“Instead of having to get to a PC or hunt through paper files, the learning is accessible anytime, anywhere… Our staff are no longer wasting 10-15 minutes looking for something or someone to answer their question; now they can find the answer immediately. That’s been massive.”
Cesaltina De Andrade, Group Housekeeping Manager, Edwardian London
Behind every luxury hotel experience is a busy team of housekeepers working to make every stay memorable for the right reasons.
It’s a job where staff engagement and customer satisfaction are deeply entwined, with no margin for error.
As the Group Housekeeping Manager for Edwardian Hotels, Cesaltina De Andrade understands just how much training goes into making sure every small detail is looked after for each and every guest.
But with a diverse and fast-growing staff spread across multiple locations, keeping training consistent had become a challenge.
Large, paper-based training materials were difficult to manage and tedious to consume, and while the company had digital training materials, they had to be accessed on computers far away from the worksite:
“We were finding it very difficult to make sure our training was being delivered to over 600 people in the same way, using the same method, the same language and the same format.”
Staff diligently tried to assist one another on the job, but this slowed things down and introduced new inconsistencies.
“It was a real struggle. A lot of the time we found that things were being lost in translation. They were misunderstood or not explained in the same way and people had different takes on them.”
In order to keep training more consistent, Cesaltina knew she needed a way to get answers to staff while they were on the job and in a format they would actually use:
“We needed to figure out how we could make training short, sweet and accessible. We wanted it to be immediately available to our entire team, without having to have 12 different people in 12 different sites explaining the same thing.”
With that goal in mind, Cesaltina began searching for an ideal solution.
Cesaltina was initially drawn to Looop’s simple yet effective way of delivering concise, targeted content on demand in a consistent format:
“After Looop approached us and showed us their platform,we thought it looked interesting and decided to look at it further. We couldn’t find anything else that compared to Looop in our research, so we ran with it.”
What’s more, Looop’s mobile platform was an instant and easy fit with the technology the Edwardian Group’s staff already used and loved, making the transition extremely easy.
“All of our room attendants – about 80 percent of our workforce – work using an iPod, so that technology was already available and accessible. It was a no-brainer; all we had to do was download an application, and the learning was at their fingertips.”
With hands-on help from Looop’s learning experts, Cesaltina and her team were able to quickly create a library of training material, starting with the basics every staff member needed to know:
“Our first job was to make sure that we had the basic training elements that we call our ‘little Bible’ available to all of our housekeeping staff: the rules, our basic processes and the fundamental procedures. Making sure this information was delivered in a consistent way across all locations meant that we were able to bring guests the same high standard of care, in the same predictable way, no matter where or when they stayed.”
Cesaltina and her team also needed to find a way to turn thousands of pages of tedious, paper-based training into interesting, actionable content.
It was Looop’s introduction of multimedia support that changed everything.
“Before Looop we had hundreds of operational procedures and most of them took up a whole folder. To actually sit down and read through it all and understand the process was very time consuming. Short little videos can really describe a four-page document in 30 seconds and people will relate to it more.
What impressed Cesaltina the most during implementation was how willing the entire team at Looop was to help. She was continually surprised with how their customer service stretched far beyond the product itself.
Looop’s experienced learning consultants worked directly with Cesaltina and her team breath new life into their training material. They did this by not only suggesting new elements to include, but by helping Cesaltina to actually create new content.
Looop’s support, guidance and advice proved to be a game-changer for Cesaltina and her team:
“Looop came to us with the idea of incorporating videos. In the beginning they actually came in and helped us create some videos and photography and helped us create some training. The first few that we did, they came onboard with us and helped us produce them. They trained us on how to use the system, how to put things together quickly; that was very beneficial.”
Virtually overnight, Edwardian’s housekeeping workforce dramatically shifted the way they consumed and applied their training.
With engaging, context-rich content available on the iPods they already carried, staff no longer had to leave the workflow to get the answers they needed to do their jobs:
“Instead of having to get to a PC and search for a document, or hunt through paper files, the learning is accessible anytime, anywhere with a few presses of a button. Staff are no longer wasting 10-15 minutes looking for something or someone to answer their question; they can now find the answer immediately. That’s been massive.”
Thanks to Looop’s short learning curve and automatic formatting, Cesaltina was able to scale up the number of content creators very quickly without compromising consistency.
For a company with multiple locations, giving local subject matter experts the ability to contribute to training material is a huge victory:
“In less than a year, we’ve been able to create over 100 training resources – either videos, photography or little how-to-manuals. When we started with Looop there was only two of us creating content. Now we’ve trained ‘super-users’ at each site so that they can add, edit, and change content. We now have a minimum of 12 people adding content.”
Unlike the Edwardian Group’s legacy training methods, which are slower and more difficult to update, Looop has made it easy to rapidly deploy new content.
Cesaltina has been excited to see how staff are now sharing their input and taking a more active role in shaping their own training:
“A lot of times people will say, ‘this is working really well – now, can we add this?’ The learning really supports their day-to-day operations. At least 90 percent of our housekeeping staff are actively using Looop.”
What’s more, Looop has created an environment where housekeeping staff feel supported, listened to and fully equipped to deliver the luxury experience their clients expect instead of confused as to how to move forward.
It’s a true win-win for all parties involved.
“Looop has supported and helped us rejuvenate our learning and development, especially for housekeeping because it’s kind of one of the departments that often gets forgotten about. Looop has made our employees feel invested in, which in turn has inspired another level of employee engagement.”
Having experienced the Looop difference, Cesaltina is confident their employee training and development program will continue to flourish:
“It’s an easy system to create training. It’s not overly complicated, unlike some other systems that make things very awkward and difficult. Looop is very simple to use which is great for adding content. It works for our team really well; we haven’t come across another system that even compares to them.”
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