How Vyond Helps Whole Foods Market “Keep Up With the Speed of Business”

Vyond reduces average video production time by 75%

About Whole Foods Market

Founded in 1980, Whole Foods Market Inc. is a multinational supermarket chain headquartered in Austin, Texas, and a world leader in organic and natural foods. In 2017, Whole Foods Market was acquired by Amazon.

Industry

Supermarkets and Grocery Stores

Employees

100,000+

Challenge

At Whole Foods, the Learning and Development (L&D) and Change Enablement teams partner to provide the wide spectrum of training their employees need.

The L&D team delivers career development and soft skills training. And the 50-person change enablement team, including Bryan McElroy, Senior Team Lead of Change Enablement, Training and Communication, and Jason Ferguson, Principal Learning and Development Analyst, Change Enablement, is responsible for product- and skills-based learning, helping ensure consistent quality across stores and maintaining Whole Foods’ customer-centric culture.

As the demand for new training content increased company-wide, Bryan, Jason, and their colleagues knew they had to evolve their production process to keep up.

What they needed was a versatile tool that would help them create video content on a wide variety of topics efficiently; let them adjust and repurpose that content easily; and engage their workforce. Plus, they wanted to avoid the cost and hassle of shooting live videos.

Approach

Having used and benefited from Vyond’s video animation software in a previous role, Bryan purchased a few licenses for his team. But quickly, they found Vyond so invaluable that Bryan upgraded to the 35-seat Enterprise plan they have today, which is used by both designers and non-designers.

According to Bryan, “there’s not a day we don’t use Vyond.”

The teams use it for everything from sprucing up boring PowerPoints with animated GIFs, to creating microlearning videos series (the most recent involved 23 videos), to creating custom characters reflecting specific roles. “The animated characters are great for showcasing diversity,” Bryan says.

“And on certain topics where we might not want to use animated human characters, we use graphical elements in Vyond,” Jason adds.

How Vyond helped

Since Whole Foods Market brought Vyond onboard, it has become an essential part of their training strategy, making life easier for both the L&D and Change Management teams on a number of fronts.

By using animated video instead of live action, the team saves time and effort they’d otherwise spend on in-store staging—aligning labels, hiding price tags—not to mention the cost of actors and production crews.

In upgrading to Vyond’s enterprise plan, Whole Foods is also able to capitalize on the Shared Spaces feature, which allows the teams to easily share assets, repurpose each other’s work, and generally collaborate across projects and initiatives.

And Jason has noticed that their team’s training video content tends to get more engagement—and more positive employee NPS scores—than the print content they share. “Anecdotally, more people like to watch a course than read it.”