Orienting 1,600 Employees Into an Unfamiliar Operating Model
THE PROBLEM
Sixteen hundred employees were moving into a new parent organization on a fixed date, and almost none of them understood how that organization worked.
WHAT WE DID
Built the orientation course that explained the operating model, then cut it down until it fit the attention people would give it.
PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS
Self-paced course delivered to over 1,600 transitioning employees
No prior orientation, deck, or explainer existed, so the full structure was designed new
Original storyboard was cut substantially to hold the course to 25 minutes
Narration built with Synthesia avatars and AI voice, allowing updates without re-recording
Delivered ahead of a fixed integration date
The Situation
A national grocery chain was being absorbed into a much larger parent organization, with a fixed integration date driving everything.
Sixteen hundred employees were moving across. They knew their own stores and their own work. What they did not know was the organization they were joining: how it was structured, what its other grocery formats were for, how products moved through its distribution and fulfillment network, or where their own store sat inside any of it.
There was nothing to build from. No prior orientation, no deck, no internal explainer. Leadership brought the request directly, the integration date was already set, and the course had to exist before it.
The Diagnosis
The constraint was not a shortage of content. It was the opposite.
An organization of this size can say an enormous amount about itself, and the first storyboard did. It covered the operating model in real depth, and it ran far too long for the audience and the moment. Sixteen hundred people were absorbing a change in employer, in reporting structure, and in operating language at the same time. A comprehensive course layered on top of that would have produced completions rather than understanding.
The design question stopped being what to tell them and became what is the least they need for everything else to make sense later.
That set a ceiling of 20 to 25 minutes. The storyboard was rebuilt to fit it, and content that was accurate and interesting but not load-bearing came out.
The Build
Four lessons: a welcome, the operating architecture, the store formats, and a wrap-up.
The four store formats are presented as flip cards rather than four separate sections. Each card holds a short summary of scale, shopping purpose, and defining feature, letting someone compare all four at a glance instead of reading four pages and trying to hold the differences in their head.
Every lesson closes by tying the content back to the learner's own role. That was a design choice, not a client request. Orientation content drifts easily into corporate narration, and the closing statements kept pulling it back to the person taking it.
The course was built in Articulate Rise for speed against the integration date and for straightforward updating afterward. Two narrated videos carry the explanatory weight, one on the operating architecture and one on the store format strategy, both produced in Synthesia using its avatar library and AI voice. That was a longevity decision as much as a cost one. It removed voiceover talent fees, and it meant the course would not need re-recording if the people who might otherwise have narrated it left the organization. A short leadership video sits early in the course to establish visible sponsorship before any operational content begins.
What Changed
The organization went into its integration date with a single consistent explanation of how it works, delivered to every transitioning employee before day one.
Sixteen hundred people arrived able to place their own store inside a larger operating model rather than learning it piecemeal from whoever happened to explain it first. Because the narration was built with avatars rather than recorded talent, the course could be revised as the organization changed without returning to a studio.
