Speexx Exchange Podcast – Episode 21:
Digital Transformation for the Front-Line Workforce With Mitja Kulcar

Intro 0:01   
Welcome to the Speexx Exchange podcast with your host Donald Taylor. As a renowned learning and development industry expert and chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, Donald sits down with experts from around the globe to talk business communication, learning technology, language, digital transformation, and engaging, upskilling, and reskilling your organization. This podcast is brought to you by Speexx, the first intelligent language learning platform for the digital workplace. Listen in, and you might learn a thing or two.  

Donald Taylor 0:37   
Welcome to this episode of the Speexx Exchange podcast with me, your host, Donald Taylor. I have with us today, Mitja Kulcar, who is the Frontline Training and Development Lead at MOL Group. You may not have heard of it, but it’s an extensive retail operation throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Mitja will tell us more about that in a minute. We’re here today to hear a great story about implementing digital support for learning not in an office but with frontline staff. Primarily for blue-collar people who are working, getting their hands dirty, in gas or petrol retail stations and service stations. It’s not necessarily how you would expect or where you would expect a digital learning implementation to take place. So Mitja, great to have you with us. Welcome to the episode. Can you say something about yourself? Can you let us know where you’re from and what’s your background?  

Mitja Kulcar 1:30   
Yeah, thanks for the invitation. I am flattered to be here. Since the beginning of my career, my heart has belonged to retail, and I found my passion in helping frontline employees become the best version of themselves. I progressed through all the significant areas in retail in the last 13 years. Starting from being a retail associate during my college time leading a store, then progressing to become the regional sales manager. Somehow on the way, I landed in frontline training. Today, I lead the Global Retail Training and Development team, sitting in the retail business division, as opposed to a more conventional setup of learning and training being usually part of HR. With my team, we serve 15,000 employees that work on almost 2,000 petrol stations, or, how we call them, service stations in our organization. They are dispersed across nine countries in Central Eastern Europe, and we are based in Budapest.  

Donald Taylor 2:24   
It’s a very distributed workforce that you’ve got. You’ve got something like 6, 7, 8 people in the service stations. In some places, you will have far fewer than that. That brings with it its own challenges, plus the fact that you’ve got really different cultures, haven’t you, in these different territories that you’re in? It’s not as if it’s in England, Scotland and Wales. All these countries speak different languages and have profoundly different cultures, don’t they?  

Mitja Kulcar 2:49  
Yeah, exactly. We are dispersed from Montenegro and Bosnia to Slovakia and the Czech Republic if we’re talking about the scale. Maybe even if we see our story from a different perspective, MOL Group is an integrated oil and gas company to give you more context. So, as mentioned before, I’m from the retail division. In 2015, we started the business transformation, where we realized that we also have to spend our station network, mainly by acquisitions. On the other hand, we also wanted to switch from primarily selling fuel to enhance the non-fuel business. What I mean by that is that we started to modernize the look and feel of our stations. The most important thing was that we were extending an offer to our customers. So, we began to sell things like fresh food, sandwiches, hotdogs, fresh coffee, and other sorts of services. That went pretty well, but the reality hit us when we realized that we also have to support the 15,000 frontline employees who were the first human touchpoint with our brand, but are seven different cultures, seven different languages, nine countries, and entities. So, the complexity was intricate. Having said that, imagine an employee at a petrol station before 2015, who was primarily helping customers to fuel up their cars, stock the shelves being the cashier, most of the time. But today, in just a couple of years, the same employee also prepares fresh sandwiches, complies with many HACCP standards, makes cappuccinos, and so on. They even smile and are friendly to customers. So, it has changed drastically. We are bringing enormous complexity into this role, not only from a new process point of view, but also behavior change, new skills, and building on their performance. I mean, I can say that we did this transformation, and we successfully shifted. Still, how we did it was also with the help of learning technology and digital transformation.  

