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Good Sammy

Good Sammy empowers employees to learn and grow with ELMO Learning and Development Solutions.

Delivering learning for new hires was manual and cumbersome.

Training wasn’t accessible for all employees across the business.

Inability to efficiently track and assign training and skills development.

Managers had no visibility over their team’s learning & development.

“Before using ELMO, there were just so many things for one person to keep track of.”

Nicole Mola

Learning and Development Manager at Good Sammy

Good Sammy is a not-for-profit social enterprise based in Western Australia with a clear vision: To create a better future for people with disability.

Employment is a central part of that mission and almost 50% of Good Sammy’s workforce is made up of people with disability. With op shops located from Albany to Geraldton, the organisation now employs around 600 people in 25 locations.

Good Sammy has a big focus on the training and development of their team members, both for new hires and existing staff. But before using ELMO, the manual process of identifying staff members who needed training and tracking their process was extremely time-consuming.

This was a major pain point for Nicole Mola, the Learning and Development Manager at Good Sammy.

“It was mostly spreadsheet tracking, so we would identify people in their roles who needed training, drop them in a spreadsheet and update it when they completed the training,” she says.

With a fast-growing workforce and an expanding remit, much of Nicole’s time was being spent on manual tracking. On top of learning management, Nicole also needed to track performance development and probationary tenures, among other things.

“Before using ELMO, there were just so many things for one person to keep track of,” she says.

Nicole knew the organisation was in need of a digital platform to manage their learning and development programs throughout the business.

The Solution

When Good Sammy first started looking for a Learning Management System, it needed to be something that was not only available to their non office-based workforce, but it also needed to be “user-friendly and accessible for all of our people”. Accessibility was a key factor, requiring a digital solution that could be used on the go.

The solution also needed to be competitively priced and able to integrate with their existing
payroll system. As a not-for-profit organisation, value for money was an essential component, ensuring a positive return on investment flowing back into the business.

The Good Sammy team decided to invest in ELMO Learning because it met their criteria and could be customised to suit their needs. Good Sammy are currently using ELMO Learning, while the implementation of ELMO Onboarding and Recruitment is underway.

Automated workflows deliver learning courses to employees via email.

Online learning can be accessed easily by staff wherever they are.

Learning is easy to track through a dashboard, eliminating tedious manual tasks.

The self-service functionality empowers employees to take control of their own learning.

Being able to create reports with just the click of a button has made a big difference.

Nicole Mola

Learning and Development Manager at Good Sammy

We now have a full organisational view of all learning activity

Since launching ELMO Learning, Good Sammy has been able to completely transform the way they manage and deliver training for their hundreds of employees.

Not only has Nicole been able to remove the need for manual tracking, but the time saving has allowed new learning opportunities for the Good Sammy team.

“Our training was predominantly all about compliance and the mandatory courses that staff needed to complete for the role. It wasn’t necessarily focused on their interests or future development opportunities,” says Nicole.

“Historically, we could only offer opportunities to do large group training sessions at our head office. But now we can also offer e-Learning modules based on specific areas of interest for people which might be more niche.”

As the Learning and Development Manager, it’s important to Nicole that all employees at Good Sammy have access to the training they need to confidently perform their roles, while also exploring new opportunities to learn and develop their skill sets. Being able to offer career development opportunities is particularly important for not-for-profit organisations which have felt the effects of Australia’s skills shortage.

As well as benefits for the business, there have been plenty of positives for Nicole in her role too.

“The customised reporting is really convenient,” says Nicole. “From a manager’s perspective, and specifically for an L&D manager, being able to create reports with just the click of a button has made a big difference. Then I can save the reports that I’ve designed and send them off to the necessary people.”

The self-service functionality of the software has provided managers with more oversight, while also freeing up valuable time for the HR team. Previously, managers would need to reach out to Nicole about the status of their team’s learning; or Nicole would need to sift through her learning management Excel sheet before getting in touch with managers.

“Being a manager and not being able to check where your team is at in regard to their training meant there was a lot of reliance on HR,” explains Nicole.

By removing these manual components, the pressure has been taken off Nicole so she can devote more time to other projects, such as curating new learning activities for staff. It’s also given managers more autonomy and agency over their teams. What’s more, the design and easy-to-use functionality of the ELMO solution have ticked a lot of boxes for her and the wider Good Sammy team.

Good Sammy

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The Challenges

The Solution

The Benefits

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