Noodle Box has been recognised with a prestigious award for their innovative and user-driven e-learning and communications platform – Noodle U – by the National Retailers Association (NRA), Australia’s largest and most representative retail industry organisation.
Held last night on the Gold Coast, the NRA Innovation Award for Excellence recognises businesses that have successfully introduced an innovation into their business in the form of new technology, merchandise, marketing or store concepts.
“We were very delighted to have picked up this prestigious Award for our training and communications platform Noodle U,” said Ian Martin, CEO of Noodle Box. “At Noodle Box we firmly believe in the importance of consistent and high quality training for our franchise partners and their teams, as this is what is at the heart of truly delivering our guests a consistent “Noodle Box” experience each and every time. Nothing makes better business sense than investing in your people, and this is one of our core strategic pillars of activity. Noodle U helps us achieve a high quality of consistent learning and skills development, but doing it through the use of new technologies and gameification.”
Noodle U is a user-friendly, game-styled online environment that encourages the team member to better their score and their abilities. One of the specific activities within Noodle U is Build-a-Box. Calling upon the principles of gameification, Build-a-Box represents an important development in training and educating team members as well as franchise partners.
“We have over 52 different ingredients, making more than 20 dishes, some of them containing as many as 15 ingredients per dish,” explained Ian. “It makes for an incredibly complex training challenge to deliver consistently. Combine that with speed and timing, we need our online training program to constantly be testing the skills of our teams.”
One of the core components of the online training is assisting team members how to correctly and efficiently select the right combinations of fresh ingredients, sauces, implements and cooking time. Over 95% of team members have completed both modules of the Build-a-Box training course since its launch late 2013. Noodle U was awarded the Innovation Award for its bespoke nature, its delivery and its accessibility.
The development of the tools was done in conjunction with Olive Media, a global company specialising in the development of training materials for the online environment.
“We’ve seen very positive outcomes since the introduction of Noodle U, and Build-a-Box,” said Leanne Morrison, Noodle Box National Training Manager. “The induction of new team members and Franchise Partners as well as the refresh of knowledge for Noodle Box veterans has had some very positive already for the business. Since the introduction of the training, Noodle Box Mystery Shopping results have had the highest ever results recorded.”
