The transition to creating a “Well Experience” for Walgreens customers required a complete overhaul of the company’s retail model: how it delivers patient and customer services; its products and physical stores; retail technology and processes; and store team member responsibilities and behaviors. This yearlong overhaul, which began in fiscal year 2012, could only succeed with a strong learning plan.
Collaborating with store and pharmacy operations to gather data and insights on customer needs, operational metrics, and learner audiences, six designers in just six months developed a 12-week curriculum to engage and educate thousands of team members on new Well Experience behaviors, roles, technologies, products, and processes/procedures.
Program Details
Integrated into change management initiatives to ensure consistency in messaging and leadership alignment, the comprehensive Well Experience Field Training is a blended solution designed to meet the learning needs of a broad audience. Components include:
- Two-week train-the-trainer programs for 24 operations facilitators (OPTs):
Week 1: OPTs work in already-opened (“live”) Well Experience stores to learn new skills and best practices and engage with team members. Daily debriefs follow.
Week 2: Facilitators master training content and complete learning lab segments to model the classroom experience; they then study those segments as “homework” and conduct teach-backs the following day.
- Online learning on new pharmacy technology, including the use of iPads, waiting room monitors, and express pharmacy pick-up kiosks
- Instructor-led learning labs for leaders and team members, each reinforcing the benefits of impending changes and providing hands-on practice in a simulated pharmacy and/or store environment
- Leader Guides to use at store team meetings, with five-minute huddle guides and on-the-floor activities such as a merchandise scavenger hunt to help team members learn their new store layout and customer/patient role-plays
- Team Resource Toolkit containing reference guides by store role, job aids on critical skills, transition milestone calendar, and educational games such as Pharmacy Workflow Bingo
- Job shadowing opportunities for high-performing store team members in live Well Experience stores; after, they help lead the change at their own stores
- Go-live performance support coaches—teams of operational experts providing successful real-time support and on-the-job training during Well Experience store openings
- District Manager Webinars to engage leaders and equip them to support the training
Results
To date, Walgreens has rolled out Well Experience Field Training to more than 450 stores and 13,000 employees. By all measures, the program has been a success. Effectiveness scores based on learning lab evaluations were above benchmark in all categories:
- Overall: 95 percent
- Job Impact: 97 percent
- Courseware: 96 percent
- Instructor: 94 percent
- ROI: 92 percent
- Content: 89 percent
- Confidence of Content Knowledge Before vs. After: 42 percent vs. 90 percent
Improvements in business metrics include:
- Overall customer delight in stores where team members completed training increased at a faster rate than control groups by 20 to 80 basis points in a three-month period.
- The volume of prescriptions filled in these pharmacies was up significantly, achieving Walgreens’ second-year investment hurdle in the first year.
Now that it has proven itself a best practice, Walgreens will continue to deliver Well Experience Field Training across the country for at least three more years.
