Alitex - Nurture - The Idea Bureau

Introduction

Alitex creates bespoke high-end greenhouses for both consumer and commercial clients across the UK, Europe and America. Their customer base includes the National Trust and Kew Gardens (from a commercial perspective), and their process runs from initial sales, through to design, manufacturing and installation for clients who wish to enhance the natural beauty of their homes and gardens.

Previously, we designed and built their sales platform, Eden, that handles the end-to-end customer sales process. This is something we continue to support alongside their new internal Nurture platform.

The Problem

One of Alitex’s principal business drivers internally is supporting their employees’ learning and development. The company comprises a team of roughly 90 people across a variety of departments. When they approached us for this project, they were already using a mixture of spreadsheets and a web-based tool to manage their HR activities; however, this process was very disjointed, and as time passed, it became clear to them that the tool couldn’t meet their needs.

The previous tool they used did include functionality for reviewing employee learning, but it lacked the flexibility to cater to different departments. It was also incredibly labour intensive to use, as it required a significant amount of admin input to enable its review features to work. To add fuel to the fire, there were a number of other features that the team wanted that this tool was unable to provide. Due to the high license fees, they ultimately decided it wasn’t cost effective to continue using, and contacted us to see what we could create for them.

As the company holds its employees’ learning and development in such a high regard, they wanted a platform that would facilitate this in a way that all of their team members could access. This meant having the ability for each member of staff to track and own their learning activities and reviews personally. Having already experienced the benefits of a bespoke solution for their sales and customer service processes, they realised it would make sense to create a custom platform to fulfil this.

“Ben and the team helped us refine our ideas, challenge our thinking, and push the boundaries of what a ‘people platform’ could be, and Nurture was born. The site is simple and easy to use yet provides detailed insight to admin users. It is robust and well-built, and Ben and the team are always on hand to support or tweak as needed.”

Jo Lee

Relationship Manager & Senior Leadership Team at Alitex

Our Solution

Through the creation of the Nurture platform, we’ve given Alitex a solution that allows all its stakeholders (i.e. all staff within the organisation) to manage their individual day-to-day learning. It also enables team leaders to review their direct reports, and for the senior leadership team to guide the organisation’s learning and development via reports and monitoring.

Alitex have built their core values around learning and development. These values cover ‘Ownership,’ ‘Tenacity,’ ‘Curiosity,’ ‘Inclusivity’ and ‘Humility.’ Our proposal for the Nurture platform enabled employees to bring together evidence of living these tenets as part of their daily activities within a centralised hub that delivers information clearly and efficiently to all its users. It’s also able to support more general HR needs and make data readily available for bi-annual reviews.

This concept was fairly straightforward to bring to fruition from a technical and design point of view. It only took a few months to implement a proof of concept to demonstrate to Alitex’s senior leadership team, and we’ve continued to adapt the platform to include new features, building upon the strong progress we made with the core team in its inception.

Client:: Alitex
Project Type:: Internal learning platform
Link:: Closed to public
Tags:: Database, CRM

How the platform works

We began the project by selecting Laravel Nova as a starting point, which we used to create the foundations for a more bespoke platform. This gave us the option of a stable framework with base functionality with which we could underpin what would become the Nurture platform; it also afforded us the ability to break away from the base structure to make custom elements where needed, allowing us to build a highly unique system without the expense of something completely built from scratch.

Employees have their own logins to access their learning activity data and to see examples of others activities – all of which are linked to the organisation’s core values – via news feeds and custom cards.

One use for these cards is for users to post updates to highlight their work – for example: an activity that exemplifies the ‘Tenacity’ value – through text and imagery.

Other elements of the platform include ‘Curiosity’ – a day-to-day activity based area that connects to employees’ work-based points of interest; ‘Skills Mastery’ – a set of skills-based syllabi that relates to various skills necessary within a department; and ‘Horizons’ – a collaborative section that brings teams together via shared interests, whether work-related or more personal to the individual.

“We would wholeheartedly recommend working with Ben and the team – intuitive, competitive, and creative in equal measure.”

Jo Lee

Relationship Manager & Senior Leadership Team at Alitex

Using off-the-shelf tooling to boost our bespoke service

Throughout the Nurture platform, we’ve created a number of custom features, such as a progress dashboard for each individual team member to track their learning in real time; an analytics overview of the entire organisation for admins, including useful charts and statistics; and custom cards that attach to particular resources. We built these elements specifically for this project, something that would usually be highly expensive. However, using an off-the-shelf product like Laravel Nova, with its customisation options, meant that it not only offered fantastic value for money for the team, but also gave them a tool that’s tailored to their unique requirements.

More recently, we’ve added a feature called the ‘Reviews’ section. This area is used to collate the data from other sections, such as ‘Curiosity,’ ‘Skills Mastery’ and ‘Values,’ as part of bi-annual reviews between employees and their team leads. Having this as a separate area to check in on has made excellent time saving improvements, and assists employees in building evidence of their learning and development to demonstrate as part of their reviews.

User experience: elevated as standard

A key feature for Nurture was to make it as user-friendly as possible. This was essential, as a wide variety of people, all with varying technical abilities, would be using it. It also needed to be flexible enough to adapt to our development requirements for the future as we added new features.

Our approach was to utilise Vue.js, which is highly interactive, and allowed us to display information with our own designs applied to it, an important aspect for great user experience. As UX was one of our highest priorities, it was imperative that the design represented the Alitex brand and its values to the fullest. We selected colours that fit in with both the company’s brand guidelines and complemented our other platform, Eden, as well as making use of hand-drawn icons that already exist within their ecosystem.

“Since the initial build Nurture has grown and now shows a more holistic view of how our employees are engaging at work.”

Jo Lee

Relationship Manager & Senior Leadership Team at Alitex

Improving efficiency through collaboration

One major challenge of the project was ensuring we understood the complex requirements for the build. Initially, we discussed creating a proof of concept for the platform with Alitex’s owner, Tom, and the Learning and Development Coordinator, Jo, via a discovery call. This gave us the opportunity to determine its feasibility, as well as using our expertise to pinpoint their specific needs; it also allowed them to buy into the platform’s concept from the beginning.

We continued to consult with the Learning & Development team throughout the project, embedding ourselves in their processes to better understand how they work – this collaboration enabled us to suggest adjustments and tweaks to their processes that will ultimately provide greater efficiencies when using the Nurture platform.

Conclusion

Since we launched Nurture, we’ve introduced a number of new features for the Alitex team, and continue to provide value for them. By offering our expertise within another department in the organisation, we’ve demonstrated our development skills and improved efficiency through the implementation of new procedures. We’re proud of how the Alitex team have such an open mind about process improvement, and how they’ve been willing to take ownership of the new and bespoke digital tools we’ve created to further their organisation.

We’re hosting and supporting this platform via our Bureau⁺ service on an ongoing basis. This will ensure it remains reliable, secure and always ready to bring benefit to the team. We hope to provide our digital expertise for Alitex into the future, helping them to achieve their goals, with both the Nurture and Eden platforms, and many more projects to come.