Suez

The handling and recycling of hazardous waste requires specific knowledge, particularly with respect to health and safety. Suez Belgium has approximately 2,000 permanent and 300 temporary or external employees. To ensure that all employees are all on the same page, so to speak, each new employee must complete a training course before he or she can start. This normally takes place in the office, but COVID-19 made this impossible as from the beginning of 2020.

That was an opportunity for Suez Belgium to resolutely opt for digital alternatives and resulted in the environmental giant entering a partnership with FLOWSPARKS.

Pascale Hermans works as a Talent & Development Manager at Suez Belgium. Her team collaborates closely with the Business Department at the company’s Paris headquarters. ‘They already had a clearly defined learning roadmap in Paris. It was time to catch up,’ explains Pascale.

Suez Belgium had to pull off a digital sprint. To this end, they wanted to develop a single integrated learning platform in all languages spoken in Belgium. ‘We also wanted an external platform for work placement students, freelancers and temporary employees.’ Another requirement was independence. Every employee must be able to complete each training course fully autonomously.

When accessibility, ease of use – both on the side of the party responsible for creating the digital learning modules and on the side of the participant – and smooth multilingualism are a requirement, nothing makes more sense than engaging FLOWSPARKS to help you.

A start was made in early 2019. Corentin Snauwaert, HR Business Partner L&D at Suez Belgium, and three other employees in Pascale’s team set to work with FLOWSPARKS. They received the input they needed from their colleagues in Paris.

However, the project needed to be accelerated at the beginning of 2020 due to the COVID crisis. Everyone was suddenly working from home, on their own little island. ‘We drew up a training course for booking workspaces at the office,’ says Pascale. ‘Including an integrated floor plan of the office building.’ This prevented double bookings and other administrative problems. ‘It was greatly appreciated by our employees. Particularly by our colleagues at reception.’

52 training courses

In 2020, 52 training courses were created addressing subjects such as safety, technical matters and onboarding. A total of 1,300 employees participated in them. The team received a lot of positive feedback from them.

‘FLOWSPARKS’s handy templates helped us create some interesting training courses based on different didactic principles,’ says Corentin. Moreover, FLOWSPARKS can be perfectly linked to major LMS systems such as SuccesFactors, Totara Learn or Cornerstone, so that the results and the status of the completed digital courses can also be perfectly monitored via these systems. When newcomers are at risk of falling behind, they also receive a reminder from the system (either from FLOWSPARKS or from an external LMS).

Learning made fun and low-threshold

‘Safety regulations are extremely complex – as well as important,’ confirms Corentin. But thanks to FLOWSPARKS, Suez is still able to keep these training courses easy to fun and low-threshold.

‘Every new employee is required to take a safety test on his or her first day at work. A score of at least 15 out of 20 is needed to pass the test.’ Newcomers can easily pick up the information they need through activities such as SMARTVIDEO, SMARTPAGE and SMARTTEST. They will take a clearly defined course of learning, into which a number of GIFs and animations have been incorporated to make it more appealing.

The same applies for another digital training course on safety icons. This test makes use of sequences. Participants must obtain a minimum pass score. They also receive feedback to help them learn from their mistakes. At the end, the participants are given the opportunity to download the results in.pdf format.

‘The prevention of fatal accidents is a priority at Suez. We used more or less the same didactic structure for these courses, with a THEMEPAGE, supplemented with activities such as the SMARTVIDEO and SMARTTEST.’ Embellished with GIFs and animations, of course. It was easy to make them by myself,’ says Corentin. He has received a lot of positive response about them.

Gamification

‘The House of Waste’ is the most comprehensive training course they have created. Suez applied gamification to this: the user is transported digitally to a kind of escape room, with a storyline that is adapted to the situation.

The setting is a big house with several inhabitants living on each floor. The employee takes on the role of a secret agent and has to garner enough information (knowledge about safety regulations and protocols) to correctly process the waste created by each inhabitant. SMARTTESTS and QR codes are used for this purpose.

‘This is very different to traditional training at the office. Apart from this, a newcomer also receives a tremendous amount of information on his or her first day,’ says Corentin. ‘Now it can be more spread out, with a more interactive approach.’

‘FLOWSPARKS is easy to work with and user-friendly, for both the designer and the user,’ explains Pascale with satisfaction. Currently, there are four people developing new training courses at Suez, but they intend to expand that number soon. ‘We want to train people at every department to create digital training courses quickly and easily.’