Eva Kindgren de Boer, Sustainability Manager at KappAhl

Why did you choose to educate and train your colleagues? How does this fit into your sustainability strategy?

We see sustainability as a skill that is highly relevant for all KappAhl’s coworkers to learn and develop, especially those working with design and purchasing. KappAhl had conducted several types of sustainability training for its purchasing department and production offices throughout the years, and we’d found ourselves struggling with finding continuity, a connecting thread if you will, and also maintaining a steady level of training. We found the opportunity to use SFA’s online training tools very helpful for this reason. They enabled us to offer the same education to all coworkers, effectively providing everyone with the same basic knowledge at the same time.

How many colleagues from your company participated, and how did they respond to the education and training?

We asked 115 colleagues to take the course simultaneously, which created a great response. The overall mixture and set-up of the education platform, and especially the course modules, got a good response. After each module and internal workshop of the SFA online course, everyone was asked to complete an evaluation by grading the session between one to ten (where one is bad and ten great), and the total average score was nine.

What have the benefits of the training been?

We saw very motivated colleagues working effectively together to achieve KappAhl’s goals.

What advice do you have for other companies planning to engage, educate or train their staff on sustainability topics?

The number one contributing factor to the success of KappAhl’s experience with SFA’s training was the mixed set-up of online course sessions and workshops. We chose to add an internal workshop, one for each completed module, where we focused on KappAhl’s sustainability strategy, structure and way of working. We also took the opportunity to offer more extensive and deeper training on other key issues, such as textile knowledge and our Social Code of Conduct..

Is there anything else that stands out about your SFA training experience that was helpful and you would like to share?

The interest for sustainability has always been great at KappAhl, but we are still surprised by the huge interest generated by the SFA online course and training. It’s with great respect for everyone’s time and schedule that we roll out this type of extensive training, so we are very happy about the positive response. Even the most heavy topics and elements of the training, such as chemical use, got very high scores among our staff’s training evaluations.