Ready-made templates
At Balta, nobody has the time to build e-Learning modules from scratch, which is why we required ready-made templates.
Because FLOWSPARKS is so intuitive, it requires next to no technical expertise.
The Belgian Balta Group is a leading producer of textile floor coverings. The company, which was founded in 1964, currently has six production facilities in Flanders, in addition to showrooms in Paris, London, Turkey and the United States. It exports its products to 136 countries around the world.
Balta is the European No. 1 for woven and tufted carpets and rugs. Its range also includes wall-to-wall carpet for residential and commercial uses as well as non-wovens. In 2020, the group had a consolidated revenue of € 562 m and a global workforce of 3,838 employees. Balta Group has been trading on Euronext Brussels since June 2017.
It was people’s lack of time that prompted Balta to search for an e-Learning solution. Before Balta joined forces with FLOWSPARKS, it organized in-company and external training sessions based on the specific needs of the business or its employees. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic made online learning very popular, with a great many training sessions and tutorials being shared on the intranet.
However, the biggest problem was that – whether the training session was in a classroom or digital – employees have a busy schedule and can’t that easily take a full or half day off for training.
In addition, PowerPoint presentations and courses on the intranet proved rather ineffective in terms of the learning effect. Experts often received the same questions from coworkers in other departments. Balta therefore went in search of the right solution for offering knowledge in bite-sized chunks in a way that was both interesting and intuitive. A tool that facilitated knowledge sharing and encouraged coworkers to apply this knowledge in practice.
For Balta, the quality of the training sessions had to be guaranteed. They had to take up less time (not only of the in-house experts creating them but also of the participants following them) and had to be streamlined so all the group’s employees around the world could easily access the same information.
Daisy Corteville, Communication & Development Expert at Balta, had previously developed digital learning programs, so she had excellent knowledge of what would work for Balta and what wouldn’t. ‘No one here has the time to build e-Learning modules from scratch. That’s why we required ready-made templates to which we only need to add content.’
‘We also wanted to retain our own branding so that people didn’t have the impression that we had bought an off-the-shelf solution.’ FLOWSPARKS also meets these requirements, so the choice was quickly made. ‘Moreover, FLOWSPARKS is very intuitive to work with and the Learning Formats such as SMARTPAGES and STORYWISE are very easy to use. Obviously, its multilingual capability is an extra asset in a multinational.’
At Balta, nobody has the time to build e-Learning modules from scratch, which is why we required ready-made templates.
Because FLOWSPARKS is so intuitive, it requires next to no technical expertise.
The business was involved from the outset in the development of the digital learning modules in FLOWSPARKS. The people who use the digital learning pathways are also the ones who create them. ‘We conducted a survey among the different departments and quickly found colleagues willing to develop e-Learning. These authors are given a lot of autonomy in creating e-Learning modules. After all, they are able to assess the needs of their target audience better than anyone else,’ says Daisy. ‘And because FLOWSPARKS is so intuitive, it requires next to no technical expertise.’
For now, the emphasis is on microlearning. Bite-sized chunks of information and knowledge are offered online – and in the future also through the internal communication app. They don’t take much time to go through and the knowledge seems to be retained longer.
Balta’s biggest challenge continues to be to find the time to develop e-Learning. Authors do this on top of their own workload, so it’s not always easy. ‘But it pays off as the return is so much higher with FLOWSPARKS, because you don’t have to invest time in classroom training any longer and therefore don’t need to keep giving the same information to different groups,’ Daisy concludes.
