Here’s a common scenario. 

• When your team members join they undertake some training on restricted products.
• You have posters up in your stores, both in public about methods like Challenge 25 and in the staff areas covering other topics. 
• When seasonal stock includes additional restricted products you send out an email with extra details as ‘a reminder’.

Does this sound familiar? Do you find it difficult to track or prove compliance for these reminders? Do managers report back about how these emails were received and who asked for advice?

Could there be a better way?

We want you to be able to deliver compliance updates to exactly who needs them and track who is (or isn’t) compliant from anywhere – with the Virtual PA system.

We have the tools you need to transform your compliance process, to share blended learning, refresher training, track participation and test understanding. 

Take for example, Christmas Crackers – only in stock for part of the year, not one of the most obvious restricted products but prohibited for sale to shoppers under the age of 12. 

More obvious might be fireworks – a complex set of rules depending on the type of product with ‘party poppers’ being included in the definition and restricted for sale to over 16s where the majority of fireworks are an 18+ sale. 

How can restricted product range changes be communicated most effectively?

We think a combined approach is going to give you the vital core compliance delivery for up-to-date product awareness and sales strategies.

• Refresher Training 
• Tracked Communications
• Filtered access based on role (exclude HO who aren’t on trade floor)
• Shop floor standards audit

Refresher Training

Use the MSCP module to deliver a short course covering all the restricted products in your stores, with alternate versions for different territories if required. Set these courses to an annual refresh, either exactly a year after they last completed it or set everyone back to Incomplete a week before the information is most relevant. 

With the Virtual PA’s learning module, all content can be revisited without resetting progress on the course too so your people can check anything they want a reminder on at any time with only a few clicks. 

You can also store highlights or summaries as an image in the Knowledge Base which will allow it to be added to someone’s favourites list to make it even easier to recap if the need arises. 

Tracked Communications

Emails can be inefficient in a variety of ways, from having to manually manage distribution lists and often with unreliable or non-existent read receipts – using Knowledge Share will allow you to track who has read your communication at any time, get feedback via questions or a poll, and even send to an always-up-to-date filtered list of recipients. With access based on Job Title and Location, you’ll never need to manually add a new manager or remove your leavers (often after the bounced email comes back) or rely on an email sent to a venue address actually being read by the intended recipient. This even removes the headache of people changing roles too, because as soon as a Job Title is updated they will be eligible for all current communications (including ones sent yesterday!) so you won’t need to resend the same message to accommodate this either. 

Built in live reporting gives you that central oversight that messages are being read and understood and an idea of who to chase if they haven’t confirmed what you have sent out. In any business with multiple sites across the country (or globe) you can’t be everywhere at once, but the Virtual PA makes tracking compliance from a distance that one step easier. 

Filtered Access

Using Filters that take into account the fundamentals like Job Role and Location, and the more nuanced attributes like Location specific differences or time with the business, you can ensure that your Compliance delivery and tasks are assigned only to those who need to participate. It can be as wide reaching as ‘Exclude Head Office’ as they won’t be interacting with the public so don’t need to see the updates. Or it can be as specific as ‘X store has a speed bump and ramp’ AND ‘Manager’s only’  so only your Managers at X store will be presented with the relevant Risk Assessments. 

This is part of our unique offering, to sit with you and understand your needs for communication, compliance and performance management, to make sure your Virtual PA is tailored to your company’s differences and set up for success.  

Standards Audits

Once your communications and compliance training is delivered, a good idea would be to follow up with a compliance audit, perhaps a Standards Audit to make sure each venue is meeting the mark. Check that every venue is up to date on their restricted products training, that they are displaying the right warnings, asking the right questions and placing products as expected, safety and to the guidelines. 

This might be an Area Manager audit, completed ad-hoc on their visits to your locations, or a Manager audit, scheduled to be completed by the General Manager every month to make sure their team is keeping on top of seasonal changes and monitoring the upkeep of their location. 

Avoid a fine and know that your remote teams are on top of their compliance. 

With concerns of retention in the minds of senior leaders in business, making sure your people feel safe and supported through all stages of compliance, training and development, we have your back.

With this in mind, is it time to collaborate and get some new communications out to your teams, start tracking their compliance and improving understanding throughout your business? Drop us an email at info@informpeople.com and we can set up a call to discuss your pressure points and possible solutions.