Max Burgers, Sweden’s most popular hamburger chain, quickly trained hundreds of young employees with Totara Learn

Max Burgers is not only Sweden’s favourite hamburger restaurant chain, it is also one of the first. The first restaurant opened back in 1968, by the same family that still owns and runs the company.

Today, Max has more than 100 restaurants with more than 4,000 employees. With a focus on quality, Max has been awarded with the most satisfied customers in the business, 13 years in a row.

As a family-owned business, Max has the ambition to exist for many generations to come, so it comes as no surprise that sustainability is a key value at Max. Max was the first quick-service restaurant chain in the world to label and compensate for the food’s impact on the environment, and has recently launched a whole range of vegetarian dishes.

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The Challenge

For Max, a quick and efficient onboarding programme is essential. New employees must be able to get up to speed quickly, both regarding the company’s values and the hard facts of the role.

“As a new employee at Max, you enter our blended learning onboarding programme almost the minute after you’ve signed the contract. This programme consists of e-learning where you learn the basics about Max, the history and core values. It also covers the compliance training in essential areas like food hygiene, allergies and how to handle credit card payments. This is combined  with practice in the kitchen, already during the first day.”

The Solution

Totara Learn was first introduced to Max in 2014, at the time as a complementary solution to their legacy LMS.

“We were looking for a way to improve our leadership programme, by turning it into a blended learning programme supported with web-based activities like assignments and forums. We also wanted the programme to become more visible to both potential participants and their managers.”

In 2015, based upon the positive results of using Totara Learn as the hospitality and catering LMS for their future leaders, a full migration from Max’s legacy LMS was performed.

“With Totara Learn in place, we’ve now got a complete platform for all our learning-related needs. We use it for compliance training, benefiting from Totara LMS’s certification feature set, we can create and manage our training activities, and our managers have access to relevant reports and statistics.”

Moving forward

Max has recently taken a major step in the digitalisation of the customer experience. Kiosks for self-ordering, ‘Max Express’ have been rolled out massively and successfully – with more than 65% of orders now being placed digitally at some restaurants.

Now, the digitalisation process will also be boosted internally.

“We’ve got a young workforce. They expect to be able to do their work-related tasks and e-learning on an iPad or a smartphone. This is something Totara Learn supports, but our legacy e-learning content isn’t always up to date in being responsive and optimised for the new multi-screen reality.

Our next step in terms of learning is to further improve the users’ experience. We want to make both our content and the portal to be an attractive, interactive environment, resembling more of a social tool like Facebook than an administrative system. Just like when serving our guests, we want to serve our learners a tasteful dish, based upon a refined recipe and great ingredients. The current UX improvements  in Totara Learn will certainly help us achieve this goal.”

The Results

In the less than 18 months since launching the platform, Max has seen over 45,000 course completions.As well as this, managers and learners now benefit from complete support for blended learning, managing face-to-face sessions and e-learning, with more than 100 learning activities already created, including assignments, forums, quizzes and surveys.

Additionally, there are now company-wide certifications in place as evidence of progress and achievements. The Max team can also now access comprehensive reports on all levels, from individuals to restaurants, regions and the entire organisation, giving managers and administrators a better idea of how everyone is performing individually and collectively.