The Co-Operative: Setting New Standards

Background

The Co-operative Group is the UK's largest mutual business, owned by over six million consumers, not by private shareholders. It is the UK's fifth biggest food retailer, the leading convenience store operator, and a primary financial services provider, operating The Co-operative Bank and The Co-operative Insurance. Among its other businesses are the number one funeral services provider and Britain's largest farming operation. The Group operates 4,800 retail trading outlets, employs more than 106,000 people and has an annual turnover of more than £13 billion.

Challenge

As a forward-thinking company, the Co-op has always sought to embrace innovative learning techniques to strengthen colleagues' knowledge base and competence and minimise operational disruption. The business wanted to incorporate industry-leading online health and safety training into its managerial and supervisory staff. This, in turn, would help enhance competency around risk management and inject a progressive health and safety culture into their senior workforce. 

Choosing the online format ensured the interruption to the daily operations of their business was minimised and allowed for complete course flexibility around the enrolled staff. The Co-Op signalled the intent to run a trial of the Online IOSH Managing Safely training course with the objective of trial success being a site-wide rollout of the course across their Logistics division.  

The initial trial was very successful, with excellent course pass marks and delegate feedback received, leading to the broader rollout as planned.  

Results

As of September 2021, Astutis are very proud to have signed a new 3-year agreement to continue to provide our health, safety, and environment training services to the Co-op. Our new contract constitutes a continuation of the training support we have extended to the Co-op since 2016. We are delighted that our long-standing and trusted working relationship continues to go from strength to strength and elevates the standards of health and safety in the very heart of The Co-Operative. 

The Co-Operative has opted to develop our relationship through adopting bespoke NEBOSH training courses to comprehensively train their workforce in other areas of health and safety. We are delighted to be the training provider of choice and to help make their business safer for the future.