The Melbourne Racing Club (MRC) is committed to Learning & Development (L&D) as a primary responsibility to attract, engage and retain exceptional employees that positively contribute to the organisational strategy. This is supported by LinkedIn research which concluded that 75% of employees would take a learning and development course suggested by their manager. Similar research shows that 94% of employees said they would stay with their organisation longer if it invested in their learning and development.
With a strong commitment to development and compliance across the organisation, MRC agreed to a new program of Learning Development work in 2020. An opportunity was identified by the Executive team to focus on the quality and delivery mechanism for compliance training across the organisation.
Delivering the program of work initially presented some significant challenges for the organisation. Not least was the transient nature of its workforce. MRC brings in a substantial seasonal workforce in order to cover busy periods such as the Spring Racing Carnival. The fact that a large number of people join the organisation at the same time and are only employed for a short period, means that training and educating this group is challenging. Further challenges were presented with large numbers of the permanent workforce having varying levels of computer literacy, diverse cultural backgrounds and a wide range of ages.
After an exhaustive search, MRC engaged Tribal Habits to be the platform that its online compliance training would be delivered through. MRC chose Tribal Habits as the most suitable system for the business as it is a cost-effective, customisable and user-friendly system that provided the organisation with the opportunity to build upon existing compliance modules and to continue to invest in the development of its employees.
Getting compliant
Before engaging Tribal Habits, MRC had little to no compliance training in place for its staff, and as such, there were significant risks to the business. Implementing core compliance modules for staff would set a precedent of mandatory expectations for each employee & provide important information regarding MRC’s policies and procedures. In turn, this assists in filling any knowledge gaps that exist across the business and ultimately reduces the risk employees pose to the organisation due to lack of knowledge regarding expectations.
MRC developed two compliance pathways for rollout over year one of the project launch, targeting specific employee groups and ensuring a baseline of knowledge exists across all locations of the organisation.
Compliance pathway one relates to all permanent employees across MRC & contains the following modules:
- Overview – Melbourne Racing Club
- Occupational health & safety fundamentals
- Alcohol & drugs in the workplace
- Anti-bullying & anti-harassment for employees & workers
- Information Security: Employee awareness
- Conclusion
Compliance pathway two relates to all casual employees across MRC and contains the following modules:
- Overview – Melbourne Racing Club
- Occupational health & safety fundamentals
- Alcohol & drugs in the workplace
- Anti-bullying & anti-harassment for employees & workers
- Conclusion
During the lockdowns in Victoria due to COVID – 19, the P&C Shared Services team began to build the ‘DRIVE Development with Tribal Habits’ platform, with the plan to rollout to the modules out to the permanent staffing group in February 2021.
During the design phase, the focus was on achieving maximum engagement from the learners by making the compliance content as engaging and informative as possible. This was achieved by researching effective learning methods such as gamification and microlearning.
Throughout its compliance modules, MRC wanted to incorporate legislative requirements contained within the template compliance modules supplied by the Tribal Habits designers, alongside MRC specific business-critical information. This approach has resulted in each module within the pathway being an exciting mix of information for employees to absorb, all relevant to their role in the organisation.
To ensure that each modules learnings were translated effectively into practice within the business, each has MRC specific implications and assessment questions to ensure learners absorb knowledge. Within each module, learning is divided up into sections and can come in the form of text, videos, scenarios, images, downloadable content, quiz questions and interactive elements to ensure knowledge is in a logical order for easy abortion and engages learners.
To achieve high completion rates, MRC designed a set of reminder notifications to occur from Tribal Habits throughout a 28-day period that was allotted for the completion of the training. These included an email reminder to those with outstanding pathways:
- 1 week before the due date
- 3 days before the due date
- 1 day before the due date
In addition to this, the Executive Director – People & Culture spoke each week at the Executive team meeting about that week’s completion rates and particularly noting staff within the team of each Executives team that was yet to engage in the training.
MRC’s implementation strategy focused on building an easily accessible platform that its dispersed sites could access in the same manner, at a time convenient to them. As the organisation has a diverse range of employees who work across a 7-day roster and at different hours of the day, it was essential that self-paced learning could be achieved. Through the inclusion of Single-Sign-On within the platform, all permanent staff could access our portal through a single click that required no log in credentials to be input by the user – it could not be easier to access!
