How Sana helped foodora scale its employee onboarding and boost engagement
by Olivia Winkvist, Talent Acquisition & Development Manager @ foodora
Challenge
foodora has been on a tremendous growth journey, now employing more than 7,000 people. But with a cumbersome LMS that required hours of content creation and resulted in courses that hardly anyone took, foodora needed a new end-to-end platform that could automate and enhance all of their training.
Outcome
New employee onboarding and training are now automated at foodora, improving their engagement and completion rates, addressing a large competence gap they were struggling with, and putting the professional growth of staff at the heart of their employee experience.
“Sana has helped us go from manual, one-size-fits-all onboarding to a fully automated, yet still tailored experience.”
Empowering growth with an innovative learning platform
Growth is a core part of the foodora identity today—not just for the company but for everyone who works here. We want all of our employees to look back on their time at foodora, and see it as the place where they’ve grown and developed the most.
But that wasn’t always the case. foodora is a data-driven company, and the data we collected was clear: our fast growth had resulted in some improvement areas.
It wasn’t surprising. When I started in my role a year ago, all of our education efforts had been done manually and weren’t formalized. And the company has grown quickly—from 70 employees just a few years ago to more than 7,000—because we employ our riders. It’s something we’re really proud of. The riders in Sweden are a part of our collective bargaining agreement, which is negotiated with the Transport Workers' Union.
We tried using another LMS, but it was cumbersome, time-consuming, and hard to use. As a result, barely any training hosted there was ever completed. Something needed to change.
I knew we needed an end-to-end platform that would allow us to train our 7,000 employees in a wide variety of roles—managers, new staff, riders, customer service agents, and pickers in our foodora markets. And it needed to be a solution that our employees wanted to use. We discovered Sana and haven’t looked back.
Producing higher-quality learning experiences, faster
Every day, we’re discovering new ways to make content creation even faster in Sana. For example, I recently started using the AI course generation feature, where I can upload an existing PDF and Sana will generate an interactive course based on the text in the document. Being able to repurpose existing content in this way is such a time-saver. It takes a lot of the manual workload off our plates.
And we’re not the only ones. I’m getting help from all over the organization to create content. Various departments like commercial, customer service, legal, and logistics are all building and creating so much in Sana. It’s been fun to see other people in the company get so engaged.
Consequently, we’re using Sana for a wide variety of training: workshops, live sessions, learning sessions for the whole company, as well as mandatory courses on topics like GDPR. But the biggest application is in onboarding—not just for all new office employees, but for about 5,000 riders and 500 pickers.
Offering a smooth and cohesive onboarding experience
As a fast-growing company, onboarding is a constant priority. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Before Sana, the quality of onboarding varied quite a lot depending on the manager who was giving it. Now we feel confident that every new hire is getting the foodora experience they deserve.
The main reason is the quality of the user experience. Take our onboarding courses. We like producing self-paced content for our onboarding journeys because it offers new starters a sense of autonomy, allowing everyone to move at their own pace. Sana makes these courses so much more engaging—you can easily drop in interactive features like polls, quizzes, and reflection cards. The experience is never static. On top of this, Sana also makes the experience more personalized. Courses adapt to each person’s knowledge level, meaning new hires can skip what they already know and focus on learning new material.
Sana has allowed us to go from an experience that was widely inconsistent to one that is standardized, but still inspiring. We’re engaging our new hires in a way we simply couldn’t before. I feel proud because now we’re building the employee experience we always wanted to offer.
Increasing operational efficiency while closing key competence gaps
A key enabler to scaling our employee onboarding has been automation. Thanks to Sana’s integrations, new hires automatically receive their onboarding journey as soon as they are added to our HRIS platform. Not only has this saved us a lot of admin time, it’s also helped us improve our completion rates and address large competence gaps, especially with our pickers.
Pickers are responsible for collecting items in stores. Previously, we had an issue with pickers selecting wrong items or delivering partial orders. With Sana in place, we were able to spin up a dedicated program addressing these topics and assign it to all our pickers. They took the courses, and all the mistakes dropped to near or all-time lows—virtually overnight,their picking speed increased, too!
“Growth is something that’s very important to us. To have an innovative platform that then allows us to be innovative and focus on growth has been a tremendous change.”
Making Sana the headquarters for professional growth at foodora
Eighteen months into the partnership, we’re only just getting started. We plan to integrate Sana into as many parts of the organization as possible. My ambition is to automate as much training and onboarding as we can through the platform, like dedicated career paths and other tailored experiences. And continue our work to add all of our company information and data, so we can use Sana as our knowledge library.
We’re even sitting down with each team to educate them on how to use the platform, so managers can take charge of their team’s development. Thanks to Sana’s smart insight and analytics capabilities, it’s easy for us to follow up and see how many courses are being completed, how it’s going for them, and identify where to offer more support.
We’ve even made one of our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to expand our education offering on Sana, and encourage managers from across the company to use the platform even more. They’re already putting a big effort into building out what we can offer through the platform because they see what Sana can do. They see that if they put in the work, they will save more time later. Together, we’re putting the professional growth of our employees at the center of the company experience.