The culture and trust of a workforce can be heavily impacted if there is a culture of covering up or ‘turning a blind eye’ to harassment within the company. Now, more than ever, organisations need to be aware of the importance of taking proactive measures to adequately address the need for culture training, and periodic culture assessments of their remote workforce.
Enterprise software company TOKN Technology, with its head office in Perth and partners around the world, has bolstered its innovative training app to allow new employees to be inducted on the go.
The new feature allows companies to upload SCORM files (video files used in standard inductions) and group these sessions to individual users who can then watch them on their own mobile devices. It’s a game changer for organisations with remote operations and staff as administrators can see who has watched each induction video, including monitoring the percentage of the video they have viewed so far and who has completed the entire session.
It works the same as a normal LMS but is compatible with a remote mobile setting – a rarity in the current induction landscape.
The innovation was prompted by one of TOKN’s clients, Mader Group, a leading global provider of mobile and infrastructure maintenance in the mining, industrial and energy space. As a group, they have a proactive vision to work towards a more socially responsible workforce – the perfect match for working with the TOKN team.
The new app makes inducting new employees remotely as easy as logging onto their phone.
“The Mader Group team approached us as they were aware of a high prevalence of harassment and assault cases in the general mining workforce,” said TOKN’s co-founder Clinton Schroeder.
“They wanted to be able to show the workforce and their customers that the company takes harassment seriously. It also sets clear expectations and accountability within the workforce, which in turn makes workers feel confident and safe.”
The app easily distributes a comprehensive induction covering these topics to make aware their workforce of the issue and point out behaviours that are deemed unacceptable. It also tracks the results and up to the minute reporting of results and progress.
“With this brief in mind, we created the LMS to make this process easy for the company who are already using the app for all of their communication with their remote and dispersed workforce.”
Justin Nuich, Executive Director and CEO of Mader Group, was delighted with the results.
“We have placed a huge focus on our systems in the recent years. It’s sophisticated systems like TOKN that allow us to keep our predominantly remote workforce, safe, connected, and accountable. Our goal is to increase efficiency, whilst maintaining clear visibility and effective communications across our teams” he said.
“TOKN provides technology that helps us achieve that.”
As well as saving time and the need to attend inductions in person, away from a remote work site, the new development allows HR departments to assess and monitor a new inductee’s progress and integration into the company’s processes in real time as the team member navigates the induction program.
The technology uses the cloud-enterprise platform which connects client’s data and systems allowing businesses to build, manage and connect apps with little or no coding. By making this system viewable on a mobile device makes it possible for new team members to literally join the company via the palm of their hand.
“The majority of the technology currently used for inductions is available to watch on laptop devices only, with a lot of companies requiring new employees to watch all their inductions in the office before they are deployed to site,” said Mr Schroeder.
“But this only helps address new starters, what about the bulk of the incumbent workforce. Being able to deploy interactive inductions to mobile devices through the TOKN application allows workers to easily watch inductions, in their own time from anywhere, If new topics come up companies are able to distribute this information to their entire workforce easily and at the click of a button.”
As uncertainty around whether team members should be working from home or onsite reverberated during the height of the COVID outbreak in Australia, the necessity to come up with a system to keep inductions ongoing wherever staff happened to be prompted the innovation to come to fruition.
“When the pandemic first hit, there was a lot of confusion about who, what, when, where and how people deal with the ever-changing environment, including the need for PPE, social distancing, isolation and so forth,” said Mr Schroeder.
“The TOKN LMS would have been an easy way to upload and distribute information so that employees would have been kept informed about what to do next. Plus, being able to see who has viewed and completed each induction, would have made it easy to see who was and wasn't across the changes and follow up accordingly where required.”
With the launch of the addition to the app, companies can future-proof any occasions down the track which may impact an employee’s ability to attend an induction in person, reducing delays in essential staff starting in their role and saving time and money in transporting them to HQ for the session in person.
“Essentially it plays on the idea of open communication with remote workforces by adding an extra element of connection in the hands of the workers,” said Mr Schroeder.
“They can now see their news feed, safety updates, job openings, weather and inductions, all in a single location. There’s no need to log into a laptop or a portal to keep up to date with these pieces of data anymore.”
