to employee growth and success.

Exciting new future initiatives at MadeiraMadeira

• the team will expand the platform’s reach to encompass all employees, emphasizing honing the training and development of future content multipliers,
• they aim to elevate content production on their public channel, known as “Random,” to further facilitate the creation and dissemination of knowledge across the organization.

MadeiraMadeira’s partnership with Valamis has not only addressed their challenges but has also propelled them towards a culture of continuous learning and development. The Valamis platform has allowed them to create engaging, results-oriented learning paths, leading to significant increases in content completion and overall employee engagement.

By embracing the Valamis solution, MadeiraMadeira has successfully transformed its talent management division into a cornerstone of corporate development. In the fast-paced world of retail, MadeiraMadeira is now better equipped than ever to deliver on its mission of transforming the way people design their homes.