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Delivering E-learning Success for Royal Mail With Gamification

When Royal Mail, the UK’s primary postal service and delivery company, wanted to embed compliance in their culture, they chose a Skillcast gamification solution.

About the company

Royal Mail is the UK’s designated provider of the six-day-a-week Universal Service Obligation (USO). Privatised in 2013, they also operate as a courier and e-commerce logistics partner.

The company was created in 1516 by Henry VIII for the exclusive use of the monarch and Royal Court.

Royal Mail partnered with Skillcast to transform its approach to compliance and e-learning.

Employees

Over 130,000

Industry

Postal Services

Location

United Kingdom

The Skillcast ‘Serious Games’ platform offered a fresh and exciting approach to engage our colleagues. Against the clock, it consisted of ethical scenarios and dilemmas applicable to the biggest compliance and regulatory risks within our group. The information we could obtain from the game was vital, because it indicated how colleagues would behave in certain situations. The majority of those playing and learning were in operational front-line roles – our desired audience and the ones we wanted to impact the most. There was an increase in communications sent to the compliance mailbox asking general queries, so that’s a huge success story!

Head of Compliance Training & Communication
Royal Mail Group

Awards

As a result of our work with Royal Mail, we won a Silver Learning Technologies Award for 'best use of learning technologies to ensure compliance'.

The challenge

Royal Mail wanted to use advances in e-learning technologies to raise the profile of ethics, integrity and compliance across four main business areas:

1. Postal regulations
2. Competition law
3. Anti bribery
4. Sanctions

To embed compliance, engage employees and ensure they didn’t waste time working through content they already understood, Skillcast and Royal Mail devised an online compliance and business ethics game.

Meanwhile, to ensure learners had access to the game, Skillcast created campaign materials and a self-registration process that catered for the wide variety of job roles, devices and access channels involved.

An effective communications plan telling people about the new training format was also required.

Finally, Skillcast provided a data-rich learning delivery platform, offering assurance on completions, achievements and employees overdue completing training.

When it came to the scenario-based ‘serious’ game, we worked with Royal Mail to create interactions that:

Contextualised the learning

Real-life scenarios that colleagues faced daily, and media-rich interactive exercises to ensure maximum engagement.

Enabled effective differentiation

Identifying managers who were already competent through an initial assessment, assigning them more content in areas of weakness and less where they already had a good understanding.

Used data analytics to evolve and improve the modules

Analysing assessment results and identifying areas of weakness to focus on in subsequent training.

Some key statistics

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313% Increase in learning and development at Kentro
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313% Increase in learning and development at Kentro

The solution

An online compliance and business ethics game to further embed compliance within the business and continue to engage colleagues to make the right ethical decisions.

Many of our clients, including Royal Mail, have found games to be incredibly useful in helping to identify strengths and weaknesses as well as offering a clear focus for future initiatives.

Our scenario-based serious games present your employees with challenging propositions in a realistic context. They can accept or reject each proposition with a click or swipe as they try to answer questions within the time limit without losing any lives. It is a fun way to reinforce the serious training that employees receive.

Serious games have been proven to drive behavioural change and improve knowledge retention. A quiz is just one example of a kind of serious game, and it can be a great asset to support compliance e-learning. Most people love a quiz. It makes people think and add an element of competition, which drives up motivation levels.

The outcomes

By using a gamified learning approach to personalise training according to individual needs, Royal Mail experienced the following results.

99.9% Completion rate

17,000 managers across the business finished their training

Zero compliance issues

There were no bribery, competition law or regulatory breaches

More employees speaking up

281% increase in phone and email communications to the compliance hotline and mailbox in the first year

Engaging hard-to-reach staff

7,000 operations managers (the hardest audience to engage), completed the training before head office staff

Faster course completion

Average times for the annual compliance refresher fell to 29 minutes in the second year, saving Royal Mail 1,500 business hours

Enhancing planning

Detailed reporting and trend analysis helped target additional training and create better communications

The road ahead

Ongoing improvements included a push on greater mobile access, enabling field workers such as postmen to access the training via microlearning

When Royal Mail partnered with Skillcast, its French subsidiary was facing a multi-million pound fine for competition law breaches. After agreeing to a settlement and providing compliance commitments, the amount was reduced from €67,600,000 to €55,200,000. 

The actions Royal Mail took in the UK demonstrate a strong commitment to compliance.

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