How Svea Solar uses Sana to automate onboarding and retain top talent at scale
by Anna Klingborg, Global Head of Learning and Development @ Svea Solar
50+
content creators creating a decentralized learning culture
9
onboarding programs automated and counting
100%
of new employees successfully complete onboarding
Challenge
Svea Solar’s L&D team was struggling to keep pace with the company’s headcount growth. They needed an end-to-end tool that could help them scale all of their learning initiatives and live up to the organization’s cultural commitment to continuous learning.
Outcome
Svea Solar’s 4-person global L&D team has scaled to running 9 onboarding programs by leveraging Sana’s smart automation features. In addition to becoming more of a strategic partner to the business, they’ve reinforced Svea Solar’s commitment to learning by empowering over 50 colleagues to create engaging learning content autonomously.
“Sana has been a game-changer for us as we scale. The platform's ability to provide automated, consistent, and high-quality onboarding has been invaluable in maintaining high employee satisfaction. It's allowed us to standardize learning across our expanding workforce, saving us significant time and resources.”
Anna Klingborg, Global Head of Learning and Development
Standardizing and enhancing compliance training at scale
Svea Solar is leading the transition to a more sustainable future through solar. Our vision is to rid the planet of fossil fuels. Crucial to our journey is the ability to quickly and successfully onboard our thousands of solar panel installers across all our markets. The faster and safer they install our panels, the sooner we will be able to fulfill our mission. Sana gives us this speed in two key ways: firstly, by making it so easy for us to create and publish our training programs; secondly, by tailoring those programs to each installer's individual learning needs.
Sana seamlessly complements Svea Solar’s hands-on installation safety onboarding held at our training centers. To make our training engaging, we use a three-step process: role specific courses in Sana, on-the-job learning, and hands-on IRL learning at the training center. The transition from theory to practice creates an engaging learning experience that consolidates our employee’s knowledge. We wanted our digital safety training to be as engaging and dynamic as the physical training experience. Sana makes that possible because there are so many interactive features to bring our compliance courses to life.
Beyond formal training, Sana helps us bring regulatory knowledge into the flow of work. Its AI-powered search allows Installers to ask questions in natural language and receive relevant answers and links to courses based on the most up-to-date knowledge. It’s the same for our sales team: our reps can chat with Sana about our latest products because it can read and understand our product trainings.
Increasing efficiency through automated onboarding
Svea Solar has been on an incredible growth journey. Since introducing Sana as our end-to-end learning platform in January 2021, we’ve grown from 700 to 1200 employees. Prior to choosing Sana, we outsourced our onboarding journeys to an external third party. We didn’t have a learning platform of our own in place so updating training content was difficult. Eventually, we realized it was time to bring the programs in house and look for an end-to-end platform that could provide flexibility, control, and efficiency without compromising on the end user experience.
Increasing efficiency doesn’t mean compromising on quality. Here’s what one of our sales consultants had to say about Svea Solar’s onboarding:
“I am extremely impressed with how well organized and educational everything is. I have probably never learned so much in a short time and felt confident at the end of the training.”
Louise Eide
Today, we’re running 9 automated core onboarding programs on Sana with limited manual intervention, plus a further 9 optimed for market localization and translation.
We use Sana to train both our internal staff and also our external partners. Our L&D team saves around so much time by leveraging Sana’s extensive LMS automation capabilities. The HR system integration has been the game-changer and biggest enabler for us: now, new employees are automatically assigned to the correct onboarding program based on team and geography. Offboarding is automatic, too.
Thanks to Sana’s Smart Groups, we’ve also been able to free up more time for the Global team by distributing reporting and follow-up to our local market leads. Smart Groups allow us to set an admin per market geography and dynamically populate all the learners in that market. We also use this feature to manage learning programs per department more efficiently and accurately.
Overall, the entire L&D team has more time to focus on being a strategic partner to the business since we’ve implemented Sana. We can finally spend more time looking into the results and optimizing our programs, and we appreciate Sana’s reporting capabilities here as well. As a scaling company, we’re keen to understand how performance differs across our markets; we see that instantly now.
Retaining top talent through decentralized learning
Learning is more than training at Svea Solar. We’ve written learning into our company strategy, include learning goals in our quarterly OKRs, and reinforce its importance through ‘grow as we grow’—a key component in our employee value proposition.
While we’ve set these ambitions from the top, we’ve always strived for learning and knowledge sharing to happen bottom-up. Sana facilitates this aim because the platform is collaborative by design: the editor is so easy to use that anyone can create engaging courses and live sessions. Today, we have 50+ weekly active employees creating learning content. We’ve built a workflow to ensure quality: employees must earn their ‘license to create’ from the L&D team before they can publish, and we’ve created Svea Solar-branded templates so that all content features our colors, logo, and typeface.
Like my colleague Christian says, learning is one of Svea Solar’s key advantages over our competitors. It’s helping us retain incredible talent, and we’re thrilled to have Sana powering the experience.