How it all began
Leroy Merlin began to operate in Poland in 1994 and opened its first shop in Piaseczno, a town near Warsaw, in 1996. Thanks to the dynamic pace of development, the company is now present in 44 Polish towns and cities with 67 departments. Leroy Merlin employs almost 12 thousand people (including 1000 managers) and recruits 3000 people annually. This is a great responsibility, as we always attach great significance to the development and wellbeing of our employees.
Onboarding had been implemented in every LM shop and region for a long time back then, but it was organised in a traditional offline way. After its evaluation in 2017, it turned out that change was necessary. The analysis showed that as much as 55% of the employees who left the company were those who had worked there for no more than 3 months. The employees from that group complained about the lack of involvement on the part of the supervisors and mentors in the process. In those circumstances, the basic problem for us was that it was impossible to monitor onboarding and the level of knowledge acquired by the new employees. Even though their internship periods were summarised, they were not sufficiently reported and documented.
Leroy Merlin in numbers
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67
departments in Poland
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44
cities
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~ 12 000
employees
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~ 1000
managers
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~ 3000
people recruited per year
Effects
Knowledge Base available 24/7
Our knowledge base is ALWAYS accessible to the employees, from ANY PLACE, on ANY DEVICE with internet connection, which includes smartphones as well as computers or tablets.
Overall turnover reduced by 5%
Lowering turnover by just 2% in the company would generate savings amounting to more than 230 thousand euro. And we have managed to reduce it by 5%!
Increased employee productivity from 40% up to 70% within the first month.
By making use of a streamlined onboarding process, we have raised average employee productivity from 40% up to 70% within the first month.
New hire turnover reduced by 9%...
When it comes to the group of employees who have worked in our company for less than a year, we reduced the turnover by as much as 9%.
Monitoring and reporting
We can also monitor the results of pulse-check surveys, which are performed on the first day, in the first week, and in the first month of working.
Key to success = digitization, mobility and blended learning
We adopted the 70/20/10 learning and development model, in which 10% of time is devoted to the acquisition of formal knowledge (e.g. by means of online courses), 20% of time is spent on learning from the training mentor or supervisor, and 70% refers to learning through working.
It is worth mentioning that thanks to our mobility programme, all our employees have their own smartphones.
We added elements of gamification to all the stages of the onboarding process, for example, in the form of badges which can be won by every person involved in the process. It is important that particular onboarding tasks are assigned not only to the interns but also to their mentors and supervisors. Each of them has a personalised access to the e-learning platform display to be able to obtain any necessary information and perform a given task.
To sum up, when comparing the costs of this investment with the savings we managed to generate, we made sure that we had made the best decision. The costs of implementing the online onboarding process paid off after a couple of months. The onboarding implementation level is rising month by month.
