What you need to know:

• Bunnings has debuted its first ‘Learning Festival’, a music festival-inspired training and development day for support centre staff delivered virtually.
• Facilitated by internal staff as well as external experts, topics covered everything from personal growth to genAI, data-driven decision making and project management.
• According to Bunnings head of talent and capability, Mark McLaren, building a learning culture and engagement across corporate HQ employees is intrinsically linked to Bunnings’ ability to deliver its customer experience proposition on the retail shopfloor.
• According to customer mindset session facilitator, Amanda Fong, getting every single team member to feel a strong sense of ownership around CX is vital. Per Fong: “If every team member feels empowered to do their bit to improve the customer journey – then Bunnings will keep customers satisfied, engaged and loyalty will remain strong over time.”

It its latest Digital, Marketing and Ecomm in Focus report, Arktic Fox found only 4 per cent of Australian marketers and digital executives view enhancing the employee experience as a strategic priority over the next 12 months.

Yet take a look at any CX research report – Tiffany Bova’s The Experience Mindset is a fresh example – and you’ll see employee experience is intrinsically linked to the customer experience an organisation delivers outside its own four walls. According to Bova’s report, companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5x more engaged employees than companies with a record of poor customer experience.

It was with the view of improving learning experiences for Bunnings’ head office staff to ultimately impact the quality of experiences delivered to customers on the retail shopfloor that led to the debut of the hardware retailer’s first one-day Learning Festival in May.

An organic idea that came out of the learning and capability delivery team, the ‘festival of learning’ was likened by Bunnings head of talent and capability, Mark McLaren, to a music festival. It even came with its own Coachella-styled T-shirt featuring a list of the day’s ‘performers’.

Delivered virtually, the one-day program featured 15 curated sessions informed by staff feedback, covering personal growth topics such as resilience and vulnerability as the key to unlocking creativity and innovation, and building a customer focused mindset. Other sessions covered generative AI innovations in shopper experience, data-driven decisioning and a DIY playbook for project management.

For the most part, sessions were facilitated by internal staff. Several external facilitators were also involved, including Intent Advisory director, Amanda Fong, who delivered the customer-focused mindset content; coaching consultant, Sally Higoe, who tackled resilience in oneself and others; and former HR director and co-founder of Uncapped Potential, Marnie Brokenshire, who spoke on courageous leadership by harnessing emotional intelligence.

“The thought was: How awesome would it be if we were able to create a learning experience where people could curate their own learning through the day with topics that are really relevant. Like picking and choosing bands at a music festival because it’s important or relevant to you at the time,” McLaren told Mi3. “We wanted a solution available to everyone in the support centre environment. Our target was to generate a different way to bring learning to the team outside traditional, four walls content.

“A festival was a novel, fun way of doing something. Internal and external input was then used to decide on the topics and focus that came up during the day.”

According to McLaren, recognising HQ employees as instrumental to what happens at the coalface of retail with customers is a mentality that’s been in place since 1994 when Bunnings' first warehouses opened.

“What we provide into our team should ultimately impact our teams serving our customer. The Festival was deliberately targeted at support centre, who don’t always traditionally get training experiences store leaders get,” he said.  

“Looking after talent capability for Bunnings is both easy and hard at the same time. The business has always invested in a learning culture from day one; it’s been a key feature of value proposition in the market. Whether we promote directly or indirectly, our CX is fed by knowledgeable teams and helpful, friendly, staff and providing a safe team environment.

“It’s easy when you have that learning culture and exec leadership team passionate about creating a growth mindset for your organisation. The hard bit is choice, and ensuring what we make available for teams get value from the experience, and that they need and want it. It’s got to be fit-for-purpose plus valuable for career and personal development.”

Bunnings MD, Michael Schneider, proved was the most popular session of the day – a session which also gave staff permission to put down tools and take the opportunity to learn, added McLaren. Overall, more than 1,000 staff enrolled, with average attendance per session over 300 and average session times of 40 minutes. Engagement rates were also up over 80 per cent. Top five functions in attendance were operations, corporate affairs, people and safety (HR), technology, and property.

A virtual event format was also an opportunity to provide scale across ANZ, and the festival was produced by Bunnings’ in-house studio. Sessions were live-streamed to employees and Q&A time built into the program. Making recordings available post-event is a key priority, with short and sharp vignettes of what was delivered top of McLaren’s list.

“I was both excited and surprised by the buzz in the office, the engagement and conversation,” McLaren commented. “It’s created a really important legacy. We trialled it once, we will do it again. We have a test-and-learn culture at Bunnings, and this is a great example of that.  

“We pride ourselves on delivering learning and development experiences that contribute to that end customer. That experience and service received by a customer on a Saturday morning buying paint is hopefully an outcome of more knowledgeable, helpful and friendly team members. At the back end, the training we try to provide – whether on shop floor or team member in the tech function helping with automatic, self-service POS system in the store – plays a critical role in the customer journey. A core pillar for Bunnings is best experiences, so we’re always aspiring to be better today and tomorrow. That plays into what we offer learning-wise.”

While several core skills will stay similar – brand and culture, gen AI, flexibility, centric-service mentality – McLaren sees other topics being revisited for scope two. He’s also keen to see staff remaining heavily involved in not only curating, but delivering content.

“It speaks volumes that teams are willing to listen and learn from each other. It’s the best outcome I like to see in an organisation – we are sharing knowledge, information and we’re not precious around where someone might have come from,” said McLaren. “Building a learning community is a great outcome of this. Listening to each other is a really cool feature of what’s occurred with our festival.

“Outside the Learning Festival, we are a humble organisation – we’re constantly learning from things we want to improve on, and learning from our mistakes. We don’t always get it right, but want to ensure we get it right for customers. Listening to the internal customer is critical to growth.”

Building customer-focused mindsets

When Amanda Fong was approached by Bunnings to curate the customer content of the Learning Festival, she was immediately taken by the retailer’s openness to try something different. 

“Bunnings is already known for its brand value and strength. In many respects that only highlighted the need to approach this session with a higher degree of creativity,” said Fong. “The first thing was getting someone from Bunnings that had customer running through their veins. That was Steve Hoffman, head of customer experience at Bunnings. What I loved about bringing Steve into the fold was that we could lean on his retail experience to create a backdrop about the ever-evolving nature of retail and in turn the criticality in keeping a customer-first mindset.”

The 'morning TV' format adopted was about creating engagement and bringing to life key concepts while driving home key messages, Fong continued.

“The real driver behind this session was for every single team member to feel a strong sense of ownership around the customer experience. Put simply, if every team member feels empowered to do their bit to improve the customer journey – then Bunnings will keep customers satisfied, engaged and loyalty will remain strong over time,” she said.

Key topics addressed included challenging the notion of what customer actually means in the context of Bunnings' business, plus broadening what customer-first looks like via case studies. These included non-retail and international brands. Another must for Fong was expanding the team’s understanding of the lifetime value of Bunnings customer and their role in shaping this.

“It was about challenging the team to step into the shoes of its customers," she added. "Hammer Time."