Relevant and responsive: How Greene King catered to a multi-device audience amid continual legislative change

During the pandemic, changing legislation about how to run and open pubs created a huge training challenge. When new legal decisions were made, we didn’t get any more notice than the general UK public, leading to a need for constant and rapid course updates. This was a perfect example of the ease and agility that Gomo provides, and it felt great to have the confidence that we could make meaningful updates without any fuss.

- Sarah Talbot, Learning Design Manager, Greene King

33%

reduction in learning time

4.5/5

learner feedback for ease of navigation

100+

learning projects completed in 2022

About Greene King

Founded in 1799 and known for its cask ale, Greene King is a large, UK-based pub retailer. As an organization that spans 2,600 pubs, breweries, hotels, and restaurants, Greene King maintains a workforce of approximately 39,000 people.



a gif showing one of Greene King's training courses fade in

The challenge: Delivering timely content updates during a national crisis

As a leading pub company and brewer, Greene King experienced pandemic-era challenges that magnified the existing complexities involved in keeping track of 39,000 learners. When Greene King first adopted Gomo in 2020, its digital learning team was grappling with constantly changing rules for serving food and drink in a time of social distancing. From guidance on how to perform team temperature checks to hygiene protocols, Greene King’s many employees needed increased volumes of up-to-the-minute eLearning that accurately reflected government expectations and new legal requirements, often with minimal warning.

These rapidly authored additional courses didn’t just require constant and immediate updates—they also took valuable time away from Greene King’s workforce. The company was conscious that, in an industry primarily staffed by hourly workers, time lost to unexpected training comes with significant cost implications.

Many of Greene King’s employees are also frontline team members who don’t routinely use laptops or computers as part of their roles, with many choosing to use personal devices to complete training courses. When Greene King first encountered Gomo, the organization needed a responsive authoring tool that could seamlessly display learning content on laptops, tablets, and phones. 

In conjunction with these challenges, Greene King’s central Learning and Development (L&D) team needed to deliver its rapidly crafted, up-to-date, and fully responsive eLearning content to a number of different brands in the wider Greene King family. Though the bulk of the content needed to remain consistent with the core brand, Greene King’s central L&D team wanted to ensure that each brand’s eLearning came with its own identifying characteristics and distinct communication style.

Since many of our learners use their own devices, we needed truly responsive learning—our courses had to do more than shrink down or force learners to switch to a landscape layout. Just as importantly, we needed to achieve this level of responsiveness without the need for coding expertise. That’s why Gomo’s mobile-responsive elements were a huge tick for us.

- Sarah Talbot, Learning Design Manager, Greene King

The solution: Prompt updates that function perfectly on any device

By taking full advantage of Gomo’s live update and delivery feature, Greene King’s L&D team now makes instant revisions to its content. These updates are achieved via the cloud with the help of Gomo’s LMS wrapper, meaning that the team doesn’t need to re-version content within its LMS.

Greene King’s workforce also benefitted from the power of Gomo’s responsive design, which gives the L&D team a coding-free way to provide an optimized learning experience irrespective of device size or orientation. Corporate and retail teams now receive the same high-quality content regardless of the devices they can access. For phone users, this has transformed the navigation experience. Rather than a more conventional slideshow style, workers now enjoy a continuous scrolling approach to navigation that’s more in keeping with their day-to-day phone use.

While Gomo’s responsive design has delivered consistency to every learner, its 13 custom themes have ensured that brands under the Greene King umbrella enjoy a distinct visual style. Each theme immerses learners in the identity of their individual brands and lets them experience learning tailored to the story of their brand —without impacting the time it takes the team to produce a given course.

Greene King also used Gomo’s extensive theme options to power a major training project centered around inclusion. The team was able to enhance its messaging on inclusive topics by mirroring the visual cues associated with LGBTQ+ flags and iconography.

The results: Exceptional productivity that extends beyond the pandemic

Greene King’s learners have responded enthusiastically to Gomo-created learning resources. For example, Greene King used Gomo to create a series of non-linear knowledge hubs providing policy and product information. These hubs have seen 50,000 launches over the six-month period between August 2022 and February 2023 on a purely voluntary basis.

While this is a notable achievement, it’s in mandatory training that the L&D team’s Gomo-driven work really shines. Following the team’s push for responsive and well-formatted courses, it’s no surprise that an audience of phone users has seen its time in learning reduced by 33%. This isn’t just a general boost to efficiency—it’s also a notable financial saving for an organization that largely employs hourly workers.

This reduction in learning time can be attributed to Gomo’s intuitive interface, as learners don’t need to spend time puzzling over how to interact with their eLearning courses. In fact, Greene King surveys show that learners rate their courses an average of 4.5 out of 5 for ease of navigation—an impressive feat in a multi-device learning environment.

Gomo’s ease of use is equally felt on the learning design side. With the help of Gomo’s seamless theme implementation and LMS-free updates, Greene King’s digital learning team has been able to produce huge volumes of content despite external disruptions like pandemic-era legislative change. These high levels of productivity persisted into 2022, during which the team produced over 100 learning projects to the highest standard.

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