Donald Taylor 5:01   
You explain it very well because there’s no reason why somebody who fills a car with petrol can’t make sandwiches. But it’s not why they joined that particular line of work in the first place. That little bit you said about smiling at customers made me laugh. It’s not necessarily what you associate with the guy in the garage or the woman in the garage when they’re filling your car with petrol. Sometimes they’ll do a great job, but not always. Yet, if you’re on the direct service line, that’s essential. It’s not just how do you make a cappuccino. It’s how you make a cappuccino, serve it with a smile, upsell somebody from a regular to a large, and have them walking out the door, thinking that they’ve had a great experience, and they want to come back. That’s a significant change from just asking if they want the tank full. So, you said that the key to making this implementation was that you couldn’t have done it without the learning technology. But the learning technology, although it was necessary, it wasn’t sufficient by itself, was it? Who did you have to get on board? What did you have to do to make sure that it was implemented well? Trust me, in my years in this business, I’ve seen many learning technology implementations that have failed. What did you do to get it right?  

Mitja Kulcar 6:10  
That’s an excellent summary. I think we really went through these kinds of stages. The first thing that was important to highlight is that in order to support them back in 2017 when we started the transformation, we needed to first implement a face-to-face training program, which we still use today. We delivered that program for two years and we mainly focused on soft skills, why we do this transformation, and why we have to behave differently with customers.  

Donald Taylor 6:42   
Just to be clear, you’re delivering face-to-face training across 2,000 locations?  

Mitja Kulcar 6:48   
Yes, we usually rent some meeting rooms. Then we have significant logistical challenges to move 1,000 people to those locations. So, this was also one of the learnings in those two and a half years after we kicked off this face-to-face training. We focused mainly on soft skills and why we have to change, how to serve the customer, why smiling is necessary, etc. But through those two and a half years, we also learned a lot in terms of that we were not agile. On the one hand, we were delivering something, for instance in Hungary, where we have more than 3,000 employees working on the stations, we needed more than one and a half years just to do one round. But we are retail, so people change, the population is higher than in other industries. It was somehow inevitable to start thinking, okay, but how can we enhance this? How can we also provide the training on the products, services, and processes being implemented? Actually, every month, there was something new. Also, on the other hand, employees were asking for more training in these areas because honestly, what existed was only manuals with standard operating procedures. But who reads 50 or 100 pages? Nobody. So, having said that, we started to ask ourselves potentially difficult questions. For example, what do we have to achieve to overcome these challenges? Who are the stakeholders here? What are the other problems which we have identified over the last few years? When we had all these answers, we started to develop the concept of how learning technology can help. That was, in the end, a no-brainer that we have to move into this way. You also asked me what was one of the main challenges? What was the most important? It was stakeholder management.  

Donald Taylor 8:46   
It’s because technology will never do it by itself. You need to get people on board with that. Now, I’m guessing that an organization that has traditionally sold petrol and serviced cars is not necessarily technologically dynamic. What was the reaction of the rest of the group when you said we’re going to change from face-to-face training to a digital solution? Were they positive and enthusiastic?  

Mitja Kulcar 9:13   
I would say that at the top level, it was accepted very well. But when I was progressing through the organization, I had many stoppers on the way. Even to be frank with my team on the local levels as well. Not everyone believed that this vision can be implemented and can solve the challenges that we have identified. But to make our case tangible and that we can also prove why it is meaningful to make this change, what we did was services and research. So, we did deep-dive interviews in our top five markets. We talked to employees at the stations. We spoke to the station managers. We also had two-hour interviews with them, shadowing them on the job to understand their pain points that day. How are they solving problems, let’s say, when they are faced with questions from the customers on which they cannot react or cannot answer. So, this was very valuable research. It also gave us more confidence than in the beginning because we, let’s say, also realized that the majority of them are already using their mobile phones for some station-level tasks. For example, exchanging schedules, a manager contacting them for some work-related novelties, promotions, and so on. Today, with our transformation, 87% of our employees use their own devices to access our training application. I think that’s great because, on the one hand, they had the opportunity to use the back-office computer to access it. But on the other hand, it’s much better if they are using it on their mobile device because they can do their training or search for information whenever, wherever. So, commuting to work, or in their downtime, they can just pick up the phone from their pockets, and they can read things, they can learn, they can find the job aids.  

Donald Taylor 11:19   
Just to be clear, when you’re talking about job aids, we’re not talking about 20-minute courses here that you’re delivering?    

Mitja Kulcar 11:26   
Yeah, you’re right. So, we use the microlearning approach. So, our kind of daily session lasts from two to three to five minutes per day, realistically. Also, the data on the platform shows that this is the amount of time that they spend anyways. So, it fits into their workflow. That is one of the crucial learnings that when we were searching for the solution, we needed to find something that fits into their workflow.  

Donald Taylor 11:54   
Did they need to find something to fit their workflow?  

