DrakeVine August 2023

DRAKEVINE

A message from the EC

Your Executive Committee welcomes you to the August edition of the DrakeVine newsletter, connecting us all to share the very latest Drake news!

Over the past quarter, our (BiB) project’s strategic goals have gained significant momentum, and we want to express our deepest gratitude to each member of our team. Your dedication, perseverance, and drive during these transformative times have been truly remarkable.

Amidst rapid change and exciting opportunities, our team consistently rises to the occasion, demonstrating unwavering commitment and a hunger for success. Together, we have faced challenges with extraordinary resilience, adaptability, and determination, propelling us forward.

As we enter the fourth quarter of 2023, our focus remains on the (BiB) strategies and meeting the fiscal year’s goals. Our EC Town Hall in June was a fantastic opportunity to share updates on the success of these strategies, reaffirming our progress towards Planet Profit each quarter.

The investment into our systems and training has been pivotal to progressing our

project. In May, our management team met with Ken Graham, our Learning & Development Manager, who provided the group with leadership training.

For Drake Medox, the FT360 transition and use of SparkHire’s video interview tool have streamlined the applicant hiring process, leading to healthy candidate inflow, supporting our continued growth. With the community care sector expanding, we have invested significantly in our Applicant DFE, appointing new Recruitment Coordinators, and creating additional roles to enhance our candidate care programs.

BiB

Mark Coetzee International Business Transformation

Frank Spizzo Chief Financial Officer

Nick Polimenakos General Manager, Drake Medox

Daniel Parncutt General Counsel

Paul Unstead National Manager Operations

A message from the EC

With FT360 rolled out across all of Drake, we are now focused on improving the client and candidate experience to create a seamless and consistent process for all stakeholders. This effort will reduce pain points in the customer journey as well as minimise administrative tasks for our teams.

In the last quarter, our business has made significant strides in fostering diversity and inclusion within our workplace. We’ve taken proactive steps to celebrate key cultural and significant dates, uniting as a business to commemorate our Reflect RAP Launch during National Reconciliation Week. Additionally, we proudly extended our support to Pride Month through our socials and internal All Staff chat. We are also thrilled to announce that our Bullying, Harassment & Discrimination Policy is being updated to ensure it uses more inclusive language. We look forward to seeing more initiatives that promote diversity, inclusion, and equity at Drake, and encourage all teams to show their support.

Looking ahead, we are confident that our team will continue to thrive and achieve remarkable things together. Our collaboration, camaraderie, and collective spirit define us, fostering outstanding achievements and milestones in the future. Living and breathing our RAPID values daily, we are proud of how our team conducts themselves among colleagues, candidates, and clients.

Thank you for your perseverance and drive, we are honoured to lead such an exceptional team. Let’s embrace change confidently, knowing our collective efforts will make a lasting impact.

The Executive Committee

Strategy Update

We are thrilled to share some exciting updates on our Back in Black (BiB) project and the progress we’ve made in driving growth and enhancing our sales and service.

2023 has been a year of significant change and projects, and now we’re embarking on the big push for growth with both the Drake Staffing and Professional service lines. Here’s a quick overview:

• 20/20 CATMs: All branches have successfully developed their 20/20 CATMs, identifying growth opportunities with existing clients and targeting new clients for strategic sales efforts. This targeted approach will maximize our business growth potential.

• Dedicated Sales Activity: Each front office team has committed a minimum of four dedicated days per month to focus on turning leads into prospects and prospects into active trading clients. This increased effort will drive our growth and help us achieve our targets.

• Price Improvement Program: In July, the Staffing business launched a program to improve net revenue and profitability from existing clients through a price improvement program. By optimising our pricing strategies, we aim to boost profitability and strengthen client relationships.

• People Development: We are prioritising the development of our people, providing support to navigate through the new systems and processes utilising quick reference guides (QRGs) and training materials through the Drake Intranet SharePoint site “Insight.” This approach will ensure consistency and quality across teams.

Our continued focus will be on data integrity and cleansing, improved measurement and reporting, process efficiency, and enhancing the candidate and client experience. These ongoing projects will assist the sales and service teams to drive growth, streamline operations and elevate our service quality.

Thank you for your dedication and hard work in driving our sales and service initiatives. Together, we’re building a strong foundation for success and establishing Drake as an industry leader.

If you have any questions or ideas, please reach out to your manager. Your input is vital as we continue to evolve and improve.

Let’s keep pushing forward and achieving new heights together!

