Just over a month ago, my co-host Megan Beane Torres and I sat down with Ana Velázquez on our podcast, The Art of the Possible. Ana and I go back over 15 years, to when we were both at enterprise-focused companies and got together to figure out how to make our LMS work for large businesses. Today her days are split between frontline worker training for independent grocers and corporate learning.
Something Ana said in our chat really stuck with me: payroll is a grocery store’s biggest expense. Her clients can't pull employees off the floor for hours of formal training. The obvious fix seems to be microlearning, training built for the 15-minute break. But there’s more to it than that.
I see three levels in how Ana approaches her frontline training strategy: the organization, the person running the program, and the employee taking the course. It’s a framework I think any team building training can borrow.
Ana Velázquez is Senior Vice President at the Retail Learning Institute and the IGA Coca-Cola Institute, a nonprofit supported by The Coca-Cola Company. Her team builds turnkey training for independent grocers, from a single seasonal store to groups of 400. She’s worked with independent retailers for 20 years, in an industry where employee turnover is 40%. That means a constant stream of new people to train.
Ask the people who come to the Institute how they handle training, and she says 99.9% give the same answer: “I get my best cashier and I have somebody stand behind them, look at them and what they do, and that person will teach them.”
Ana’s team has a different playbook.
So what makes frontline training stick? First, buy-in.
Without the manager, it goes nowhere
Ana’s estimate is that the tool and delivery system are 50% of whether a program works. The other 50% is the organization’s commitment, including executive backing and managers and supervisors who understand the power of the tool they have.
With independent retailers, she says, the manager is the master of the store, and those managers get measured on sales, retention, and performance. Developing their teams isn’t on the list.
In implementation sessions, Ana asks people to tell her where the program will succeed and where it will fail. The answer, she says, is always a function of the vision and the value the store’s leaders put on training. She calls that the biggest roadblock the Institute has.
“The student can have all the interest in doing it. The administrator can put together the perfect program for their organization. But if the manager doesn’t put it in their field of vision and encourage people to do it, it’s not gonna go anywhere.”
The organizations that really succeed, she says, need a policy and a measure for training commitment in the performance evaluations of in-store leaders. Separately, she’s playing with an observation checklist where supervisors approve that someone has reached the expected level of performance on the job. It’s still an idea, but I’m a fan.
Plucked from the store and handed a training program
The next level down is the person running the program day to day. Ana says, “a lot of these people are not training people.” It’s often “somebody who has been plucked from the store” and told to get the program going. For the longest time, the usual request was “I need videos.”
She says her job has always been to help training administrators:
Understand what a training program is
Make good course selections
Adapt the plan to their stores’ needs
When the Institute noticed that a program’s success depended on how well its administrator could carry it, the team started giving administrators tools to make their lives easier. The Institute’s latest training release gives administrators a new tool that pulls together courses for them and adds video channels, so they can help themselves. They work long hours, and her team isn’t available around the clock.
Building training that fits the break
The last level is the person taking the course. Which is often where I see training strategies focus first.
With a store’s profit at 0.75% to 2% of sales, Ana says, a manager who sends someone to a course is paying someone who isn’t producing on the floor. Ana’s side of that trade is speed: “For somebody to send somebody out of the floor to do training, it has to be good, it has to be fast, and it has to hit what exactly the store needs.”
The Institute’s early courses ran ~60 minutes, with one cashier course running almost 5 hours. Her average course is now 3 to 10 minutes. Made for the quick break.
Three things worth stealing
Ask where it will fail before you launch. At your next kickoff, don't just talk about what success looks like. Have your team call out where they think the training will fall short before you jump into execution.
Build the program for all 3 levels. Write down who the learner, the program owner, and the leaders behind it are, then build the plan around each of their needs.
Write down what “ready” looks like. Pick one skill and list what a manager should see on the job before signing off.
The biggest eye-opener for me: grocery work looks simple until you see what's at stake. Pack a bag wrong, and you've ruined a customer's groceries. Miss a safety step, and someone can get seriously hurt. That’s why getting frontline training right matters.
The idea of bite-sized, 3-to-10-minute courses didn't happen overnight. “Every time we go into an iteration,” Ana says, “it’s like we are clearing up the clutter.” No program starts out perfect, which is a reminder I like to share with my team often.
Ana is great at setting the big-picture strategy and building a strong team to carry it out. She shares lots more about her role and strategy on our podcast! You can watch the full interview here.