Mitja Kulcar 11:57   
Yeah, our solution is based on microlearning. So, the whole experience on a daily level is around three to five minutes per day. We are monitoring this every day if this changes. Also, our research, which we did, as I mentioned before, showed us that this is the way how we should approach our training. Because on the one hand, these employees are blue collars, as you mentioned in the beginning. So, they cannot sit in front of the computer, but instead, they have downtime when they can do something in the meantime. Also, if you look at our beginnings, when they had the training in the meeting rooms and were traveling somewhere, it was better to come to the stations rather than pull them away from the workplace. Also, I mean, just from an OpEx perspective, imagine having to move 15,000 people logistically to different locations. That’s quite a challenge, not only from the logistical point of view but also from the optical point of view. So, we’re also talking about quite a lot of OpEx savings.  

Donald Taylor 13:11   
You mentioned the word agile earlier. Of course, everyone mentions the term agile. Everyone likes to think that they’re agile. But in retail, this is important to be able to respond quickly. If you’re trying to get 15,000 people to go somewhere to get trained, you might be able to touch base with them once or twice a year. But your retail lines change faster than that, don’t they? So, a new product comes out, and you want to get the whole workforce aware of it within, let’s say, a month, don’t you?  

Mitja Kulcar 13:37   
Exactly. When we were just focusing from a face-to-face perspective, that was a nightmare. On the one hand, we had, you know, a channel. So, we had a team of trainers on the field and training the people where they had a program they had to follow. But on the other hand, a constant kind of “Please, we’re coming from the head office,” oh, “can you also include this in the training because it’s coming in now and it will be important.” So, these were the challenges with which we didn’t know how to cope. I’m also happy that we didn’t let this happen and that we were following our path, which we have defined as the best face-to-face training that we have. Which means finding the solution to how we can really show agility and not just do something for the sake of doing it. This is where digital or learning technology comes in because it can help us not only to train people about the new things coming into their workplace but also how to communicate with them differently. Again, talking about a restless workforce dispersed on almost 2,000 locations, how we spoke with them before was with one email per station. If we have, on average, eight, nine people at the station, that’s impossible that everybody would read the emails. It was mainly about the station managers, and we have around 1,500 station managers. But then, when we are sharing operational updates or the promotions that are coming, we can just cross our fingers that 15,000 station managers will share the same information with 2,000 or 15,000 people. So, yeah, from an operational point of view, it’s a big challenge, and agility is crucial here, as you mentioned before.  

Donald Taylor 15:25   
Let’s just go back to something you mentioned earlier. You said that not all the stakeholders, meaning the higher-ups, were necessarily keen or could see the use of the digital. But you said that most of them did. However, you got some resistance from your own training team. So, can you talk about that? How have they adjusted to it? And what have you done to use them differently?  

Mitja Kulcar 15:45   
I think that the key approach which we used here was that we started with small tests. So, we did a pilot first. We had a clear concept, and we had a clear implementation plan from a communication perspective as well. So, what was the pre-communication, large communication, post communication, change management approach? We did it in our smallest market with around 350 employees for three months. We were closely monitoring what was happening. So, what is their feedback? How are they using the application? When are they using the application? After collecting all the feedback, I can say that we had more than 90% participation on the platform. We also saw that the employees logged into the platform every day when at work. It was something a. very new for them, b. it was modern, and c. it helped them solve the problems which they had at work. I would add one more thing because in our case, it’s not only about the training, but it’s also about communication. I think that the combination of both is perfect. As I mentioned before, we did not have a direct communication channel before with them. But now, we had kind of an ideal solution.  

Donald Taylor 17:09   
I love this as a well-thought-out and implemented learning technology solution. You’ve gone out and done your service design, you’ve done your pilot, you’ve got your stakeholders on board. You know what people are doing in their jobs and how to support them to do a better job in the future. But the killer question is always, so what? Did it make a difference to the business? Did it change what you were trying to change? So, did it help transform MOL from a straightforward, gas-pumping organization to something that does more, sandwiches, coffee, and so on? And did it make a difference to the bottom line? And were you even able to check that, Mitja?  

