Garage revival

In a bid to cut staff turnover on the forecourt, BP has been boosting the career
aspirations of its petrol-station attendants with a four-star training plan. Claire
Seneviratna reports (People Management, page 32, 27 Dec 2001).

Working at a petrol station can be tough. The hours are often unsociable and abusive
customers are 10 a penny. But BP is trying to inject a little more desirability into the job
with a training programme that gives its forecourt staff the chance to gain a nationally
recognised qualification.

“Developing people”, which started three years ago, has now won BP a special National
Training Award. The programme, introduced in a bid to tackle a disastrous staff turnover
rate of 100 per cent, was an attempt to redeem the oil industry’s bad reputation for
training.

“Despite being a multinational, BP was very poor in that respect,” admits John Browning,
the project’s manager. “People working in petrol stations are dealing with a very
hazardous material, but we were throwing them in at the deep end with little or no basic
guidance. Naturally, many of them felt completely unprepared.”

A huge proportion of these employees resigned within their first three months, so BP’s
managers conducted a survey to analyse the problem. “We were quite surprised when 60
per cent said that a lack of training was the major factor and not low pay or the poor
environment, as you might expect,” Browning says.

But it’s hard to co-ordinate a response when you have employees and franchise staff
scattered around 1,400 filling stations throughout the county. “We’re not like Tesco,
where they have 500 people on one site, so we had to find a new way of doing things,” he
says.

The new way has been a distance learning programme consisting of 10 days’ basic
training in till management and health and safety, followed by 20 weeks of exercises on
retail basics, with the option of taking an NVQ in retail operations. The carrot is a 5 per
cent pay rise; the stick is the fact that the basic training and exercises are mandatory.
NVQs are encouraged at every level, even management. “To the customer, petrol is
petrol, so achieving product supremacy is unfeasible,” Browning says. “We realised that
achieving operational excellence is the best way BP can carve out a niche for itself.”

And the results have been encouraging. Staff turnover is down to 65 per cent, more than
2,500 employees have opted to take the NVQ and 81 per cent have been given more
responsibilities.

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“We recognise that a lot of people who work in petrol stations are often only there to kill
time until they can get a better job,” says Paul Warren, retail training and development
manager. “But, as a responsible employer, we have to offer these people career
opportunities and increase their employability while they are with us.”

Why would an employer want to give its staff so much help to take their talents
elsewhere? Browning explains: “If anything, we’d be very happy if people stayed for the
nine months it takes to get trained and awarded the NVQ. That alone would cut our staff
turnover by half.”

Nearly one-third of BP’s petrol-station staff are from ethnic minorities and nearly two-
thirds are women – many of whom are mothers returning to work. This is one of the key
factors that led the government to sponsor the programme. “These groups are targets for
the government anyway,” Warren says. “In effect we are giving them the skills at a much
lower cost.”

BP invested £500,000 to set up the programme and it spends £1,700 on each participant.
These costs are being underwritten by a £2 million grant from the European Social Fund,
spread over two years. It is also the first nationwide employer to have a direct partnership
with the national Learning and Skills Council, which will contribute around 40 per cent
of the funding from next June.

More than two-thirds of the company’s forecourt staff have no qualifications. Tracy
Farmer, who started at the BP station at Towcester in Northamptonshire two years ago,
didn’t have a GCSE to her name when she left school. She believes that the chance to
gain an NVQ will “really improve my career prospects”, although the workload has been
tough at times. “There is quite a bit of writing involved, which I’ve had to do in my own
time, but I was given a lot of help and advice,” she says.

Farmer, who previously worked at a newsagent’s, has set her sights on becoming
assistant manager of the station some day soon. Ian Bayliss, her manager, says he can
already see her confidence growing. He is impressed by the standard of his own training
too.

“I have had better, more in-depth training during the one year I’ve been at BP than in the
20 years I worked in the supermarket sector,” he says.

Site managers such as Bayliss are the linchpin of the scheme, acting as trainers and
“signing off” employees’ workbook modules. But the participants themselves must put in
a lot of work. “We do want people to take responsibility for their own learning,” says
Browning, who helped to design the workbooks, which will soon be going online.

BP uses its PeopleSoft employee database to monitor how its learners are progressing – a
relatively new idea. “Before, we hadn’t a clue as to how each participant was doing and
we simply didn’t have the knowledge to say we were confident about an individual’s
competency,” Browning admits.

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The company is operating a similar system in Spain. Its businesses in the US, Australia
and New Zealand are also watching developments with interest.

“There is a lot of bureaucracy to cut through, but we think the risk has been worth
taking,” Warren says. The company’s market share has since risen and this, he believes,
is a reflection of the customers’ approval.

The message from BP’s experience is clear: all employees, whatever their level, deserve
to feel a sense of professional competence – and to leave their employer with the skills to
equip them for the next challenge.

Question:

Comment on BP’s approach to training.