How Novus Property Solutions use iHASCO to upskill and develop staff

Ensuring our colleagues have the right skills and knowledge to do their roles, to the best of their ability and safely, is key to the success of Novus. Our colleagues are instrumental to the success of our organisation and we are confident that the training our colleagues have plays a large role in our customer service excellence.

Training supports a great atmosphere, which encourages every employee to feel valued and welcomed at Novus. We want our teams to feel adequately equipped with the knowledge they need to carry out their roles to the best of their abilities. We ensure colleagues within our business are given access to their required eLearning from day one. This supports them with their onboarding experience, but also ensures they have the tools and knowledge to undertake their duties safely.

As learning never stops, we tailor our training portfolio by role type. This reinforces the training that colleague’s access and ensures that the learning is complimented and further enhanced by their time on-the-job. A consistent approach to the delivery and regularity of training supports the business to standardise working methodologies, which in turn allows colleagues to apply and follow safe and robust procedures as a direct result of their training to a standard that we as a business are proud of.

At Novus, we understand that a key component to ensure our colleagues can thrive is to enable access to a wide portfolio of learning from a range of blended resources. Accessible learning is key to ensuring colleagues are competent and happy.

In addition, we understand the value of professional development to support colleagues who are seeking progression or more responsibility. Development programmes help our colleagues to grow and/or develop their skills and support transitions.

Ensuring our colleagues at Novus can undertake their roles safely is our number one priority. The focus on Health & Safety related training is consistent for colleagues through each part of the employee life cycle. For most colleagues, Health & Safety competencies are delivered as early as day one and as far as possible during their onboarding and prior to the colleague undertaking their duties.

The thoroughness of this process relies on learning that is accessible to colleagues in an easy to access and multi-device format. The iHASCO platform provides all of this.

Through their online digital platform, iHASCO applies logic consistently to each Novus role type through a matrix style approach. This enables automated training assignments and removes the requirement for manual training requests or links to be sent. This approach enables communications, and reporting functionalities to be automated and ensures that expiring training is refreshed by liaising directly with the colleague through the system database.

In the same manner we also utilise iHASCO for types of colleague development not intrinsically linked to Health & Safety. We recently rolled out Mental Health training to all colleagues as part of our internally led colleague wellbeing week and regularly utilise digital learning to support business strategy.

We continuously review the iHASCO development offering to identify opportunities where we can further utilise their content to support our colleagues. This includes utilising the content as part of blended development programmes to support colleague soft skills or to ensure aligned competencies in advance of face-to-face training.

During the pandemic our use of iHASCO as a learning platform grew exponentially. Like many businesses’ the pandemic supported Novus to move quickly and adopt ways of working supported by the digital transformation. iHASCO supported us to quickly change and adapt the way we managed and delivered colleague development to meet our changing needs, and as a result of this, and a close Account Manager relationship, our processes and practices around development have seen some significant transformation.

It was important to us as a business that the pandemic didn’t stop our colleagues from retaining their key competencies and that for colleagues who remained on site, that they could continue to work safely. The pandemic brought new considerations to the forefront for organisations, including the safety precautions that training companies could offer during face-to-face course delivery to prevent increased risk.

iHASCO offered accessible learning that met our industry requirements and complemented colleagues' existing competencies. The learning offered the same standards and met the same criteria as the equivalent face-to-face courses had done previously, but enabled us to support colleague learning from within their home environment or site working teams.

The success of our move to digital learning supported our management teams with the enhanced flexibility to plan their colleagues' training more efficiently and effectively and provided our colleagues with exposure to new learning techniques and advanced technologies. Although the change to increase our digital learning offering came as a direct response to the pandemic, it is still the elected method of delivery for a large proportion of learning content since the easing of government restrictions, and has significantly contributed to an increase in productivity, efficiency, and greener ways of working.

iHASCO have a large portfolio of development aids, with fantastic up-to-date content on a plethora of subject matters including tailored content specifically curated to our sector to ensure they are useful and deliver as much value to our colleagues as possible.

The iHASCO learning management system is easy to use from an admin and learner user perspective. It provides automated accessibility such as auto-enrolment, automatic communications, and reporting at the touch of a button. This allows us to have immediate insight and reduces manual steps in our processes.

What stands out above all else when working with iHASCO is the helpfulness of the whole team. The support team is extremely attentive, dynamic and responsive and our Account Manager Charlotte is a great support. She is always on hand to answer questions and provide insight, as well as attending regular meetings with the Novus team to continue to build on how we use the iHASCO service so that it continues to support our overarching business and people strategies.