New Look Eyewear team members and their partners accepting the
Transitions Innovation award are (L-R): Kay Jensen of Transitions
Optical, and New Look’s Mario Pageau, France Reimnitz, Josée Côté,
Jacinthe Laurendeau, Martial Gagné, Marie-Josée Mercier and
Nicolas Stoikovitch.
MONTREAL, Quebec—The most effective training tactics for employees often come down to whether the program combines education with enjoyment. That was the simple idea that New Look Eyewear employed last year in developing an employee training program for Transitions Optical’s various lenses offered by the retailer.

Another aspect of the training was to ensure that it reached all employees, even part-time staff. “To do so, we created trivial games such as Jeopardy, Family Feud and Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” New Look Eyewear’s Marie-Josee Mercier, vice president sales and operations, told dba.

“Our store managers played these games with their employees during their weekly meetings. We opted for games as people tend to assimilate more information through play. Thus, our Transitions training sessions reached all our employees, opticians, consultants and assistant optometrists.”

As a result of the training program’s success, Transitions Optical honored New Look Eyewear with its Best in Training award for 2016 at the recent Transitions Academy meeting in Orlando, Fla. “In 2016, New Look Eyewear approached their staff training for Transitions lenses in an entirely creative way,” said Drew Smith, director, North America Channels, Transitions Optical. “The team engaged its employees with interactive games rather than simply slides or facts to memorize.”

New Look’s Mercier accepted the award on behalf of the retailer at Transitions Academy. She noted that by approaching the training process with the dual goals of education and fun, it helped employees retain the information they were learning in the training.

“Adopting a new method of product training very much allowed for better retention of information for our employees,” Mercier said. “Learning about Transitions products in a fun way helped us maintain a high-level of employee participation and excitement. We are very happy to accept this award.”

Mercier also explained that New Look held an internal 10-month long Transitions contest that included several challenges. The contest’s goal was to promote Transitions products. “Employees could win Transitions lenses and team-building sessions with the whole winning store team,” she added. “The idea being that if you wear Transitions lenses, you are then able to suggest them to your customers.”

In 2017, New Look will continue with its some of its 2016 strategies, including the publication of The New Look Gazette, a quarterly newspaper in which the retailer promotes Transitions products, among other things, Mercier said.

New Look Eyewear is a division of Canada’s New Look Vision, which operates mainly in eastern Canada with its network of 221 corporate stores. The corporate stores are mainly under the New Look Eyewear brand, along with the retailers Vogue Optical and Greiche & Scaff banners.