Maxima is a not-for-profit, community-oriented employment services provider supporting people in their pursuit of meaningful work. Active in 70 communities, its Disability Employment Services operations help people with a disability, injury or health condition find and sustain employment.

Maxima goes the extra mile in the provision of special assistance to DES customers, including those with mental illness. With 35 years’ experience, its disability management and employment support services prepare customers physically and mentally for new opportunities and keeping a job for life.

The challenge

Maxima’s experience with Disability Employment Services customers had made clear just how important resilience was to their success over the long term. While its team would work hard with employers to find new job vacancies, without engagement from customers and the right mindset around resilience and wellbeing, they often found it difficult to cope when faced with the stresses involved with employment. Maxima wanted to provide resilience support to help customers stay in jobs for 52 weeks and beyond, alongside training and support in other areas like employability.

Maxima also wanted to consolidate and structure training for a centralised Learning Management System. With a head office in South Australia and operations right across Australia, it wanted to be able to deliver training in a digital format across the country. This would allow it to put forward its most enthusiastic and skilled trainers into delivering digital training. It would also give customers the flexibility to access training at a time that suited them, achieve faster progress through learning modules if they wished, and gain comfort from doing that in a less confronting digital format.

The solution

Maxima rolled out Esher House’s digital Assessment of Work Readiness (AWR) tool and in-person group workshops across its DES network in 2019. This enabled Maxima to assess, triage and provide resilience interventions for inbound customers, to increase their psychological readiness for employment. In the rapid shift to a digital-first service delivery and learning environment during COVID-19, Esher House was able to support Maxima’s move by converting its in-person workshops into a fully digital format. Five workshops were broken down into 15 easily consumable modules that could be delivered online by Maxima’s trained employment services consultants.

This complemented delivery via Maxima’s new Learning Management System. With courses housed and delivered centrally, resilience sessions could be booked by customers online at times that suited them. Customers could proceed through modules at their own pace – with some moving through rapidly – and even choose a preferred facilitator. For Maxima, this meant being able to direct its best online training staff into delivering Esher House sessions. It also enabled the delivery of courses online across the country in different time zones and the centralised management of learning.

The result

Maxima has seen significant improvements in the psychological work readiness of its customers, improving the likelihood of customer engagement with new work opportunities as well as success in maintaining employment over the longer term. It has also successfully centralised resilience training modules for more efficient and effective operation alongside other training, improving its service model and operational excellence across Australia. This success led Maxima to roll out tailored Esher House modules for Jobs Victoria participants, with plans to expand this to the NDIS program.

Centralisation: Maxima is centralising resilience learning modules for convenient booking and professional and efficient delivery Australia-wide.

Flexibility: Maxima is putting customers at ease with digital workshops that can be accessed and undertaken from anywhere at a suitable time to support work readiness.

Motivation: Maxima is improving customer psychological readiness for work through delivery of comprehensive, guided online resilience program.

What Maxima says

“Maxima Joblink has always been motivated to improve the lives of our customers and know how challenging finding and sustaining employment can be. The Esher House Resilience Program is a key part of our service and support for customers and we know the difference this program has made to their mental well-being and resilience as they pursue and undertake employment. The feedback our trainers receive from our staff around the country demonstrate how the program has benefited their customers personally through supporting motivation and engagement. Maxima fully supports this targeted engagement and intervention support for our customers and know this greatly increases their chances of gaining employment.”

Nathan Weedon, Organisational Development Manager, Maxima Group

Interested in finding out how Esher House can improve job seeker support with behavioural science? Learn more here.