REDI shopping centre, opened in Kalasatama, Helsinki in 2018, is the second largest shopping centre in the Helsinki city centre area, and Finland’s seventh largest. REDI seeks to produce a first-rate customer experience and utilises Mediamaisteri’s service to ensure that its employees’ skills are always up to date.
Employees at the shopping centre and its premises total approximately two thousand. Since many of the employees are students and seasonal workers, the turnover rate at the shopping centre is high. An estimated 30-40% of personnel changes annually. This increases the importance of training in ensuring the quality of operations.
"It is important that every entrepreneur and employee understands the importance of the customer experience, that everyone knows their role and can provide a well-informed description of the shopping centre’s services to the customer", says Janina Pohja, Marketing Specialist at REDI.
Having employees confirm that they have seen the training materials is not enough to ensure success. The effects should also be visible in everyday operations.
Mediamaisteri was involved in the planning and implementation of a digital solution for REDI, which enabled the training to be introduced to a large target audience efficiently and reliably.
In an extensive shopping centre environment, it is crucial that things run flawlessly and by a shared set of rules. Entrepreneurs and employees must know how the maintenance area works, how waste is separated and how to act in a way that supports the general rescue plan, among other things. Especially security is a top priority in everyday operations.
"Security is a big deal in shopping centre operations. The security section of our training has been examined together with a fire safety inspector, who has verified that it is forceful and extensive enough," Property Manager at REDI, Jukka Parkatti, states.
REDI used to be a part of SRV Yhtiöt Oy, which provided access to a remote training solution. However, the training was tailored for the needs of construction sites, which meant that REDI needed a new solution.
The original training material was nearly a hundred pages long and available in digital format, for example through the company’s intranet. The real challenge was to get employees to internalise the information and genuinely follow the instructions.
"It was very difficult to get employees to read a stack of papers, although it contained a lot of security-related content. People would often call different parts of the company, trying to find answers to questions that could have been found in the training materials,", Jukka Parkatti explains.
REDI’s training material was transformed into a more pedagogical and digestible form that could easily be completed online. Superiors also found it important to know which of their employees had carried out the training and which had not.
The current, SRV-managed system was moved into REDI’s own platform, and at the same time, the online training platform was modified to become more suitable for the shopping centre environment and fit the REDI brand.
The entire process was completed in approximately a month. A pedagogical script was written for online training production purposes, and lessons were designed so that they would resemble real-life work situations as much as possible.
The goal was to avoid a flood of unnecessary information. Examples and interactive assignments made it easier to remember details. The end result included a great deal of sound narrative, animations and other elements to activate the senses. The purpose of the practical online training was to get new employees to internalise the lessons more effectively and apply them directly to their work.
Total study period of approximately 20 minutes
Consists of images, animations, sound narrative and videos
Plenty of practical examples and interactive assignments
Finnish and English language versions
A small test at the end, followed by an automatic e-mail certificate upon completion
"REDI’s training is provided openly online to have as many employees as possible completing it. The primary objective is to get new store managers to undergo the training, but we set a goal of having 95% of people working at our premises complete it,” Janina Pohjala explains.
In order to achieve this goal, employees are offered a REDI card, something that is only given once the training has been passed and provides benefits at REDI’s stores for REDI employees only. The carrot appears to have worked, since a total of approximately 1,700 people have completed the training.
The training, which took place in a learning environment, reached a large share of the target audience effectively and removed a great deal of manual work. The content itself became an informative and entertaining online course entity that is much more memorable than the previous one. Taking the training into an online environment also resulted in significant cost savings and improved the attractiveness of the training.
“Collaboration has been extremely smooth. All our goals for both resource savings and target group reach were achieved due to our new online training solution,” Janina Pohja states.
"With the training taking place in written form, we had no way of ensuring that employees had actually read the material. Now the situation is different, and this has a major impact, for example, on security matters. I urge other shopping centres to also use a similar approach to training,", Jukka Parkatti sums up.
The digital environment can be an immeasurable tool in arranging training. On the other hand, it does not remove the importance of human contact. If an implementation similar to REDI’s sounds like a viable approach to your training sessions, book an appointment with our specialist and let’s brainstorm together!
As a partner of Mediamaisteri, you have access to top online training experts providing online pedagogics, learning technology and content creation services. We not only build online training platforms, we support and guide in their deployment, implementation and continuous use, ensuring that your organisation can get the desired results.