Mitja Kulcar 17:48   
I knew that probably we would come to this question. Obviously, many people were curious about what would happen with that. In the beginning, again, if we see from that period when we had many non-believers, they may see this new addition as something fun to have at work because the platform we’re using also applies gamification elements. So, it looked like just, you know, a game at work, but, it’s more than that. After six months of implementing it globally, we saw the results because whatever we do in content design, we link everything to business targets and KPIs. So, looking from that perspective, what we have seen as the first results was to have a reality check on what is the baseline knowledge on our strategically important products and services. It was interesting to see how low it was. On the one hand, it was a shock, but on the other hand, at least for me initially, it was a winning moment because this is how I could prove the importance of why we are doing what we are doing.  

Donald Taylor 19:08   
Can you just explain for a second what the strategic product for you is? It doesn’t sound very complicated. Perhaps you can explain it more to our listeners? For example, you’ve got some petrol, how much do you need to know about petrol? Obviously, and very clearly, it is complex, but can you explain a bit?   

Mitja Kulcar 19:20   
There are many things, especially if we’re talking about the difference between the main grade and the premium fuel. So, how can you explain in those very brief conversations at the cash register with the customer why they should try the premium next time and how this will help their car and its performance? So, this is one example. The majority of transactions are fuel, but as I mentioned before, we are also switching to the non-fuel business.  

Donald Taylor 19:57   
Yeah, exactly like saying, we have a strategic product which is premium fuel as opposed to regular fuel. You were saying that you established a baseline of knowledge and you thought that baseline was lower than you’d expected, yeah?  

Mitja Kulcar 20:11   
Yeah, exactly. It was low, and as I mentioned before, we were surprised. But over the period when we started to increase the knowledge with the help of the platform, what we have seen is that the confidence and knowledge about what the main features and benefits of premium fuel are and how the employees can communicate about these benefits to the customers were reflected in increased premium fuel share sales. That is one of the most important areas for our business. On the other hand, we also have many promotions on a monthly level and marketing campaigns. We’ve learned in the past that it was not enough if we communicated only once at the beginning of the campaign with our employees on the stations, what the aim of the campaign is, and what they should do because it’s simply not enough. What we can do today is that we can communicate on a weekly or bi-weekly basis about highlighting those key learning points about those key messages, which are important in communication with the customers. Also, what those potential questions that customers may ask are. So, they are again confident and knowledgeable when they have to react.  

Donald Taylor 21:32   
Another point you made there about the need to communicate is that you’re not just saying to them that the super fuel has got these ingredients, but you’re also telling them in those 30 seconds at the cash register; here’s how you communicate it to have an impact. Clearly, that worked, I say clearly, can you tell us something about the results? Whatever you can expose, obviously, is a commercially sensitive thing. But you mentioned that sales went up?  

Mitja Kulcar 21:55   
Yes, I mean, there were many implications, which we can pull out in which we invested in the last year in terms of content design. Obviously, the fuel was one of the main areas which we covered. But on the other hand, we also did a reinforcement of our face-to-face program, where we focused on soft skills and how to serve the customers in a moral way. That was also important because, in our research, which we do twice yearly, we have also seen the growth in how the customers perceived us as competent and kind. So, these stats went up in the majority of the markets. It was also connected to training impact.  

Donald Taylor 22:43   
Though it wasn’t just knowledge, it wasn’t just immediate sales, it was also the perception of MOL itself as a brand. That these people who are the front line, have conveyed to your customers’ competence, the sense of being kind, that is brilliant. I’m fascinated that it was possible to do that. One last question and I don’t know if you’ve even got the data on this, Mitja, but what about the people themselves? Did they stay longer? Was there less turnover of staff as a result of the training program? Or did it have no effect?  

Mitja Kulcar 23:12   
That’s a good question. We will dig deeper into this area this year definitely. Last year there was no difference here. So, this year everything has changed. I think there were many factors, which could impact this. So, we haven’t measured anything in this way. We are planning to develop the onboarding of the new hires during this year, which we could then, for instance, connect with a longer tenure. But as mentioned before, last year was all around the pandemic, so this was not in scope.  

Donald Taylor 23:50   
It’s kind of difficult to compare any data when you’ve got such exceptional circumstances, yeah.  

Mitja Kulcar 23:55   
What I can say, also from my kind of personal passion about the front line, is that I would say, in general, they are usually undervalued and underserved. So, with this approach, we show them more opportunities to take care of them and give them something new, which is not available in our region. I also talk to them when I go and fuel my car and constantly ask them for feedback. What do they like, what they don’t like, and what they would like to change. I’m mainly getting positive feedback. There aren’t very many things which they are highlighting as negative feedback. What they also emphasize a lot is that they feel valued. We were also able to drive the pandemic situation very well with the help of the technology because we could send the messages through this platform in those difficult times and really make sure that they stay healthy and remain safe.  

