Case study - People at Work - Holy Cross Services

Holy Cross Service Services is a not-for-profit organisation.

We have two key departments.

We have our industrial laundry, that aims to produce 25 tonnes of clean linen per day, as well as our Holy Cross cleaning business that cleans both clinical and non-clinical areas.

My role here at Holy Cross is a Learning and Development Advisor.

That means I engage with the workforce to understand where there may be training gaps or room for growth for our employees.

We chose to use People at Work because it's government backed,

it has the government behind it, it has clear benchmarking and is very easy to use and has a load of resources as well—free resources that you can download and look at.

We all think differently.

These resources help me compute it in the way that I think, but some other resources help my manager look at it in the way that she thinks.

I looked at how this process would work online.

I looked through the resources that were provided by the government as well.

I then started to make my own resources that were more tailored to our workforce as we work with people with disability, as well as people from other cultures, other countries.

I, I really wanted to simplify it to help them understand why we're going on this journey, make it nice and clear.

I found parts of the survey, I still had to guide some people to give them explanations or real-world examples of how this might be present in their workplace.

It's a very standardised survey that we live in a very unstandardised workforce.

There's not many people that work in a laundry like ours.

It's...it's very unique that has unique factors and every individual is unique.

So the relationship metrics are different.

So I could identify some things that I know exist and then say, OK, well, what if this happens?

What if that happens?

That's what we are asking you here.

I, I think it all worked well.

The simple nature of it, that I was able to just have one link to the survey and I could do it on any device.

So sometimes I would be doing it in a sit down room.

Sometimes I would start up the survey for the person and I say, would you like me to assist you with this or would you like me to sit here and if you have questions, I'm here for you.

Or some people just opted to just do it on their phone or on their tablet.

Very simply and easily.

My board was really supportive and my CEO, I was put onto the People at Work process.

I ran it and I was able to allocate all my time to it.

It was the most important part of my role for that period of time, which meant that I could take my time with these employees.

They were also happy for us to do a during the employees' paid time, because it is a large survey, which it has to be because it is a complex issue, and it does require a bit of discussion behind it as well.

I think the beauty of this whole project is it's not just the psychosocial hazard side of it.

We're getting feedback about improvements of the everyday work environment, whether it be increasing the amount of temperature management in our industrial laundry, or we feel that sometimes our equipment isn't quite good enough for us and it slows us down.

We're getting that feedback now that we weren't getting before this survey, and when we talk about equipment or resource failure, that can always lead to increased workplace stress.

I feel my relationship with the teams, all departments at all levels is a lot better now.

Not that it wasn't good before, but there's more honest communication about I am here to assist, I'm here to help.

What can I do or what can the business do?

Whereas before people didn't know where to turn to.

And that's the huge increase that we've got.

We've got an increase of the amount of feedback we get, but also engagement with communications sent, whether it be about new projects rolling out or past projects we've done.

As soon as I've sent a email to a group of employees, I generally get one or two replies, which is a lot more than…

and sometimes they just come up to me verbally and say, hey, I saw your email.

I just have a question about this.

I also had a bit of a chat with some of the employees about the difference between not just general decision making and informed decisions. I talked about we cannot make as a business an informed decision, without listening to our workers.

I don't know how they do their job, so how could I make an assessment on what we could do better?

How can I identify training needs, if they're not honest in what they might need help in?

Firstly, to do it.

It is a really good and easy process.

Allocate staff to it.

I was allocated to it.

It was my whole job for the couple months that we were doing it.

I'm somebody that hasn't worked with that cleaning department much, but ever since I have done this survey, a lot of them know me by name.

They'll say hello to me whenever I'm in their offices, and you know, it, it's just a great starting point, especially if you're trying to engage with your workforce for maybe the first time when you're talking about psychosocial hazards.

Oh yeah, definitely.

I actually was really lucky to be able to present the findings to, directly to our board, and our board were impressed with the information we could gather.

Obviously, it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

They do know that, and they, they want to see how we can improve that.

They were very happy with the way it was presented the information they got.

But also, just that insight.

As I said before, everybody has individual stories and we can't have 350 employees come here and talk to the board.

The board doesn't have that kind of time.

But we can sum up what some of the key concerns are, but also highlight those really individual niche things that people do.