COCA-COLA AMATIL DRUG & ALCOHOL POLICY
A two-pronged online learning program for Coca-Cola Amatil’s new Drug & Alcohol Policy.
We understand the groan the word ‘policy’ draws from employees. It can feel like a wrist-slap or a compliance box-tick, and can be unmotivating for our people.
But what is actually the point of a policy? Yes, there’s legalities in there but policies, albeit a bit of a boring read, are usually written to protect our people in one way or another. So how can we work a bit harder to convey that level of care and concern?
When Coca-Cola Amatil was launching a new Drug & Alcohol Policy, they knew it needed to elevate beyond the legal jargon to create meaning for their people. Working with their Health, Safety and Wellbeing team we created two online learning programs to support the new policy: one to support the business leaders, the other to educate important changes to the Drug and Alcohol policy on site to the broader employee audience.
Background —
Elevating policies from compliance to care.
Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) is one of the Asia-Pacific’s largest bottlers and distributors of non-alcoholic, alcoholic and ready-to-drink beverages, and one of the world’s largest bottlers of the Coca-Cola Company range. They employ around 14,000 people in Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Samoa.
Danielle Odd, Head of Health, Safety and Wellbeing at CCA Australia came to us with a task – to launch the first fully regionally applied policy, delivered as online training to all employees.
Overall, CCA needed a solution that:
could be implemented across the entire Asia Pacific region
could be easily translated for local languages
demonstrated CCA’s commitment to care and support
was highly visual and engaging
that their people took on board, and
something completely different to what CCA people had experienced in the past.
As manufacturers and distributors of alcoholic beverages, CCA is very mindful of promoting the responsible consumption of alcohol, and educating their people about the harmful impacts it can have on personal wellbeing.
Knowing the way policies can be perceived, they wanted to ensure the new Drug & Alcohol policy was implemented in an impactful and positive way – to convey the health and wellbeing message, as well as outlining the expectations of their people at work. It needed to be grounded in the CCA values:
We are straightforward and open
We take initiative and own the outcome
We focus on today and tomorrow.
The Challenge —
The policy problem.
Traditionally, policies are hardly straightforward and open. Full of technical or legal jargon, they lose their audience quickly, defeating the entire purpose in the first place – to inform and influence. They’re often one dimensional, without context, lacking personality and housed in the belly of the intranet. They’re not easily accessible or user-friendly. And no one cares to read them.
So how do you solve a problem like a policy? The challenge is to find the balance of satisfying your company’s risk and compliance needs, while ensuring the content does what it’s supposed to do – keeps people safe with information that sticks.
Consider everyone the policy impacts
Policies are usually directed for the end-user – the everyday employee. But often overlooked in the whole exercise is the policy enforcers – the managers and supervisors tasked with actually implementing the policy.
During the discovery phase with Danielle and CCA, we quickly established that their people leaders would be liable in implementing the new Drug & Alcohol policy, and that they’d need support to do their role effectively. Both to build their capability in understanding the policy and having the tough conversations.
It became clear we had two audiences we were speaking to – the everyday employee and the people leaders, and that they’d each need a unique learning program.
Building knowledge and capability.
At the core of any learning program is the desire to engage learners and strengthen their knowledge and capability.
For both audiences it was important we build in the ‘why’ context to elevate the learning outcomes. Traditionally policies only focus on the ‘what’– do this, don’t do that . And the ‘why’ context – what’s in it for me – is exactly what humans need to make the connection between doing or not doing an action and how it benefits or impacts them personally.
The Shift —
A tailored approach to communicating and embedding policies.
For managers and leaders our objective was to:
— Help them become advocates for the D&A Policy
— Empower them to aid team understanding of the policy
— Help them reinforce their commitment of care for the wellbeing of their teams.
For all CCA people our objective was to:
— Build an immersive learning experience for employees across the Asia Pacific region.
— Transfer the important information from the D&A Policy in a digestible, and engaging way.
By setting clear learning outcomes in the outset, we were then able to mine and redesign the policy content to ensure we met the learning requirements
for each audience.
