Background
B & Q is a major retailer of home improvement products. It offers a large range of goods for the do-it-yourself (DIY) market. The company is owned by Kingfisher and has experienced rapid growth. Currently B&Q are the largest retailer of their type in Europe. They employ 39000 staff of whom almost 65% are part-time; the company has an excellent reputation as an employer of older workers.
In recent years there have been some significant new business challenges as a result of changing tastes – people expect higher standards of furnishings and decoration in their homes. The do-it-yourself boom was at its height in the late 90s/early 2000s. Customers now have less time to undertake work themselves but have strong opinions on the standards they require. B&Q has adjusted by seeking to be less a place where people go to buy tools and paint and more a source of inspiration. The vision is to be ‘first and only for home improvements’.
This shift has considerable implications for staff: historically B&Q trained their Customer Advisors (their preferred term) to know the products and sell them to customers; now the aim is to help customers put together a variety of elements with more emphasis on design More decisions are now being made by female purchasers. B&Q’s approach to e-learning, the subject of this case study, has reflected these changing business requirements.
The changing business challenge
Mike Hawes is the Learning and Development Manager for B&Q’s Retail Division. In their business strategy B&Q play particular regard to the service-profit chain – a concept that encompasses the idea that motivated and engaged staff will convey their commitment to the benefit of consumers and hence generate profit. Mike Hawes’ challenge is to ensure that knowledge and skills acquisition leads to consumer benefits. He is often questioned on the impact the investment in training and learning; in his words, senior managers demand ‘a more robust rationale for what we are doing’. If the desired impact is to be achieved the learning and development team needs to form strong working relations with the business and with the human resources department – and needs to acquire organisational development skills.
One illustration of the growing importance of the link between learning and performance is the emphasis on performance indicators. This forms a key part of a revised learning development framework (LDF). On joining B&Q a new customer assistant is given 90 days to acquire and demonstrate relevant performance indicators. It is up to the store to decide how this process takes place. There are e-learning modules available but there is growing emphasis on personal support from a buddy and on ‘observe-feedback-coach’ from a line manager.
Some early decisions on e-learning
B&Q were pioneers in the development of business-centred e-learning and branded their offering as B&Q University. However over an eight year period they have moved from early adopters to becoming a mature user.
The company began their e-learning project in August 2000. The first decision to be made concerned the choice of learning management system (LMS), as this was the heart of the e-learning infrastructure. It was recognised that there was a need for the systems to grow in line with the company: firm criteria were therefore established for the choice of the learning management system; above all it should be straight forward and easy to use (user-centric). It also needed to have the ability to interface easily onto the other B & Q IT systems. Generally it was recognised that most learning management systems will have more functionality than the organisation required. B & Q put considerable effort into their choice of the learning management system which would need the capacity to allow growth as e-learning became more accepted.
From the outset, B&Q recognised that the materials deployed would need to meet the needs of the store based Customer Advisors and to be specific to the B&Q business as managers would not see the immediate relevance of generic materials. There were also questions on the scope of the content; would Customer Advisors see basic IT skills, interpersonal modules and general management as important?
In these early days B & Q made an explicit link with e-learning and their learning and development framework which was launched in January 2003, in order to offer all staff a way to improve their capabilities and achieve greater job satisfaction. Initially the emphasis within the LDF was in Customer Advisors who could progress through five levels which would result in enhanced remuneration if they were able to demonstrate relevant knowledge. Now the emphasis has shifted to supervision and expertise (for example plumbers, electricians, horticulturalists and joiners). For supervisors in particular there was greater emphasis on people skills – managing their staff. Progress on the implementation of the LDF was to be monitored using surveys and there was extensive reporting to stores on the use of e-learning.
Moving to maturity with e-learning
A number of other environmental factors have changed since the initial introduction of e-learning. PCs have improved and all e-learning material can be delivered via the intranet (in the early days distribution was achieved in part through CD-ROMS). Now almost all new joiners have PC skills and in 2005 the "Introduction to e-learning" module was withdrawn.
The main change, however, has been driven by the new demands for learning for performance. In the early 2000s when B&Q was expanding rapidly, partly through acquisition of other stores and companies, there was a need to ensure that all Customer Assistants had the requisite product knowledge. With the growing emphasis on customer service a mixture of methods is appropriate. For example a pilot initiative currently underway is called ‘project confidence’, where a group of Customer Advisors are taken away for two days to a local builders centre and shown a small improvement job (for example laying a laminated floor). This idea is not to make them experts in the job undertaken but to give them greater confidence when advising customers.
The title B&Q University has now been withdrawn as it was seen as too closely identified with a taught top-down model but e-learning remains a key component of the LDF. In the words of Barry Sampson, manager of the Learning Support Team, ‘we now recognise that it doesn’t matter how they learn so long as they do learn, and can turn that learning into performance’. There is therefore much more emphasis on making e-learning material available in the form of performance support where managers can direct the Customer Advisors as required or self-motivated Customer Advisors can access material themselves.
Over this period the number of e-learning modules available has risen to 90. Importantly all are prepared to B&Q specifications by a number of software houses with whom long-standing relationships have been established. Costs per hour delivered have dropped from £50000 per hour delivered in the early 2000s to £10000-£15000 per hour today. Some modules are compulsory for new joiners (for example health and safety and diversity policies) but other topics may be delivered by a range of materials. An illustrative list of the modules is set out in the table below. Barry Sampson estimates that about 20% of the learning and development framework is delivered through e-learning.
Example modules:
Process modules
- Epos
- Financial Services
- Insurance Products
- Health & Safety
- Stock Management
-
Stock Loss
Management skills
-
Coaching
-
Mentoring
-
Effective Duty Manager
-
Planning & Prioritising
Soft skills
- Respect for People
- Sustainability
- Services In Store
Product knowledge
- Decking
- Garden Power Tools
- Showroom Products
- 50 x Short (10 mins) Product Knowledge Modules
A quite separate application of e-learning is its potential for collaborative activity: B&Q has experimented with online collaboration for management training since 2004. The underlying idea is that management staff in different geographical areas can communicate electronically on management issues and need only come together 3 or 4 times in the course of a 12 month programme.
This idea is being extended through a new initiative called ‘Manage Your Development’; this contains no top-down content but is entirely user-generated. Any B&Q employee who is involved in a management development activity, about 1,500 in all, is invited to contribute and about 10% of the relevant staff respond. Part of the site consists of general comments on management challenges and learning experiences, another component is the requirement that all participants on certain programmes prepare a blog on the site on their experience and learning. This is designed to encourage them to reflect on what they have learned and thus improve the transfer of learning.
It is evident that e-learning will remain a key part of the learning and training offered by B&Q, However, outside of certain mandatory subjects there is no longer any compulsion. More responsibility has been devolved to the learner and his or her manager but the approach to produce and the insistence on bespoke content has remained unchanged. According to Barry Sampson, who has been with B&Q throughout the period: "By taking the high production values we had already established, and combining that with a more learner centric and flexible approach I believe we are much more effective at turning learning into performance."