Trainline is the world’s leading independent rail travel platform, selling train and coach tickets to millions of travellers worldwide, enabling them to seamlessly search, book and manage their journeys all in one place via its highly rated website and mobile app.

With 600+ employees representing over 40 different nationalities, doing Induction right is extremely important to ensure all of the staff force is onboarded efficiently and effectively. We recently caught up with Trainline’s Senior Learning, Talent and Development Manager, Ross Stevenson, to find out how he manages onboarding using Looop.

Moving From a One-Time Event to a 90-Day Experience

“The focus for us was on reshaping our employee onboarding process from a one-time event to a 90- day experience. We wanted to reframe what onboarding looked like and ultimately build a world-class welcome experience for all our Trainliners. The aim was to achieve an onboarding process that would excite, engage and support them in their career.” – Ross Stevenson, Senior Learning, Talent and Development Manager

Trainline needed to find a platform that would make the transition smooth but could also be easy to learn.

“We chose Looop for the ease and simplicity that the platform offers. Although it's packed full of useful and user-friendly features, it is to this day, one of the simplest platforms I’ve used in my 14 years in the HR tech space.” – Ross Stevenson

It’s not just the ease of use that Looop offers that has proved valuable for Ross and the team. He also praises the team’s approach to working with clients.

“Working with Looop has been very smooth and that’s really down to the expert team on hand. Looop is not full of salespeople pretending they know the industry and quoting buzzwords from the latest set of online articles. Rather, they’re a team of industry pro’s — people who have been there, done that and who I have come to respect.

I don’t look at our relationship as 'supplier and client' but rather a partnership where one strengthens the other through shared knowledge and expertise.”

Reshaping Employee Onboarding For the World Today

There were a number of data-driven points that led to the identification for change and were the catalyst for moving away from a one-day, one-time event to an experience that supports transition to life at Trainline.

Ross used his own experiences of the onboarding process as well as data shared by participants over a 6-month plus period to decide how best to move forward with onboarding in the organisation. In addition, taking a performance consultant approach with line managers allowed him to uncover the blind spots that they weren’t aware of beforehand.

“Basically, I rebuilt the experience from the ground up, closely designing that around the features Looop offers. For instance, the campaigns, pathways and workspace features have all become instrumental components of the experience.

Workspaces allow us to provide on-demand resources to get help in those moments of need, whilst pathways allow us to unpack topics in a way that the user controls. Campaigns bring it all together by enabling us to create a constant connection by sharing the right content at right time, and therefore we're able to maintain an ongoing conversation with our new Trainliners. Nothing gets shipped out from our learning team without a pilot and products are always built as a minimum viable product (MVP) with continual iterations down the line.” – Ross Stevenson

With the pilot, Ross and the team focused on a small set of new users and slowly introduced new features to the experience whilst gathering feedback. They would then keep or kill features based on this data. The process of pilot to an MVP launch took about 6-8 weeks max but could have been sooner if it hadn’t coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trainline Have Seen an Increase in Team Connection, Recognition of Support and Engagement

Ross and the team have had an improved recognition of support for both new starters and managers, with many comments on the wealth of useful tools. Their onboarding surveys show that 93% of their new starters agreed that their new onboarding process helped them settle in and navigate through the Trainline world.

One of the particular standouts have been the Slack integration.

“The Slack integration was great as it gives us a way to get more people connected with learning and growth where they hang out.” – Ross Stevenson

Start Small and Use Data and Feedback to Improve

By gathering feedback to create a MVP and using data to continuously improve from there, Ross and the team have managed to smoothly transition their onboarding to a long-term process rather than a one-day event.

If you need help onboarding your employees or would like to learn more about Trainline’s approach, get in touch with our L&D experts