Foot Locker discovers the power of communicating directly with 40k+ team members

Foot Locker Inc’s 44,000 team members don’t have corporate email addresses, so HQ traditionally sent updates via email to each store with the direction that store managers would relay important information to their teams through huddles or postings in the back room. But they had no way of tracking who was or wasn’t seeing key messages.

“HQ would communicate to the Regional Vice Presidents, who would then send the communication out to their group or district managers, who would then communicate the information down to a group of store managers,” says Dennis Gjaltema, Sr. Manager, L&D – EMEA, Foot Locker. “But a lot of things would get lost in translation or not reach the entire population we wanted to. So, we were really happy with the communication abilities in Axonify.”

The leadership team at Foot Locker quickly bought into Axonify as the perfect modern approach to training their frontline team members, but the communications piece was more of a light bulb moment during their first demo of the solution. While the leadership team was excited about the possibility of sending messages out directly to each team member through the platform, the mood shifted from anticipatory to mission critical thanks to an unexpected event.

“When COVID-19 hit we had tens of thousands of team members who went to work one day and the next day the stores were completely shut down. The communication functionality became a lifeline for us,” says Lauren Hayes, Head of Global Learning at Foot Locker.“We’ve often said, ‘What would we have done to keep team members engaged and updated without being able to reach them on their mobile devices through Axonify?’”