Center Parcs

Background

Center Parcs UK and Ireland is a family short break provider, operating six holiday villages in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, each covering about 2500 acres of woodland. The company’s first village opened at Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, in 1987, while its sixth, and latest, opened at Longford Forest, Ireland, in 2019.

More than 10,000 team members work across the Center Parcs villages and Head Office to create memorable experiences for families in beautiful forest locations. There’s a diverse range of career opportunities, bolstered by a positive commitment to promote from within.

From helping guests make happy memories to smiling and laughing with colleagues, every aspect of working for Center Parcs is centred around generating excellent customer service and keeping guests safe.

What makes Center Parcs truly unique isn’t just what they do, but also the way they do it. Center Parcs is a place where employees can be themselves whilst continuing to learn and grow. Having the skills, experience and behaviours to do the job well is an important part of being a member of the Center Parcs family; and during their career, employees will always be learning new skills.

Keeping guests safe

One of the key elements of continuous learning for Center Parcs is its thorough and robust compliance programme, which seeks to keep employees and guests safe at its villages. With topics spanning everything from safeguarding, manual handling, data security and protection to food safety allergen training and protected wildlife legislation modules, it’s clear that this complex business has an equally complex set of mandatory compliance training courses.

More than a box-ticking exercise

For Center Parcs, people are at the heart of its purpose, linking development to HR and thereby ensuring a culture of continuous learning. But what happens when the reporting on mandatory learning is out of date before it reaches the villages? How do you ensure the appetite to learn isn’t curtailed by a manual and sometimes inaccurate reporting process? How do you re-establish confidence in the data to bring the focus back to the importance of the learning?

Center Parcs’ existing reporting process was completely manual. It required Learning and Development (L&D) colleagues to run manual completion reports for every team in the organisation, often resulting in hours of work that could already be inaccurate before village L&D Advisors even had the chance to converse with their teams to encourage completion.

Furthermore, Center Parcs’ multi-layered structure meant that numerous people in the business – from the Leadership team to Health and Safety Managers and Learning and Development teams within the villages to various teams in its Head Office – required management information visibility. In all, this amounted to around 500 different users. Consequently, not only were the L&D team receiving multiple requests for different reports, but they were also constantly limited to acting reactively, rarely able to proactively improve training/workload planning.

Streamlined, accurate dashboard reporting

With these challenges in mind, the Learning and Development team at Center Parcs sought to reduce the administrative burden of reporting whilst restoring focus upon learning by producing reliable, accurate compliance records in real-time.

The objectives were to support the business in its quest for compliance, by:

• Producing management information dashboards for compliance learning modules.
• Creating accurate, up-to-date records that could be viewed in real-time.

Having already worked with learning experts Learning Pool for its LMS system, Center Parcs approached the team to help deliver a solution capable of realising the company’s vision.

Together, the teams have accordingly produced bespoke compliance dashboards, producing real-time management information that can be broken down by village, division and team. Data now includes completion rates, progress, pass rates and prompts for action required from leaders.

Bringing the focus back to learning

Center Parcs also runs a two-year cycle for its ‘Protect Me’ courses, a programme for major legal training events encompassing topics including fire, COSHH and manual handling. A two-year rolling rotation of course runs twice-yearly: the window opens for 8-12 weeks, and learning is mandatory for all staff to complete.

These events create a unique buzz, generating a competitive spirit between villages which all aspire to be the first to achieve 100% completion. However, insufficient/inaccurate data has often impaired engagement in this event, with managers having to spend time analysing data and thereby risking the wind out of the sails of otherwise highly motivated teams.

The provision of real-time, accurate data has completely resolved this problem. Now, teams are solely focused upon completing their courses.

Trusting the data

Ensuring the data was consistently accurate and up to date was crucial to ensuring that dashboard users had faith in its reliability. Feedback revealed that previous manual reporting didn’t take staffing changes into account, meaning those on long-term sick, maternity or paternity leave (and thus unable to complete learning modules) were not removed from the reporting.

The dashboards have functionality which creates exception rules to prevent this problem, resulting in greater levels of buy-in from users. Additionally, the dashboard is configured individually for each user, removing confusion and ensuring the right people will always see the right data.

Future plans

Today, Center Parcs’ compliance dashboard has proven to be a mainstay for teams right across the business. Future plans include continuous development of the tool in line with feedback from users, e.g. supplementing the dashboard with additional buttons and reports.

Impacts

Since the dashboards were launched in 2021, Center Parcs has seen:

• Time savings: The central team have saved on average approximately three hours per week over the training window (taking into account running reports, checking data and additional conversations to confirm data). Over a 10 week training window, this has amounted to 30 hours saved.
• Compliance rate improvements: There has been an improved accuracy of completion results as the team have the ability to exclude those on maternity/parental leave or long-term sickness, so data takes into account only those in the business during the training event – previously those colleagues were included in the data which reduced the completion rates.