Congratulations to our Q3 RAPID Award Winners!

These fabulous staff were our Q3 RAPID Award winners!

RESPECT:

Lewis Ngatai

Congratulations to our RAPID Value Award Nominees!

ACHIEVEMENT:

Shivani Sholapurwala

PASSION:

Troy Poposki

INTEGRITY:

Paul Marshall

D&I:

Karina Hammer

Melyssa Cumming, Kellie Hayley, Jaspreet Bedi, Lewis Ngatai, Daniel Parncutt, Mischell Aristo, Garrett Overend, Yasman Wilkes, Roisin Bettaney, Simeon Nikolaidis, Chang Xu, Claire Alcock, Megan Van De Kamp, Kristina Deverell, Beverley Melville, Shelby Crameri, Jessie Drane, Alana Blandford, Matt Vido, Stuti Khanna, Abbey Blenkinsop, Stephanie Jory, Karen Chittick, Michael Benedet, Morgan Cullen, Nidhi Shrivastava, Isabella Evans, Valerie Muscat, Lucy Palu, Ivy Wen, Courtney Kaye, Kris Dilucchio, Chandra Henry, Lee Chung, Nathalie Den Doelder, Victoria Hunt, Kevin Vowles, Sarah Ross

RAPID TEAM AWARD:

Sydney Medox

Congratulations to our RAPID Team Award Nominees!

EC AWARD:

RAP Working Group

Credit Team, RAP Working Group, Medox Perth, Drake Bendigo, Drake Government

Thank you for all your hard work and support, and for living and breathing our RAPID values.

You can nominate a colleague or a team at any time

For more information about our RAPID Award program

Safety News

The WHS Team has been working in the background on some key initiatives:

• WorkPro consolidation – This will be completed in the next few weeks, standardising our induction packages, making it simpler to administer.

• Incident and injury reporting system – We are in the final stages of negotiations with a system vendor. This system will enable us to manage all incidents from the initial report through to injury management and WorkCover. This will also enable accurate safety reporting and better visibility across the business with respect to safety incidents.

• Alternatives to the current Injury Assist program – The decision was made late last year that we would bring Injury Management in house which now sits with Olivia Sorensen and Jeremy Swan. The second part of this initiative is to source an alternative supplier to our current, DHS - Injury Assist. We are in the final stages of this and will announce changes within the next 2 months. For now, it’s BAU, all injuries no matter how minor are to be called through to Injury Assist.

Current Initiatives – D&I Update

The D&I Committee would like to thank all teams that participated in our competition and submitted a D&I statement.

We had 6 submissions across the business, and it was fantastic to hear from teams what diversity and inclusion means at Drake. We are excited to announce our final D&I statement as:

“At Drake, we are committed to fostering diversity, inclusion, and equity. While our journey is ongoing, our shared goal is to create an environment where every individual is respected and valued. We are a community that recognises the strength of diversity.”

Our newly created D&I statement will be used across all our websites and job ads, helping to encourage and attract diverse talent to Drake!

A huge congratulations to the following teams - you have won a team lunch out on Drake for your outstanding submissions!

INITIATIVES

Drake Wetherill Park

Drake Derrimut

Drake Gold Coast National Accounts

Current Initiatives – D&I Update

Reflect RAP:

It’s been a fantastic quarter for the RAP Working Group! We had a successful Reflect RAP launch across our offices and have been busy working through our RAP’s key deliverables. To recap, some of the key initiatives we implemented in the last quarter were:

• Celebrating and acknowledging key cultural dates such as National Reconciliation Week & NAIDOC Week.

• Educating teams and implementing an Acknowledgement of Country protocol across any key events hosted by Drake. You can find our Acknowledgement of Country resources on Drake Insight!

• Researching best practice and policies around race relations & anti-discrimination. These recommendations have been taken into consideration when updating our new Bullying, Harassment, & Discrimination Policy.

• Creating a list of key stakeholders that Drake can engage with on our reconciliation journey, which has included a range of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander employment service providers.

D&I page now available on Drake Insight!

We have created a dedicated D&I page on Drake Insight which provides our team with resources and updates on our Reflect RAP as well as other D&I initiatives!

Explore more today!

Current Initiatives – FT360 Update

The FT360 team have plenty of updates to share with our wonderful team!

Key Highlights:

• Medox has gone live with FT360 which is a huge achievement! With all of Drake now using FT360, we can start to align and standardise processes to maximise the benefits of using this system.

