Rail Express spoke with Badi Noble, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Olinga Services to learn more about the business.
Can you share with us the core values of Olinga Services and how they differentiate you in the industry?
The core values of Olinga really sit around people, it takes everyone into perspective. Whether it’s our employees, our suppliers or our customers, our priority is about people.
We believe having a culture and an ecosystem that focuses on the wellbeing of everyone brings success as this focus on people allows us to take a very proactive approach with regards to safety, wellbeing, equity and fairness. We believe if you look after your workforce, they will look after your clients.
How does Olinga Services ensure the workforce is equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary to handle the challenges they face?
We directly employ our workforce so we know that all staff on site have the required skills and licences, are properly trained, familiar with the site and understand the client’s needs. We have invested heavily in the development of a positive culture within the organisation. Going back to the core values of people, it’s ensuring that safety is not down to one individual or just the system, but rather it is an entire ecosystem and culture of wanting to abide and look after each other. I was trained and brought up that safety started with you – if you looked after yourself, you were able to look after others, but then you also had a responsibility to keep a lookout around you.
The focus on safety is especially crucial in the rail sector. In addition to building a strong people culture, we have invested heavily in our tech, systems and platforms, coupled with effective and tailored training to drive safety across the organisation. We also have 360 feedback to ensure we are able to identify opportunities for improvement and development.
What steps do you take to scale the workforce effectively when there’s flexibility needed or demand changes?
Something we’ve been really good at from the beginning is how to predict and understand workforce requirements. If we think about it from a resource development perspective, we take a long-term approach, which is investing up front in the development of resource benches, where we might not necessarily need to, we see benefit in terms of understanding the client needs and then building contingency into that.
Secondly, we have an active labour hire workforce that allows us that flexibility and scalability, to be able to recruit, train and access a resource pool that other organisations might have difficulty with because they don’t have that capability. Our labour hire side really becomes an asset in terms of flexibility and being able to deliver our client short term needs or respond to peak periods.
Specific to the rail industry, is there an example around that that you could talk through?
Let’s take the hardest one which is Cook, located in the Nullarbor, South Australia. It was our ability to resource the site that sits in the middle of the desert and takes 24 hours to get there. It’s being able to identify individuals with not only the certification requirements, but also the mindset and the lifestyle skills to survive in such an environment. Being isolated working in the middle of the desert, having limited interactions, being able to self-regulate and manage themselves, is slightly complicated. Because of our engagement within the industry, we’re able to find people with the necessary certification, or again, we’re able to get that very quickly for them. Secondly, find them and find the ideal or the right personalities. Again, it was an understanding of what the requirements were, and we found over the last two years, we have never had a missed shift, we’ve never had staff unable to adapt to the environment, because of our understanding of what the requirements for that role were.
How is the team prepared to handle unexpected challenges or operational disruptions when they happen?
One of the things you learn very quickly is all the planning in the world still won’t cover everything that happens. You can try, and we do, we have comprehensive business continuity plans in place, project continuity plans are developed where we try and anticipate all of the different outcomes that are there. I think the most important aspect of what we do is building strong communication and relationships with our clients and also within our organisation.
We’re very proud of our management team and their understanding that things can happen. You can always come back and evaluate and you can look back retrospectively and say okay, let’s do an assessment of what it is, but really, it’s all about how we deal with these situations and moving forward. I think our management plans on how to approach crises, whether they’re small, even to the biggest ones, has always been one of resolution and rectification and communication.
Compliance and safety regulations are really important, how does the team keep up with that?
Being ISO certified and undertaking regular internal audits and reviews is one aspect. We have a range of key partners to the business and we have very strong engagement with our legal teams. We have outside consultants who come through and do reviews of our systems and our processes to ensure that we’re compliant.
We do a range of self-initiated internal and external auditing of our businesses, but also our electronic systems allow us to ensure that compliance aspect as well. Our purpose-built automated systems and platforms provide for a certain level of security, and once identified, we can update the protocols into a complex algorithm that covers those compliance requirements.
How does your workforce utilise tech and innovation across your organisation?
Olinga Services has invested in building our own systems and software to allow us to support our staff, have a focus on safety and deliver consistent outcomes for clients. Because we are a people first organisation, we believe that tech is not there to replace our staff, it’s meant to support and enhance the service that they’re able to deliver and then by that enhancement, what we hope to do is deliver value to our clients. The value comes in terms of greater productivity, being able to redirect staff to higher value tasks in terms of what they’re delivering as well, but also being able to provide clients with traceability in terms of what they’re spending their money on.
Could you expand a bit on something that’s unique, one of those platforms or systems that Olinga Services invests in?
We have an internal software development team dedicated to developing our purpose-built software and platforms, such as Luigi Jobs, our staff management software and Olinga App, our reporting and compliance platform. Luigi Jobs gives us end to end support for our directly employed staff. From recruiting and onboarding new staff to rostering, time and attendance as well as payroll, the entire process is online, automated and offers real time information. To maintain the safety standards, the system requires us to determine what the minimum requirements are from a certification or training perspective for each role or job site so that only staff with the requisite skills and training can be allocated. This cannot be by-passed. Staff must use the application to sign in and out of their shifts to be paid, and to be scheduled, they must meet the minimum requirements for the role and client site.
So again, our system requires you to upload the right documentation and complete the necessary training, which is verified by our system before we can even place you, or schedule you onto a job site. For emergencies, we have real time information of everyone on site and can communicate with them directly.
Our other key platform is Olinga App Staff have access to all current and relevant safety information for the client site at their fingertips via the App. Safety is a two-way street and the App also allows staff to report and provide feedback to us in a real time scenario.
Looking to the future, what do you see as the future in the facilities management space and how is Olinga Services preparing for that future?
In terms of the future, where the industry expands, we’re seeing that a lot of the assets that are being managed right now are becoming smart assets. Whether they’re smart buildings or smart assets, for example if you look at the trains there’s a level of sensor integration and other reporting that different clients have, it requires providers like us to understand and be responsive to.
What are you most excited about in regards to that?
The most exciting thing that I see is that, despite all the technological innovation, FM still ends up being a people business. Technology is there to support the people delivering the services to do it safer and more efficiently. I think when people see someone who’s engaging in work on site, there is a level of satisfaction and security that comes with that. We discount the value of the visual reassurance we get sometimes when we see individuals do certain tasks.
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