The Importance Of Training As We Reopen

Here in the #bmFamily💜💚 as we continue travelling along the roadmap out of lockdown, we have been working on ensuring our teams have access to a range of training opportunities to ensure they are ready and confident to go back to what they do best – providing fabulous food and the very best service to our customers.

Power of Partnerships

We believe in the power of partnerships, leading to collaborations that have helped bring the training journey alive and bang up to date.

MJ Flanagan, of mj inspire (a lifelong friend and inspiration to the #bmFamily💜💚) has worked to create a range of dynamic, interactive contents which can all be delivered virtually. The main themes are:

• Returning to Work with Vigour and Passion – all about managing expectations and motivation
• Leading in a COVID World – which focuses on the importance and use of emotional intelligence in helping teams and customers navigate the changing landscape as they venture back into the workplace.

Our Pear Training online platform has also been updated to include content under the banner “PREPPED” – a pathway split into three areas, with a blend of online learning media.

The three topic areas are:

• Feeling Confident
• Staying Safe
• Being Better

Each area is packed with useful resources and learning material to help teams feel safe, confident, and ready to welcome guests back.

Our traditional classroom sessions on all things FOODIE have been reworked, to include sessions on:

• First Class Food Presentation
• Delivering Innovation
• Sales and Marketing
• Compliance

These sessions have all been brought up to date to reflect the changes in our operations which make them COVID Secure, and also to allow them to be delivered as virtual classroom sessions via the interactive use of Zoom.

Changing to meet our Teams’ Training needs

Clearly there have been some changes to the needs of our teams in terms of learning and development, to that end we have created some new and topical content for our training calendar, including a dedicated session on:

• Mental Health and Wellbeing for People Managers,
• The Role and Importance of Mental Health First Aiders (we have a team of 10 currently undergoing the Level 2 Mental Health First Aid at Work qualification)
• Company wide sessions on Mindfulness, and the Importance of Personal and Professional Goals (and how to set them) when thinking about managing self-esteem and personal resilience.

Goal setting ties in nicely with our new Apprenticeship Journeys; having used the lockdown period as an opportunity to re-evaluate our NVQ pathways, we have reinvigorated the offer available to our teams by engaging with a wide range of new providers; enabling us to offer a significant number of qualifications not previously on the table. Ensuring our teams continue to feel invested in by giving them the opportunity to develop in many directions in a fully funded way.

This approach positions us to be able to develop and promote our own amazing talent, as well as to attract great new people to facilitate the growth and development of our business as we continue to reopen sites, mobilise new contracts and drive the #bmFamily💜💚 firmly down the road towards even better than pre-COVID levels of success.