Interactive micro-learning for best outcomes
Research shows learning in bite-sized pieces makes the transfer of learning from the classroom to the desk 17% more efficient.
Having content accessible and readily available means learners can move at their own pace.
And distilling content into modules of 3-7 minutes, makes the information more focused which reduces cognitive load and improves retention.
To enable effective learning we broke the policy into a series of micro learnings that could stand on their own, within the broader learning experience.
When we had the technical content down, our team then created a wireframe to ensure we were using a mix of mediums throughout, to contextualise or distil the information further.
— An infographic to share data or stats
— A short animated video instead of onerous amounts of reading
— Interactive click-throughs
— Scenario-based learning.
This ensured we were catering to the many learning styles of our audience, and kept the learner in a mindset of curiosity – the best headspace for effective learning.
Driving emotions help shift behaviour, while a narrative layer increases connection.
The art + science
Our process blends art and science, drawing on the psychology of behaviour, motivation and learning, applied with human-centred design and communication principles. Driving emotions help shift behaviour, while a narrative layer increases connection. Curiosity draws attention to crucial messaging and inspires active learning. Complex systems and processes are simplified and visualised to reduce cognitive load and increase comprehension.
Approach —
Personas —
The Amatil workforce is:
Multi-generational
Across multiple locations in the Asia Pacific region
Gender mix
Blue and white collar employees.
We developed audience personas so the team had a shared understanding of the users, which meant we could meet their needs and objectives in design.
Tone of Voice —
Tone of voice is more than just the words we choose. It’s how we communicate ‘personality’ — this is both the look (design) and the feel (words). The tone we chose was conversational and straight to the point with an undertone of care.
This meant our learning content was written with a positive, active voice, avoiding jargon, spelling out acronyms and getting to the point quickly. We also relied on storytelling throughout the learning experience — we wanted our audience (leaders and employees) to have someone to empathise with. We know people are more likely to listen to the messages that we’re trying to communicate if they’re being told an engaging story in the process.
Delivery Channels —
Once we’d established our audience personas, we needed to gauge the best channels to reach them effectively.
For managers and leaders
Danielle and the Safety team were keen to develop support materials that could launch and communicate how the policy would be implemented, as well as a suite of ongoing resources that leaders could reference and pull from when ‘live’ issues under the policy arose.
For all employees
The objective was to build awareness and knowledge of the policy so everyone knew how the policy applied to them personally and understood any obligations they had under the policy.
The Leader Learning Experience.
The Leader Learning Experience
We needed to prepare and support leaders ahead of the formal policy launch to all CCA people. Through discovery sessions with the safety team we identified three distinct phases where leaders would need to build capability.
Preparing for the formal policy launch.
Pre launch –
Communicating everything leaders needed to know and do before the all employee policy launch dates.
Launch –
Helping leaders create a plan to ensure their team completed the employee online learning module, and ensuring leaders were ready to answer queries or concerns from their teams.
Post launch –
Preparing leaders to continue the conversation about the D&A Policy. Insights into behavioural markers to assist identifying signs of drug or alcohol use, and advice on how to show support and care for any team members experiencing dependency issues.
For this phase of learning we needed to design a solution that was scalable and consistent across the region as each geography had a unique launch date for the policy. To meet these needs the best solution here was an online learning module.
15 minute online learning guiding leaders on their roles: prelaunch, launch, and post launch
10 x explainer videos unpacking the ‘tricky’ parts of the D&A policy — building leader capability upfront and used as a refresher once the policy was implemented and live issues arose.
D&A policy cheat sheets housed on Sharepoint for easy access.
The Employee Learning Experience
To turn a formal policy written with legal and compliance outcomes in mind, into an engaging learning experience is quite the art and one that our team loved delivering on. By getting to know the policy with intimate detail, we worked with the safety team to ensure we distilled and simplified the most important pieces of the policy to be brought to life in the learning experience.
Once we had that foundation, we could create a prototype of the content to share with Danielle and her team for their review. Working this way ensures the process is highly collaborative and delivers the best outcome for our collaborators — they are involved, listened to and consulted every step of the way.
Animation storyboard.
