Employee engagement through Learning at Work Week
WHSmith has been running a Learning at Work Week event for the last five years, with more employees getting involved year on year, and the Week is now established as an important employee engagement event at WH Smith. This year we ran 36 master classes in our London and Swindon Head Offices with 671 places being filled. In Stores, 800 store managers took part in voice conferences led by two executive directors focusing on the subject of customer service; and a total of 12,000 customer facing staff took part in over 500 voice conferences. Master classes and voice conferences were led by our senior management and Executive management team with topics varying from Leadership to Report Writing to Interpersonal Impact. Dedicated intranet pages then provided a tool to communicate and share learning about Learning at Work Week across the business.
The feedback from staff was overwhelmingly positive, with comments including ‘Learning at Work week initiative is a really good one – it seems to put the experience and expertise of our senior colleagues to really effective use to provide genuine lessons and inspiration’; and ‘The voice conferences were very beneficial, a very strong message and we should do more of these’.