Scandic: Empowering learning for a digital native workforce

In 2015 Scandic Hotels, the largest hotel chain in the Nordics, set itself a new vision, mission, and future states aspiration for 2020.

One of these future states was to have an inspiring and empowering culture. Within this new environment, one of the challenges the HR team faced was how to make learning relevant and empower its diverse and relatively young workforce. The chain was also expanding rapidly and new team members were constantly being onboarded.

Scandic’s training and Learning Management System was unfortunately outdated. Existing eLearning classes were long and usually less than 20% of employees completed the eLearnings. Compounding the problem was that most employees do not have ready access to a computer. And finally, the old way of top-down learning no longer seemed relevant as technological advances have changed the way people gathered information and learned.

How could Scandic keep its learning current and create a learning culture within an empowering company? Scandic’s journey shows how changing the culture of a company can have a rippling effect on learning and motivating employees, and vice versa – how learning methods can also reinforce the desired outcome of an organization’s cultural change.