Overview
Beverage Retailer Co.* stands as the nation’s most extensive independent fine wine retailer since its founding in 1991. Fast forward 30+ years and they’ve expanded to over 10,000 employees across the country. For the company, its commitment to supporting and developing its people is core to its strength as a business and speaks to its decades-long track record of being a market leader.
This commitment led the company to partner with Praxis Labs to prioritize feedback training for managers, aiming to foster a culture of inclusion and heightened performance. More than that, the company sought a solution infused with inclusive best practices, backed by the rigor of an evidence-based and skills-focused approach. Praxis Labs identified an opportunity to launch an immersive feedback solution for a targeted cohort of 30 managers.
Identifying the Need for Feedback Training for Managers
As part of its commitment to its people, Beverage Retailer Co. recognized the need for a comprehensive overhaul of its manager and leadership development training to address critical issues affecting its workforce.
A primary concern was employee retention, especially for people of color, with many citing manager behavior as a key reason for departure. In the past, Beverage Retailer Co. addressed this through e-learning solutions and in-person role-play. While these solutions provided foundational knowledge and awareness of key concepts and opportunities to learn as a group, they failed to spark lasting behavior change due to a lack of engagement, scalability challenges, and discomfort among participants.
Another critical issue facing the company’s Learning & Development team was that their go-to solutions failed to truly measure impact. While e-learning surfaced data on learner engagement and skills gained, it could not account for whether or not learners were changing their behaviors, nor what the overall impact was on company culture and team performance. Similarly, in-person sessions were evaluated through smile sheets and anecdotal reflections.
With a small L&D team supporting the company’s 350+ managers (both corporate and in the field), the company needed a feedback training solution for managers that would:
- Improve leadership skills and behaviors in giving effective feedback
- Achieve high learner adoption and engagement at scale
- Be highly relevant and applicable to learners
In this new phase of training for Beverage Retailers Co., their Talent Development Manager wasn’t just looking for a stand-alone implicit bias training program, but one that was skills-based and deeply engrained with inclusive principles and best practices. She shares, “I got the call to look into unconscious bias and inclusive feedback training for managers, and I love that Praxis Labs has an element of inclusion infused into everything.”
Implementing Feedback Training for Managers: An Immersive Approach
To augment Beverage Retailer Co.’s plans to transform its manager training, Praxis Labs introduced a practice-based immersive feedback experience. This solution aimed to offer bite-sized practice opportunities embedded directly into the holistic manager and leadership curriculum that the company’s L&D team was developing. It enables learners to learn, practice, and refine their feedback and communication skills in a risk-free environment, supported by data and measurement tools to track progress and effectiveness.
The Praxis Labs learning experience pairs immersive real-world scenarios of giving feedback to a colleague with generative AI to provide real-time grading to accelerate learning and growth. The implementation of this learning program marked a turning point for their manager training, helping their managers translate learning from theory to action and setting a new benchmark for effective learning within the organization.
Improving feedback skills and capabilities
A core focus of Praxis Labs’ program was to enhance the ability of leaders to provide inclusive, actionable feedback. The results showcase the efficacy of combining the latest in immersive and AI technology to enable a practice-based approach:
- Confidence in giving feedback jumped from 57% pre-training to 85% post-training.
- Knowledge and application of giving structured feedback improved from 42% to 80%
- The ability to ask open-ended questions, a critical skill for understanding and addressing a situation from a holistic perspective, increased from 79% to 95% post-training.
Learners recognized the value of this approach, with one learner sharing, “I liked the practice of asking questions – it helped me get more comfortable asking uncomfortable questions.” Especially as we head into a year of polarizing conversations, being able to ask questions that help employees navigate conflict and collaborate better together are going to be the hallmarks of every thriving business.
A safe and engaging way to practice skills
Praxis Labs’ research-backed learning design ensured high levels of completion through the engaging aspects of immersive learning, with participants exceeding the completion goal:
- Intending to complete 30 experiences, Praxis Labs saw a 117% completion rate with 35 unique experiences, meaning that learners went back in multiple times to practice their skills.
- Learners gave the training a satisfaction score of 71, 7 points higher than the industry average for e-learning.
This achievement was underscored by participant feedback emphasizing the safe, supportive environment the program fostered. One learner shared, “I really liked that I could take a risk and peers weren’t judging me even as I was practicing giving feedback.”
While in-person role-play scenarios can be helpful for learners to practice and learn together, they often feel more high-stakes for people who feel anxious about making a mistake in front of their colleagues. One of the greatest benefits of immersive learning is that learners get to practice in a simulated environment that activates feelings of being in the moment without fear or social anxiety.
High learner relevance
Ensuring the learning experiences were directly relevant to the participants’ roles was a critical goal of the program. Beverage Retailer Co.’s L&D team was excited to see that 95% of learners said it was relevant for their roles, and that they could directly apply the learnings to their day-to-day. Learned feedback highlights this, with one participant noting, “I’ve been on the receiving end of the feedback sandwich and it’s unclear what people are giving feedback on. This framework was very clear and felt actionable.”
By being able to see themselves in the immersive experiences, learners create deeper emotional resonance with the content. Over time, learners build the confidence and “muscle” needed to respond to these moments when they happen in real life.
Saving time while boosting impact
Especially for a lean team, the time needed to design a comprehensive curriculum and deploy it at an enterprise scale is daunting. In addition to helping managers give better feedback and have difficult conversations, the company’s Talent Development Manager was also tasked with digging through disparate data sets to measure the ROI of their programs, enhancing team effectiveness across corporate offices and the field, and supporting leaders in goal setting for themselves and their teams. Having a solution like Praxis Labs that delivers research-backed learning and shares insights on progress in real-time helps free up the Talent Development Manager’s time to focus on strategic priorities.
As they explains, “Right now, I’m facilitating 15 ILT sessions per quarter. I see Praxis Labs as a way to scale that learning and allow me to focus on our broader strategy.” Especially in a time marked by the need for agility and strategic focus, freeing up the team’s time to focus on the levers that are most important for the business is invaluable.
Embedding Inclusion
For Beverage Retailer Co., Praxis Labs delivered on the goals to improve feedback capabilities in a way that is highly engaging, relevant, and actionable. Especially in a transformational moment for the company’s leadership training — where the L&D team is honing in on improving manager skills and inclusive behaviors — having a solution they can trust to deliver impactful on-demand experiences is a must-have for their talent strategy in the year ahead.
According to their Talent Development Manager: “We’re shifting a bit to focus on inclusive leadership training and are a bit concerned about having to build this ourselves. The whole Praxis Labs program is built through that lens, which is exciting because we can embed this throughout the year.”
*Beverage Retailer Co. is a fictitious company name assigned to one of our clients.