Donald Taylor 25:00   
Mitja, thank you so much! I’ve been making notes while you’ve been talking even though I’ve heard the story from you, I don’t know, four or five times. But each time, I learned something new. I love this idea that in spending three to five minutes a day, you can transform them as part of an organization, you can increase sales, you can make them feel probably happier about what they’re doing. I also think your last point is really important though probably it’s most effective if you care about these people. If you have, as you said, right at the beginning, a passion for retail, and I would say probably a passion for the people involved in it, I think that may have made more of a difference. Your personal commitment may have made more of a difference to this program than you might be saying. But it’s great to hear about this transformation you’ve done. Thank you for sharing the detail of it. Some last questions that we ask every guest, Mitja, are two questions. Firstly, what do you wish that you’d known when you started in Learning and Development?  

Mitja Kulcar 25:54   
Actually, not knowing many things was, for me, a motivational driver, and it was inspiring to discover all these new perspectives. I said before that what I think was right, what we did was good stakeholder management because we were thoroughly prepared. But still, what I wish I knew is to expect that I would have to repeat my pitches over and over again and to put the effort in the buying across the organization. I might even say I was not really prepared for so many funny looks when I explained the vision of what we would like to achieve with going into mobile training. Even to me, sometimes I started to not believe in the vision. I’m happy that we continued and that we are here where we are today. I would say there is one more; actually, it’s understanding what was or what is available on the market from a technological point of view. Also, to have someone to talk to and to understand where our retail challenges were. Because talking to at least 15 to 20 vendors there on the market, there were not many who understood the blue-collar population, which is different. I think we also have to go from a different perspective. Just from a technical point of view, they are not sitting at a desk and don’t have a computer at work. So, the approach is totally different compared to the white collars. So, this is where I think I also struggled a lot because I was not sure what the right option was. But on the other hand, I’m happy that we did all this research before. We really make sure we understand who our learner is, who our employee is and what they really need.   

Donald Taylor 27:37   
My observation would be that perhaps not having a learning and development background, but a retail background really helped you. If you’d had a training background, you might have come in with some assumptions, but it would have stopped you from being affected. I think going out and discovering the situation, asking the questions from your stakeholders and your frontline staff probably helped you develop a great solution. Final question, what are you curious about at the moment, professionally in your work? So, what comes next? What are you curious about?  

Mitja Kulcar 28:07   
Yeah, before we talked about behavior change, I think this is one very interesting topic for me. How to better support behavior change with the combination of training, design, and communication. What I mean here is designing courses or creating courses where we will be genuinely considering how to evoke reactions and feelings in the learners. The latter one comes as an inspiration from reading a book. It made me think differently about learning and design. It’s called “How people learn” by Nick Shackleton Jones. I think it’s a great book. The other one would be how to set up an efficient onboarding journey to speed up the time the new hire employees need to become efficient and operational. As mentioned before, we have a very good base from the research which we did last year. But this year, the great challenge will be how to put this into place and design the content that will perfectly fit and be efficient. The third one I would say is to dig deeper into the data we are getting from the platform and utilize it with a meaningful interpretation. We do our best to tighten every e-learning or switch on the platform connected to some business goals and KPIs. There are so many things that we can pull out already from the platform. But now the question is, how to make it in a smart way because you can really become overwhelmed very quickly.  

Donald Taylor 29:43   
As someone who loves dealing with data, I can tell you that once you go down that journey, it can be pretty addictive. You find correlations, you then start asking more questions, and it never finishes. This has been a fascinating conversation. I thank you for sharing your observations, your experiences, and the issues. I loved it, and we’ve talked about it before. I loved the expression on your face, which the guys listening in on the podcast can’t see, but the expression on your face when you talked about having to repeat yourself again and again. I think when we spoke before, you said it was 150 times—just trying to get your message across to people. You did it, and you made this transformation. Mitja Kulcar, from MOL Group, thank you so much. A really inspirational story about how it is possible to get blue-collar online, develop them, and engage with them.  

Mitja Kulcar 30:31   
Thank you so much for inviting me!