Against the clock: How Golden Leaves ensured compliance when faced with a tight deadline
Who are Golden Leaves?
Golden Leaves is one of the UK's longest standing independent funeral plan providers and has always adhered to high standards of excellence. Established in the 1980s by a highly regarded family of funeral directors in South London, Golden Leaves has always been at the forefront of the development of the funeral planning sector. Golden Leaves Pre-paid Funeral Plans are offered by a network of funeral directors across the UK and Europe, serving the expatriate communities. In addition, Golden Leaves is the only funeral planning company to provide a repatriation plan, working in conjunction with Rowland Brothers International to British expatriates living abroad and foreign expatriates living in the UK.
Why did they need a Learning Management System?
In July 2021, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced plans to take over the regulation of prepaid funeral plans. In order to be able to sell or administer a funeral plan, these new rules required all funeral plan providers to gain FCA certification with effect from the 29th of July 2022. Without being FCA authorised, a company would be unable to carry out funeral plan contracts further to this effective date. These new rules will ensure all funeral plan providers are authorised by the FCA and conduct their business in line with their strict high standards.
Golden Leaves faced the challenge of gaining certification within the time constraints set by the FCA, which involved getting their internal staff trained on specific courses in addition to their extensive network of approximately 70 externally appointed representatives who sell funeral plans on their behalf.
Why Tugela People?
Initially, Shelley Hiller (Group Human Resources for Golden Leaves, Rowland Brothers & Rowland Brothers International) turned to their existing solution provider for assistance. However, they could not provide the required system implementation, set-up, training and support to implement a training solution that would meet their requirements and enable them to gain FCA certification in time. Upon recommendation and referral, Golden Leaves were put in contact with Tugela People, who offer the Learning Management Solution (LMS), TalentLMS - an all-in-one, feature-rich remote learning solution that's suited to organisations of any size (regardless of industry and geographic location), enabling them to implement a training program that benefits all of a companies stakeholders (including employees, contractors, and partners) from one platform. TalentLMS is ideal for any type of training, and in the case of Golden Leaves, it offered them the perfect solution for their compliance training.
Golden Leaves started working in partnership with Tugela People approximately three weeks before the FCA certification date. Therefore, the extended Tugela People team had to get their LMS set up (which included branding and configuration) and training content loaded according to tight timelines to enable their staff and Appointed Representatives to complete the relevant training ahead of the deadline.
How were Golden Leaves requirements addressed?
Due to the need to onboard internal staff and externally Appointed Representatives, two different onboarding strategies were set up, which used the TalentLMS branches feature (thereby creating subsites for the two different audiences) and groups (to automate course allocation by job role).
The staff were loaded by an administrator and given the relevant courses by job role (with automation put in place via TalentLMS's groups to ensure that staff would continue to receive relevant training as per their job role). The Appointed Representatives were given a separate route into the system, which required them to sign themselves up (a guidance document was created to advise them on how to do this), and they received notification and access to only the training they were required to complete.
Discovery to Implementation in a matter of weeks
The first discovery meeting between Golden Leaves and the extended Tugela People team was held on the 27th of June, and the system went live to their staff on the 11th of July. The subsite for the Appointed Representatives went live soon after on the 19th of July.
The Implementation was not without its challenges! Aside from the tight time constraints, a notable issue related to Golden Leaves IT policies which were blocking some of the content of certain staff members. However, once the problem was identified, within 24 hours of becoming aware of the issue, Tugela People sent the relevant whitelisting information to Golden Leaves for their IT department and also adjusted the content into a different format to further ensure that the content was not blocked.
Golden Leaves wrote the training courses in PowerPoint and provided the 'Q&A', and the Tugela People team then set these up on the LMS
A roaring success
The TalentLMS system was well received by Golden Leaves staff and Appointed Representatives, and within two days of the solution going live, Golden Leaves already had a 25% completion rate (with 100 out of 400 allocated courses being completed). The great news was that Golden Leaves completed all of the required compliance training and are now authorised by the FCA.
A member of the Tugela People team who was highly involved in the project said, "With the ease of use of TalentLMS coupled with our experience in setting up the site, there were limited barriers to completion, and we have never seen such quick results. But, of course, this was also due to the highly motivated team at Golden Leaves, who supported the rollout internally and used their influence to ensure that end users actually did what they were meant to do! Golden Leaves was a relatively simple implementation, but it did prove that with quick decision making on the client's side and an existing portfolio of content, it's possible to get a non-integrated site up and running in no time at all!".
Shelley Hiller, Group Human Resources for Golden Leaves, said, "It has been fantastic. The Tugela People team moved really fast for us and have jumped through hoops all the way! They were very quick in understanding and translating our requirements into a workable solution that we can develop going forward. We will continue working in partnership with Tugela People to manage our system in addition to future course and system development. We are also considering other training areas we can extend to our stakeholders".
What next?
Golden Leaves continues to be an active site, with the extended Tugela People team providing ongoing system and content support through their Managed Services division. Golden Leaves has over 200 active users, many active courses, and their completion rate (as of Nov 2022) is 1189 module completions out of 1254 assigned modules which is a stellar 94% completion rate!
The next steps will be to look at getting further training online for them. Currently, their modules are purely compliance based, but Golden Leaves plans to extend this to other areas of their business, such as induction for new starters.
More information
To learn more about TalentLMS, book a demo or discuss your requirements please contact us on tel +44(0)1908 030360 or email: info@tugelapeople.com. Alternatively, complete the ‘Get in touch’ form and a member of our eLearning team will be in contact with you.
Tugela People offers a complete service, from scoping, through to configuration and set-up, as well as ongoing support of your LMS. In addition, Tugela People provides a complete and extensive e-Learning service to assist you in producing bespoke e-Learning material, including the custom branding of existing course materials, that delivers on your desired outcomes and helps to achieve your company goals. Click here to find out more about our eLearning services