Circle K’s COVID-19 response: 3,000 staff trained in a week
During the coronavirus pandemic, international convenience store chain Circle K needed to quickly get its staff up to speed with new working practices and sanitary conditions. With traditional classrooms, PDFs, or video training methods impeded, digital solutions mattered most.
By using Attensi’s gamified simulation training, the company turned around a rapid response solution to train thousands of employees across Europe in record time.
The coronavirus outbreak has led to big changes to the way we all work. For convenience store brand Circle K, those changes had to be swifter and more fundamental than most.
Thousands of stores across Europe remained open as essential services during lockdown and beyond. Only now, business was anything but usual.
Strict new guidelines around sanitizing work areas, social distancing, and supporting employee mental wellbeing were just a few examples of the behaviours and skills that Circle K staff now had to master. Fast.
With restrictions around group interactions, classroom–style training was not an option for Circle K’s management. And given the importance of getting the pandemic response right, a set of videos, branded PDFs, or linear e-learning courses were not going to be sufficient.
Fortunately, having already worked with Attensi’s gamified simulation training, the team had an ideal way to quickly upskill the Circle K staff operating on the front lines.
Attensi SKILLS provided the answer Circle K needed.
As a mobile-first training solution, Attensi SKILLS uses a range of engaging minigames to help users learn new knowledge and adopt new behaviours in a format they know and recognise. All of these are playable through a dedicated smartphone app, which can be downloaded to employees’ own devices.
Working closely with Attensi, the Circle K team designed a customised set of training modules, each of which outlined the new COVID-19 centric policies in place. These included everything from how to properly clean and prepare stores to comply with government health advice, to handling customer concerns with appropriate sensitivity.
These SKILLS modules had to be translated into nine languages, for release across multiple European territories. Despite this formidable challenge, the team turned around a finished solution in just four days, from initial consultation to launch.
With no time to lose in preparing staff to thrive in their new working conditions, results had to be evident and measurable from the get-go.
In the period from the launch of the COVID-19 training on 24th March 2020 to mid–May:
✅ Over 80,000 individual training sessions were completed and recorded.
✅ 3,000 staff were trained and certified within the first week of rollout, with 6,000 by the end of the following month.
✅ From their first to last playthroughs, the average knowledge score of staff improved by 87%.
The speed and success of the roll out was not lost on Senior Director of Staff for Circle K Norway, Nina Sandsbråten:
As responsible operators, it was vital for us to handle the impact of coronavirus with the upmost care. From our in-store staff to sales managers in the B2B segment, this project has really been evidence of a team that pulls in the same direction.”
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