Welcome to the latest edition of our blog series. It’s all about the companies and people who are using our platform to make sure their workforce is operating at its very best. This time we're hearing from Machmade Ltd (a licenced Dyno Rod franchise).
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Name: Reg & Neil Illingworth (Owners)
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Company: Machmade Ltd
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Location: Liverpool, U.K.
Tell us a little about being a Dyno franchise….
Dyno Plumbing & Drains Liverpool has been established since 1987 for Drains and 2007 for plumbing.
The company started out with just one van and a single plumber, and within 12 months rapidly expanded to 12 operating vans.
We provide a full plumbing service from domestic homes to large-scale projects including British Gas and other major commercial clients.
Our expert plumbers and engineers are home based and operate throughout Merseyside.
Having this team of local plumbers allows us to provide rapid response, emergency plumbing services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We aim to ensure that the disruption caused by burst or leaking pipes is kept to an absolute minimum.
What is your role?
Our roles as Dyno franchise owners and directors is to lead our teams to success. We have responsibility for our management team and all our plumbing and drainage engineers. We are involved in safety meetings, operational excellence, financial, marketing, social media, sales and business development as well as HR, recruitment and customer service.
Basically, running a business like ours, you are involved in everything and there are never enough hours in the day! We have always thrived on that since we started the business and love the fast paced and customer facing environment we have.
Our team are very important to us, and we spend lots of time making sure that we are right for each other. We aim to retain our people as long as we can. We also like to invest in the local community, particularly when it comes to offering apprentice schemes for the young people in our area.
Tell us more about how you train, communicate and engage your people….
Investing in our people and making them feel valued and supported is a big part of what we do here at Machmade.
eduMe gives us the opportunity to add value to the team by making information accessible at the point of need. Any learning material we create, or information we need known, is easily and readily available in a format our on the go, dispersed workforce needs - bite-sized tidbits.
The engineers are short on time and always out and about, so it’s ideal that eduMe allows us to break their ongoing growth and learning process down into manageable and relevant lessons and courses.
eduMe gives us the opportunity to add value to the team by making training material easily and readily available.
We spend a lot of time focused on customer service and the soft people skills that come with it. eduMe is great for this purpose - it allows us to create bespoke content and training that fits with our business and the wider Dyno network.
We love the fact that eduMe enables us to get the right content, to the right people, at the right time. It means we can target the areas where we specifically need to improve on, based on NPS scores from customers, for example. This ease of access to relevant knowledge empowers and motivates our people to perform their best.
What is your favourite course? How did you make it?
We already have a library of 20 lessons. We have built this up by sharing some content with colleagues in the wider Dyno network. This is the great benefit of being part of a franchised business.
Our favourite course so far is the one that we use for on-boarding a new joiner. This allows us to introduce the company and its history as well as the team and some basic procedures.
This saves us a huge amount of time, potentially up to 2 weeks in real time. All because we don’t need them to travel into the office.
This saves us a huge amount of time, potentially up to 2 weeks in real time.
We love being able to use eduMe’s Flashcard feature. Flashcards allow us to engage our remote team with bite-sized chunks of information, and use follow-ups to cement their knowledge retention.
We use Flashcards to put in little messages, photos and videos about our company and its history to communicate with and engage the team using different formats. This gives them a really good insight into the company they work for and the wider network they are part of.
It’s also great because once it’s been created we can make it so that the information is always at hand for anyone. We are even getting great feedback on it from established members of the team!
How is eduMe helping you make your workforce successful?
After only a few weeks we are seeing how we can successfully take our team to the next level.
eduMe has allowed us to optimise our support and engagement of the team, making them more successful as a collective. Specifically, being able to send them very relevant communication, information or training, direct to their mobile device.
This is something they have never had before. Its ideal because eduMe is mobile-first and our workforce are rarely in the same place.
What are your future plans for using eduMe?
We are really keen on using eduMe for on-boarding all new staff. Currently this process takes a while and uses up a lot of the management team’s time. Our long-term plan is to have the whole process running through eduMe. We think we can save up to 2 weeks of time!
We plan to have information like: company history, contacts, procedures, and full induction, all in bite-sized lessons.
This will mean all the information is centralised in one place, where we can easily update, maintain and disperse it. We can also use the insights feature to keep tabs on how well people are taking the information in. This way we can know who needs a refresher or additional help with what.
What is your best success story so far?
There are two members of staff we’ve already identified as an excellent advocates of eduMe - Chloe and Cliff. They’ve shown that they’re very ‘tech savvy’ and love to create content for other members of the team. Both are very motivated by us investing in new technology and can see how this will benefit the team.
It’s great to have ambassadors of eduMe in the team from day one!
Where can people find out more about Dyno?
Our website offers lots of information about us.
We are also active on YouTube and other social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.
And finally, what has been the most rewarding moment for you in your time as Dyno franchisee?
A few years ago, we made the decision to build our own apprenticeship scheme for staff in the office. This was to enable new staff to understand our culture of growing profitable business as well as their personal growth.
This culminated in us becoming the Winner of the Department of Works and Pensions Apprenticeship Employer of the Year in 2017 for Liverpool City Region, Lancashire and Cumbria.
We were also listed as a Top 100 Apprenticeship Employer nationally in 2017 which was sponsored by Centrica.
