NorLand Given Excellence Award for Canada's Safest Employer
Employee safety is absolutely critical. The most important thing that NorLand does on any job site is ensuring that Everyone Goes Home Safe. That means we are constantly adapting our company practices and updating our employee training to reflect the latest and greatest in employee safety. We believe that Innovation Is What Sustains Us, and we have spent the last few years developing a training portal with courses and employee certification records. The portal has been beneficial since its launch, and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from our team, clients, and partners. Most recently, we were Excellence Awardees for The Most Innovative Use of Safety Technology Award, presented by Canada’s Safest Employer.
Canada’s Safest Employer is an organization that ranks Canadian companies that take employee safety seriously. They have over 15 award categories, including “Best Environment Management Program,” “Safest Employer for Young Workers,” and “Safest Mining & Natural Resources Employer.” Each nominee in the Safety Technology category has recently developed and implemented a new technology that would help keep their employees safe. We each had to submit an informative video explaining the technologies and the benefits it’s had. Each video would then be judged based on their ability to demonstrate the technology’s positive outcomes, alignment with broader corporate goals, efficiencies in cost savings for the company, and the positive impact on the team. You can watch our submission video below for more information.
When we started on this project, We’d looked at several portals on the market and realized that a few problems needed to be addressed: specificity, record keeping, and retention. We wanted to ensure that our training modules were completely relevant to our team, so we took the regulatory compliance manuals we already had and adapted them to include custom NorLand information with visuals and voiceovers from NorLand’s personnel. We also needed to easily see everyone’s certifications, and be able to send that information to clients. That’s why we developed a database that clearly displayed each employee’s certifications, and allowed us to export the information to others. Lastly, we wanted to make sure the lessons stuck, and to prevent people from skipping the content and going straight to the tests. We did this by dividing the course into several modules combined with check your understanding questions on what you just learned. This made it so you had to go through each module to answer the questions, which made it more likely for the information to stick. Many companies host their employee orientation online, but very few do it as in-depth as we do. When we first embarked on this project, we wanted to create a tool that would provide value for everyone in the company, from the operators and mechanics to the shift supervisors and office staff. We feel that we have achieved that, but we are always looking to improve how we do things. A big thank you to Nicki Wilson and Brooks Patterson, who spearheaded this project and made it all happen! We are proud of what we’ve accomplished with the portal and couldn’t be more pleased with the recognition we’ve received.
Written by Devon Sacré