Consensus transforms compliance into empowerment with Totara and Kineo

Welcome to Consensus: where every moment matters. For 15 years, Consensus has been dedicated to supporting individuals with learning disabilities, autism, and complex needs, providing bespoke care and support to help people lead fulfilling lives; embracing every day and celebrating every achievement.

With over 1800 dedicated employees across 98 homes in England, Scotland, and Wales, Consensus focuses on quality care and personalised support to ensure that every individual’s goals, needs and aspirations are at the heart of life at Consensus. L&OD and training underpin Consensus’s mission to positively impact those they support, through the empowerment and progress of colleagues and adaptable learning; their development ensures they can offer exceptional support focused on enriching lives, creating memories, and providing opportunities to flourish.

The Challenge

Consensus operates in a highly regulated environment. Managing compliance amidst constantly evolving requirements while simultaneously delivering customised training tailored to individual needs posed a formidable challenge.

With a manual learning environment reliant on spreadsheets and printed materials, Consensus faced significant administrative burdens leading to compliance challenges and stress among staff.

The lack of a centralised platform made it difficult to track training, making it hard to ensure compliance was met, leading to constraints in their ability to provide comprehensive training beyond mandatory and core requirements.

Striving to maintain a people-centric approach amid stress and time-consuming processes, Consensus sought a solution to streamline and scale training, whilst engaging learners, and building a culture of continuous learning to support staff in delivering exceptional care.

To overcome these challenges and enable easier, more flexible and continuous training, Consensus sought a platform offering versatility, scalability, and adaptability.

Key features required included Automation of manual processes, flexibility in audiences and permissions to personalise training, robust reporting and a user-friendly interface catering to diverse learner types. Additionally, a clear dashboard highlighting the RAG status of all learning was essential for effective monitoring and compliance management.

The solution

With the implementation of Totara’s learning platform, dubbed ‘Click’ (Consensus Learning Inspires Confidence and Knowledge), Consensus scaled their training and empowered their workforce in 3 ways.

1. Improving competency through engagement: Consensus adopted a person centred approach to learning. They actively gathered and incorporated user feedback to customise the learning experience, fostering trust and engagement. Click provides a clear journey for employees by combining e-learning, virtual training, and face-to-face sessions to meet diverse learning needs. All whilst offering a user-friendly interface, ensuring that every individual receives the support they need to excel in their role.With over 1800 active users, courses are tailored to specific audiences, leveraging permissions and audience, the system streamlines onboarding, requiring minimal user input. This not only relieves admins of manual work but also enables users to easily access content suited to their needs, resulting in time savings, user empowerment, and reduced bottlenecks.
2. Driving compliance through insight: With over 150 active courses and 98 active organisations, the RAG status dashboard, developed by Kineo, revolutionised compliance management, providing real-time insights and forecasting capabilities, and simplifying training planning and execution.Consensus leverages Totara’s powerful reporting and dashboard features to monitor compliance, track progress, and forecast training needs, providing valuable insights for continuous improvement.
3. Going beyond compliance: Their human-centric learning extends to employee development, emphasising leadership at all levels. They’ve established academies to enhance skills, like operational academies tailored to employee needs, aiming not just for compliance but excellence. Leadership academies focus on refining current leaders through revamped inductions, masterclasses, roadshows and conferences that support L&D and business strategies. Aspiring academies prepare individuals with the right skills for their next step, with three leadership programs and coaching networks. They also provide support through sustainability ambassadors, mental health first aiders, and culture advocates, ensuring a supportive environment for all staff.

The result

Over the past few years, Consensus has seen remarkable improvements in training effectiveness and efficiency. Beyond mandatory training, specialised programs and academies cater to bespoke individual user needs, fostering a culture of learning and continuous development. The shift to a person centred approach has nurtured an open and approachable learning environment, resulting in proactive compliance management and increased engagement and completion scores overall.

The impact of Kineo and Totara on Consensus’s learning and compliance initiatives has been transformative. With greater visibility and automation, Consensus has reduced administrative burdens, allowing their teams to focus on delivering exceptional care. Compliance is now proactive rather than reactive, with dashboards providing real-time insights, flagging any potential issues and creating a roadmap for future learning.

Additionally, implementing dashboards has helped Consensus stay ahead of training needs by identifying and overcoming potential learning obstacles. Overall, Consensus has experienced a 5% boost in organisation-wide learning and development, thanks to increased engagement and better training results with the help of Kineo and Totara.Learner engagement has also soared, driven by a person-centred approach that prioritises user feedback and personalisation. As a result, Consensus has seen increased compliance scores, decreased user queries, and a notable improvement in talent progression across the organisation. This improvement has not only saved time and costs but also built a system of trust, resulting in increased user engagement and satisfaction.

It has also led to a significant reduction in user queries and requests for courses, going from up to 10 weekly queries to zero, demonstrating the effectiveness of the new system.

Insights gained from the system have informed strategic decisions, enabling them to expand their training offerings beyond mandatory requirements, focusing on more specific needs such as employee development, leadership, coaching and specialised academies for people that they support in their services.

With proactive compliance management and enhanced user engagement, Consensus is paving the way for digital learning solutions and fostering a more inclusive and approachable learning environment.

Consensus’s journey with Totara and Kineo showcases the transformative impact of leveraging innovative learning platforms to enhance skills, drive compliance, and ultimately, empower the great quality of care provided to the People that they support.

Additional quotes taken from Proactive Site Feedback survey:

• Having used other systems, created other system user faces and designed other system navigation, I believe CLICK to be one of the better systems. – Head Office User
• I can find everything and it looks and feels so much smoother – the training courses work better too. – Service Team
• Very easy to book staff on training sessions that are on the calendar. – Service Manager
• Great and easy to use. – Learner
• All learning resources are easy to access on CLICK. – Service Manager
• The best to keep track of the stats and who needs to be booked on available sessions. – Service Manager
• Easy to understand. – Service Manager
• Nice, clean layout. – Learner