For effective implementation, a 12-month strategy was designed to stage the rollout of these two pathways to the business. By doing this in a phased approach:
- It has allowed the current staff of the organisation to buy into the project and gain an understanding of why compliance training is business-critical.
- It has meant that managers had the opportunity to complete their own training either simultaneously or prior to their teams, maximising learnings and ensuring managers can effectively support their staff.
- Momentum has been gained, and naturally, word has spread across the employee group, assisting completion rates.
- The team administering this training has been able to learn through this journey and adjust pathway aspects, notification expectations and ultimately better the process for future module rollouts.
To ensure staff understood that the completion of this compliance training was mandatory within a 28-day period from enrolment and that they understood why this was being asked of them, MRC rolled out communications to its employees.
How it’s going
Post-implementation feedback from internal stakeholders was both incredibly positive and informative.
Employees felt as though:
- All topics covered provided valuable insights without feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content within each module.
- Modules were structured logically and were not too long.
- They now understood key compliance themes and their role in ensuring MRC acted in a manner that would meet compliance requirements.
- Many employees highlighted that the training clearly outlined key company policies that they were not previously aware of.
Perhaps equally important as the positive feedback gathered was that online training has opened a tight communication loop between employees at MRC and their managers. Managers are reporting that the training has prompted numerous conversations around working practices at the organisation as staff suggest improvements to current practices.
Staff members have enjoyed the training so much that they are requesting that online training be rolled out to more parts of the organisation. Many staff are making specific requests for the sort of training they’d like to see. MRC is thrilled at this level of engagement and with the fact that communication links and personal relationships between staff members and their managers have strengthened measurably.
This project was implemented easily within budget due to the effective partnering with Tribal Habits on a flexible agreement in which headcount access to the portal can be altered month to month. This meant that MRC could stagger its implementation rollout as desired without paying for users that were not active, which ultimately kept this within the anticipated budget.
Getting it done
The most significant reportable success of MRC’s online compliance training program is the completion rate of its permanent staff during February 2021. As the table below highlights, over the circa four-week period the organisation allowed for training completion, a 100% completion rate was achieved.
| Week | Percentage Completed |
| First Week | 19% |
| Second Week | 42% |
| Third Week | 66% |
| Fourth Week | 100% |
These completion rates were achieved with minimal human interaction or follow up from the team at MRC. As highlighted earlier, the team used the Tribal Habits platform to create a series of automated email notifications that reminded staff when their training was due and prompted them to complete it within the allotted timeframe.
These results are remarkable given the concerns the organisation held over the concerns of the level of computer literacy within its workforce. MRC was able to edit Tribal Habits’ base compliance training modules, to create relevant and engaging training that spoke to its audience. Presenting this information in an intuitive user interface meant that even users with minimal exposure to online training products could quickly complete the required training.
MRC has learned a lot about its workforce through this program. The tighter feedback and communication loops built with its staff members are being used to create a future road map for training within the organisation.
The organisation has already committed to roll-out compliance training regarding the organisation’s commitment to meet modern slavery standards.
Off the back of the success of the compliance training, discussions are taking place within the organisation around delivering role-based training as well creating induction pathways to be undertaken by new staff when they join the organisation.
“What’s great is that now we have the framework and systems in place; adding more training is really straightforward.”
“We feel like we’re at the start of something big here. There are so many applications for online learning within our operations.”
Ruby Miles
Familiarity with e-learning has been an enormous win for the organisation as well. The fact that the organisation’s employees in the field and those administering the system have had minimal issues with the transition to online learning means the organisation now has a high level of confidence in the solution and applications within the business.
“We now know that we can easily create amazing online training that our staff will love, and for us, that’s massive.”
The organisation is also investigating giving more power to its management team when it comes to online learning.
“We want to get to a place where managers in our organisation can enrol people in training. This way a manager can have open discussions with their staff and if a development opportunity arises, they can enrol them in some training that will allow them to make the most of that opportunity.”