• RatesCalc has gone live across Drake Staffing, Government and Professional! Through this, new rates have been “synced” to our FT360 Job Templates, reducing manual keying, risk of error, whilst ensuring rates align with Fair Work requirements.

• RatesCalc was used to enable our FWA increases, price improvement program and statutory increases. We look forward to embedding this across Drake and providing a more seamless experience for client quoting and rate compliance.

• Annual Rate increases were managed through FT360 for the first time, with everything ready in time for pay and bill! This is a huge undertaking at any time but especially with new systems. Amazing work to all involved!

• Bulk Actions available via the Job Order search – Quick Reference Guides are available on Insight here!

Up Next:

• RatesCalc Training on new client quoting and electronic signatures.

• Embedding compliance into our candidate and job order records to reduce the risk of issues with our workforce.

• Improving Broadbean automation and template use.

• Candidate and client onboarding project that will be enabled via the Drake Forms platform upgrade.

• Ongoing reporting improvements across all areas.

FT360 Training

• With the ‘Big Sales Push’ for Back in Black, Drake Staffing, Government and Professional leadership teams have participated in system training for managing activity. This is now being rolled out across branches as they embed FT360 into their daily activities.

• Activity-related reports are now available in FT and include Jobs in Progress, Activity by Comments, and Activity by User reports. Everyone can utilise these to measure and manage the activity being conducted. If it isn’t in the system, it didn’t happen!!

• We are developing a training roadmap to deliver specific FT360 sessions. We will reach out in the coming weeks for input into key topics that will support you to succeed with FT360

• Developing QRGs and training modules around best practice use of FT and ENTO for SMS and email communications across a range of scenarios.

• There are a range of Quick Reference Guides (QRGs) available on Drake Insight that are updated regularly.

Access Quick Reference Guides

Out and About

The Drake WellbeingHub team surpassed 5000 pushups this month in support of the Push-Up Challenge, hitting a total of 5089 push ups. Well done, team! L-R: Kevin Vowles, Tara Bradley &

Sara Ciappara

Adam Sparks & Stuti Khanna representing Drake Medox at a Darwin Ready Set Connect Event!

Shivani Sholapurwala received a surprise birthday delivery of Mel Cumming’s famous brownies!!

Nicole Jones visited Perth and caught up with Roman Koester & Mel Cumming!

Nick Polimenakos (General Manager ANZ) visiting the Drake Medox Darwin team! L-R: Nick Polimenakos, Samidha Khanna, Stuti Khanna, Richa Bakshi, and Adam Sparks.

Out and About

The Adelaide Branch celebrating Pride Month with a colourful morning-tea! L-R: Janet Kirton, Emily Tonissen, Alexis Miller, Asha Selva-Nayagam, Maryanne Zrilic, Simeon Nikolaidis, Mikayla Papastamatis, Caitlin Marciniak, & Nikita Verma.

Mikayla Papastamatis with our new Drake Medox banner, which features a few of our amazing clients and candidates!

RAP Launch from across the country

Client Success Stories

We are thrilled to share the incredible achievements of Georgia Matterson & her Drake team. They have built strong partnerships with RMS and Correctional Services Victoria to develop training strategies to support inmates’ transition back into the workforce.

The partnership between Drake, RMS, and Correctional Services Victoria highlights Georgia’s entrepreneurial mindset, whilst embracing Drake’s desire to promote a more inclusive and diverse workplace.

The aim of this project is to develop training strategies within the prison system so that when inmates are released, they are skilled up and have a pathway into the rail and construction industries. Statistics state that if someone coming out of the correction system obtains work within 3 weeks of being released, the chances of re-offending are significantly reduced.

Drake’s partnership with RMS and Correctional Services Victoria has been highly successful, with RMS’s NSW Business Manager providing a glowing review of Drake’s services:

“From the beginning, it was evident that Drake was different from other recruitment agencies. Their bespoke service was tailored to our specific needs and requirements, and they took the time to understand our company culture, values, and the specific skill sets we were seeking in potential candidates. This personalised approach was truly refreshing, and it set them apart as a partner who genuinely cared about the success of our organisation.”

A huge congratulations to Georgia and the Drake team – what an incredible initiative!

Karina Hammer, Terry Nicholls (RMS Business Manager), Georgia Matterson, and Nicole Jones at Loddon Prison, Castlemaine.

Marketing Update

Drake

Social media performance:

Our social media presence continues to grow each quarter, extending our reach to both candidates and clients. These platforms play a crucial role in promoting our brands and are currently thriving.

