Arriva launches compliance learning hub to serve their diverse European workforce

Arriva is a leading provider of passenger transport across Europe, employing around 40,000 people and delivering around 1.2 billion passenger journeys across 12 European countries. As part of Deutsche Bahn (DB), Arriva not only provides bus and train services, but runs trams, waterbuses, car and bike-sharing systems.

The Challenge

Compliance is extremely important to Arriva and all new starters, irrespective of their role, get issued with a set of 4 compliance courses:

1. Information security
2. Financial crime
3. Standards of business conduct
4. Competing fairly

Every employee has to complete these courses within a 4-week window, with a required pass rate of at least 80%.  There is also refresher training every year for all employees.

Arriva has over 39,000 employees spread across 12 countries in Europe. With so many different languages spoken, Arriva needed a robust e-learning solution to ensure that their compliance requirements could cost-effectively be met and that the necessary training could be delivered to all their employees, regardless of geographic location.  This training also had to be of the highest quality, consistent, and delivered across 14 different countries and dozens of different departments and job roles, each with their own set of course programmes to complete.

The Solution

The organisation had a small e-learning focused team that began by implementing targeted projects, starting smart and scaling. This demonstrated the flexibility of Totara Learn and how it could revitalise Arriva’s compliance training across all their European operations.

Totara’s programme feature enables compliance training to be a fully automated process across the business, automating course assignments based on user profiles (for example, by sending out invitations to new starters as soon as they join Arriva to take part in the mandatory training). And because of the 4-week time period, the system also automatically sends reminders to both the individual learner and their manager about their compliance status.

Because Arriva operates in a European market, they have also greatly benefited from Totara’s multi-lingual featureset, allowing the same compliance content to be shared while giving employees in different countries the ability to select their preferred language. Automating the compliance process and introducing local language testing has resulted in huge cost savings and increased rates of success.

Arriva is also utilising the system not only for hosting the training material, but also the data that it outputs, setting up an integration between Totara and their Management Information system.  This allows Arriva to use Totara Learn to create localised dashboards that highlight key stats such as percentage completion rates that are specific to each business area, allowing Compliance Champions within each of Arriva’s different businesses and individual managers to see how their teams are progressing, clearly identifying those employees who have completed the training, those who have delayed, who hasn’t started, etc.  This has meant that compliance rates have increased while management time spent administering the training has significantly decreased.

Because the four training programmes are mandatory, the ability to report on completion activity is vital.  A priceless feature for the L&D department is the automation of the solution and the ability to easily keep an auditable and accessible record of all the training carried out by employees.

Results

By starting with a small and targeted solution, Arriva Learning is now having a major impact on the business. As a result of this initiative to use Totara Learn for their employee compliance induction training, Arriva now have a powerful new learning strategy that enables their learners to become quickly competent in Arriva’s compliance goals. Since the system went live in 2018, there has been a total of 59,409 completions for the 4 compliance modules, translated into 14 different languages.

The Totara solution is now in its third iteration of digital learning modules with a fourth set being developed. For each new iteration, Arriva Learning looks to take a further step forward with regards to new engaging content and enhanced system functionality, taking advantage of new Totara features in order to continuously provide a contemporary style of learning to their employees.

Not only has the completion rate increased to 99% across the group, against a target completion rate of 95%, but significant amounts of time and resources have been freed by the move away from the previous labour-intensive compliance process to one that largely runs itself. Automating the CSV updates alone saves at least 1 hour per week in administration time. Arriva Learning teams are now able to focus on strategy and long-term planning instead of a succession of administrative and support tasks.

Using the Arriva Learning system has allowed far greater controls and a more accessible self-serve feel to the process than when using the old approach. The system is easy to navigate and, from the perspective of system administrators, easy to troubleshoot when issues arise.

Due to the nature of compliance training, more often than not, no news is good news. Arriva’s employees face time constraints around their roles, so to see completions proceeding with minimal support and 0 complaints across Arriva’s tens of thousands of employees who have completed their compliance training on the system, clearly demonstrates that the platform and modules are accessible and easy to navigate – an overall success.

Moreover, from an end-user perspective, the Totara-based system has also been overwhelmingly positive. Arriva Learning constantly receive positive feedback regarding the content and usability of their courses, through emails from employees and reviews from compliance managers and senior executives.

“First and foremost Arriva Learning is always compatible with SCORMS developed by third parties, there are no issues with functionality and thus this gives us confidence in procuring / creating modern engaging courses.  

Due to the multi-language function, one learning page can be made with all languages embedded meaning a great deal of time is saved, similarly when setting up a program for learners this can also be set up to communicate directly with the user in their native tongue. This feature is perfect for compliance reminders / notifications as this can also be set to operate within a particular set of user defined parameters eg 1 week after enrolment to course / alert manager etc.  

The audience function also allows for specific groups of employees to be entered together into certain learning packages allowing for bespoke personalised refresher material to be delivered that is relevant to the employee. This gives us a greater element of control and a more professional and contemporary feel to the learning with different colleagues not all simply receiving one broad generic course.” 

– Samy Menad, Group Compliance Coordinator