ENDING THE ONBOARDING ROLLER COASTER

Six Flags Entertainment Corporation is the world’s largest regional theme park company, with 20 locations in North America alone. With over 1900 employees, and the parks drawing over 25 million visitors each year, Human Resource and Learning & Development processes pose specific challenges.

The Director of Training for Six Flags Over Texas, Jayson Maxwell, needed a strategy to onboard employees more effectively and turned to CD2 Learning to convert existing processes into online solutions. Here were the challenges he was facing.

• Retention
• Lack of Work Experience
• Lack of Engaging Training
• Lack of Mobile Learning
• Inconsistent WiFi necessitated mobile app
• Ensure learning/training takes place
• Reporting for critical issues (safety)
• Short timeframe for onboarding
• Needed to protect intellectual property
• Overall knowledge of the park as well as specific job requirements

SOLUTION

The strategy was to include technology components to deliver employee onboarding for their primarily millennial workforce. After researching technology offerings in the marketplace, Jayson chose CD2 Learning’s Platform for their mobile, customizable interface that would allow him to create an engaging and informative onboarding program for park employees.

The onboarding program utilized tablets and broke the content into bite size learning. The use of tablets necessitated installation of WiFi. Because of the opportunities for abuse, the WiFi was tightly controlled, allowing only for the training lessons.

CD2 Learning developed a Learning Process Map (LPM) to organize Six Flags’ learning into a linear format where the learner can be led through a journey. It was important to be efficient because of the limited onboarding timeframe. The LPM allowed Six Flags to maximize their investment in existing training content by enhancing it with video and audio files, simulations and gamification, authored assessments, surveys and polls, graphics and images. This resulted in a measurable increase in engaging lessons and active learning to practice and apply skills.

Six Flags met their goal of establishing an overall knowledge base, shared culture and language by replacing traditional instructor/student sessions with these fresh/relevant videos, games, simulations, activities and quizzes.

ON and OFFLINE Sync
A weak WiFi signal indicated the need for a mobile app to be created. This app, not reliant on connectivity, would eliminate technical disruptions in lessons.

Game-Based, Engaging Learning
One specific use was a map style game identifying key areas around the park - important because employees have a high rate of customer interaction. Jeopardy and Spot the Difference were other approaches used to gamify key business objectives. Videos were interspersed demonstrating customer service issues such as “speaking to and answering children at eye level.”

Microlearning
One specific use was a map style game identifying key areas around the park - important because employees have a high rate of customer interaction. Jeopardy and Spot the Difference were other approaches used to gamify key business objectives. Videos were interspersed demonstrating customer service issues such as “speaking to and answering children at eye level.”

RESULTS

• For such a geographically dispersed team, online onboarding reduced the time and expense of traveling to multiple locations.
• As with any organization, some managers are more organized, experience, and communicate better. The online process was a great equalizer, making all managers equally effective in training their new hires.
• As information changed, it was far easier to make those need-to-know content changes online.
• Tracking/reporting ensured new associates had mastered their training, this was especially critical for safety information and training.

The end of training surveys were valuable in identifying which areas of the new onboarding were the most engaging. Content was adapted according to those results.

Although the majority were under the age of 21, there also have seasonal “second career” seniors. As the population is increasingly exposed to smart phones and tablets, age is not the barrier it once was in technology. Surveys completed at the end of the training indicated that satisfaction levels were high regardless of age.

The CD2 Learning’s award-winning platform and mobile app are powerful tools for putting your internal processes online. Do you have a process you would like converted?