With short-form content (such as videos under 60 seconds) now being a significant factor in user engagement in 2023, it will remain a central focus of our content strategy going forward.

LinkedIn Increased by 4.8% -18,909 total followers Facebook increased by 5.1% - 8,077 total followers.

Instagram increased by 18.7% - 1,004 followers. TikTok increased by 47.8% - 520 followers.

SEO growth:

A few months back we set a target for multiple keywords to rank on the first page of Google. We are seeing the success of this target, as several queries now display Drake International on page 1 or 2.

Some examples of these search queries include “luxury retail jobs,” “warehousing jobs,” “manufacturing staff recruitment,” “retail job agency,” “customer service recruitment agency,” and more. As time progresses, our target keywords will continue to rise in rankings, driving more traffic to our website.

Drake home page rebuild:

Australia has led the way in creating a new home page design that’s better suited to today’s audience. This redesigned page will now incorporate our sub-brands, testimonials, branch locations, and more, ensuring that users have easy access to our services. The primary objective is to enhance user engagement and overall website performance as we enter the next quarter.

Marketing Update

Medox

New ad content

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our new ad content, designed to captivate and resonate with our audience. Featuring genuine moments and stories from individuals benefiting from our disability support services, these visuals create an authentic connection that leaves a lasting impression. Additionally, this fresh ad content enhances our search engine optimisation efforts by providing relevant and engaging material.

Fresh collateral

We have recently updated our brand-new collateral, transforming our exhibiting opportunities into engaging showcases for our disability support services. From vibrant wall banners to eye-catching counters, compelling flyers, and custom tablecloths, our refreshed materials create a captivating environment. Emphasising our mission and services, these visually striking elements enhance brand visibility and captivate visitors, making a powerful impression that resonates long after their encounter.

Social media performance

We would like to share the outstanding performance of our social media channels, which include people-centric content that truly resonates. By showcasing real stories and experiences of individuals benefitting from Medox services, we’ve witnessed a huge surge in engagement. Our audience connects deeply with these authentic narratives, leading to increased likes, comments, and shares. Together, we’re building a vibrant online community that uplifts and empowers.

Our followers are growing!

Marketing Update

Drake WellbeingHub

Successful wellbeing event - Create a Thriving, Trusted Team Culture!!!

On June 11th, we ran our quarterly wellbeing event alongside speaker, facilitator, and mentor Marie-Claire Ross. The workshop was designed specifically for business leaders looking to create a thriving, trusted team culture. We had 212 registrations from existing and prospective customer organisations Australia-wide.

Drake Business Services Asia Website launch

Over the last 6 months, we have been working on rolling our six brand new websites for Drake Business Services Asia/Drake Business Logistics brand. The six websites cover our global office locations across APAC; Australia, Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea. Three of the six websites are available in dual languages. This is a significant step forward for the business, improving our digital footprint and our overall brand presence.

Employee Wellbeing

Did you know you have access to free, confidential counselling?

As a valued member of Drake International, we want to remind you of the mental health and wellbeing services available to you through Drake WellbeingHub. Know that whatever it is that you’re experiencing, you are not alone.

As a Drake employee, you have access to:

1. Mental health counselling – 3 sessions/year (per issue)

2. FamilySupport – your family too can now benefit from mental health counselling services

3. ManagerSupport – managers have access to consultations with qualified clinicians to work through any workplace challenge they’re experiencing

Over the coming weeks, we will be rolling out a new Drake Wellbeing initiative, which will form an integral part of our Employee Value Proposition. This will include:

• Quarterly wellbeing events on a broad range of topics, delivered by Drake WellbeingHub

• Monthly wellbeing tips. Stay tuned in our “All Staff Drake” chat!

• Regular email communications offering insights, advice, resources, and tips from our subject matter experts

Further updates, coming soon!

Competition Corner

Subscriber Spotlight!

Want to go in the draw to win a $25 e-gift voucher?

Complete our Subscriber Spotlight by answering a few questions about yourself and your role at Drake. The winner will feature in our next newsletter!

Click the link below and complete your spotlight story today!

Click here

Wordle Challenge

Try crack our Drake Wordle! The aim is to crack the 5-letter word in 6 guesses. After each guess, the colour of the tiles will change to show how close your guess was to the word.

Play now!

Correct answers go into the draw to Win a double movie pass!

Submit your answer here

Congratulations to Emily Clarke, who correctly answered “unity” for the last DrakeVine Wordle challenge!

We hope you enjoyed the movies!