Published on the 19/09/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Staging Connections has over 1000 employees who set up events from boardroom meetings to massive conferences – it also has an award winning health and safety app to protect them…
Event service company Staging Connections is involved in 50,000 events each year in Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore and Dubai and has around 1000 employees supporting its activities. The nature of the business means staff are on the move and widely spread – the technology deployed to support them needs to reflect that.
According to managing director Tony Chamberlain, technology is proving critically important in order to keep in touch with and manage the professional development and workplace safety of the company’s widely dispersed employee base.
Earlier this month the organisation’s efforts were rewarded when it won the Employee Connect Best Use of Technology award at the Human Capital HR Awards.
Although it was the first time Staging Connections had entered the HR awards competition, its home-grown health and safety app, plus a deployment of a talent management solution saw it beat off competition from much larger organisations such as Rio Tinto and Woolworths.
The StageSafe app, which was developed by one of Staging Connections’ internal HR team, can be downloaded onto a smart phone and provides fingertip access to information about safety standards, the names of safety officers in the organisation, a contact button, plus the facility to report health and safety incidents or concerns. Content is also loaded on the app for supervisors so that they can provide health and safety training sessions for their teams of workers.
Chamberlain explained that since the app is available to be loaded onto employees’ own smartphones, its use can’t be mandated, but that in the eight months it has been available “hundreds” of employees had downloaded and used the app.
The company is also using the DrumRoll talent management system, which schedules and manages employee reviews and professional development programmes. Installed earlier this year Chamberlain says the tool now covers 96 percent of staff.
“It’s important to get people face to face to have these conversations. Previously it was paper based and a nightmare,” to manage he said.
The computerised system he said meant that “employees have a clear understanding of expectations and it helps us with succession planning”.
