Hi, my name's Christine Sanger. I'm the CEO of the
Personnel Group, which is a Disability Employment Service
located in Albury-Wodonga, that's servicing the Riverina
and north-eastern areas of Victoria.
So, my focus at the moment is to really try and ensure that
every individual staff member has an innovative
and creative approach to the work that they do.
[That] they are ever aware of any opportunities
where they can use new technology to make things more
efficient or effective but, at the same time,
skilling up our employees or our job seekers  in
understanding the new technologies.
So to me, it's a huge new wave of economic change that we,
as employment service providers, have to be aware of
and have to be addressing to properly service our job seekers.
We have an internal program called Yammer, which is sort
of like an internal Facebook and it's...
it can be used for social contact,
for having groups where you have a meeting. It can be
where people might have a problem and they want to
discuss it and get other people's views on it. So it's a..
that's been one of the... probably one of the game changers
in getting all our staff engaged in understanding the benefits
of some of the new technologies that are around.
And as we have offices in other... all across the Riverina
and in Victoria, just that connection with each other is
really, really important.
One of the tools we're trialling at the moment is using iPads,
which all my senior staff have iPads because we see that
as an effective use of time and being able to communicate
with each other. So that's something that's happened
immediately. But we're trialling the use of iPads in terms
of a quality assurance really. We check with our job seekers
and our clients working, our employers and our service
providers every year about what they think of our service,
as most good businesses do. But that takes the form of
written documentation being sent out and then replying
in surveys et cetera. So to try and get more information on
a regular basis - in real time, as you call it,
we have been... we now have this information on an iPad,
so that as people come into the office, they can just fill out
a form and it goes immediately back to a central area where,
if there are any issues or concerns, we can address them
straight away. We see employers on a regular basis so
we will be taking the iPad out to those people and just
saying could they please fill this in. And that information
then gets fed straight back to a central location in the
organisation where the issues are addressed straight away.
So we're doing that and hoping that rather than a once or
twice a year operation [it] will be now just an ongoing thing
that we can address any issues directly and instantly with
our job seekers, our clients, and service providers and employers.
We use web-based technology as well to communicate
with them. We have Skype for individual people wanting to
talk to each other for doing training. We also have our
regular YouTube Monday morning bulletin which is a news
feed that provides everyone with the same information at
the same time with the opportunity for people to then get
back to us with questions, or issues, or concerns they
might have about anything that has come up in that news feed.
But we have one particular incidence... we had ten different...
a program called National Green Jobs Corp which were ten
different groups of young people across all of our sites
that were all doing a similar... doing similar work.
To try and engage them, we created a Facebook page that
would link them and get them talking to each other about
the things that they were doing and what was happening
there. That was really successful. It was...
We trialled it in a more specific area but it was about... these
were very disengaged young people who didn't have
many skills at all. The Green... the National Green Jobs
Corp projects were actually fantastic in terms of getting
people out there and doing stuff and being skilled in jobs
that they didn't think they could be skilled in.
But the relation... the relating of all the information between
each other and the competition - they'd come together at
one particular time towards the end of their courses and
all have a bbq together or... it was at a bowling green
actually, and so they all played bowls against each other.
So it was trying to maintain the camaraderie - get a
sense of teams; and that was just a communication tool
to ensure that they had a means of engaging with each
other and using a tool, because most of them were
under eighteen, a tool that they were familiar with.
So that was very successful.
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