Multi-award nominated e-learning for Burberry

Burberry is a British modern luxury brand with thousands of employees, representing over 100 nationalities across 34 countries.

With a multicultural workforce and diverse customer base, Burberry’s central Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) team is committed to ensuring that all colleagues experience a culture of inclusion across Burberry. However, there are a number of elements to be taken into consideration to make this possible:

• Different regions have different DE&I priorities
• Without a common baseline of awareness, it is challenging for local teams to identify actions they can take that would be meaningful for colleagues while supporting the organization’s global agenda
• Colleagues wanting to promote DE&I are worried about ‘saying the wrong thing’ and causing offence.

The Burberry team were looking for something more targeted and meaningful than a one-time, off-the-shelf solution. They partnered with Mind Tools to co-create a series of 10-minute digital ‘Episodes’, translated into 11 languages for teams around the world.

Each episode took the format of an 8-bit arcade game, using character designs that reflected Burberry’s diverse workforce and activities that equipped colleagues with the language and mindset to promote a truly inclusive culture.

To embed behaviors and reinforce learning, the Episodes were released slowly over time, with the same design style used across Burberry’s DE&I initiatives, including its mandatory anti-discrimination training, virtual Allyship training programme, and DE&I Resource Library.

To date, the Episodes have been completed by over 60% of Burberry’s workforce globally.

Those colleagues have since demonstrated their desire to learn more: paying over 6,000 unique visits to Burberry’s DE&I Resource Library and viewing over 19,000 resources.

Those changes are already making an impact. The digital team has started a film club to explore the experiences of marginalized groups in cinema, the supply chain working group created a book club with a DE&I focus to maintain a space for discussion, and the Episode series has provided a common language for questions at regular townhall meetings to further conversation and inspire action to create lasting change.