Health and safety have always been top priorities at Lafarge Serbia, a member of the global Holcim Group and a leader in the construction industry. To enhance their training processes and ensure compliance, the company implemented Safe MIND, a fully customizable platform built on the WAY2LRN solution. This strategic move helped streamline training, improve access to critical safety resources, and reinforce their commitment to workplace safety excellence. Research shows that organizations with a strong learning culture have 30–50% higher employee retention, making initiatives like Safe MIND essential for long-term success.
The following interview, conducted by Ana Pegan during HR Week in November 2024, features Nikola Spasojević, Learning & Development, Recruitment, and HR Project Manager at Lafarge Serbia, sharing insights into their journey with Safe MIND and how the platform transformed their approach to health and safety training.
My name is Ana Pegan, I’m a product manager for the WAY2LRN platform. Today, I’m talking to Nikola Spasojević, Learning & Development, Recruitment, and HR Project Manager at Lafarge BFC Serbia.
Lafarge Serbia, as a member of the Holcim Group, is a leader in the global and local market in the construction industry and building materials. Their main production lines are cement, RMX concrete, aggregates, and asphalt.
Ana: Hi Nikola, Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself to understand your background better?
Nikola: Hi Anna, my name is Nikola Spasojevic, and I currently work as a Learning and Development, Recruitment, and HR Project Manager in Lafarge Serbia. I started my professional career in 2017, and since then, I’ve participated in all HR processes. Since I joined Lafarge in 2020, my main activities have been learning and development, recruitment, performance management, and digitalization of HR processes. Here, in the digitalization part and the projects part, we have the Safe MIND platform, which we’ll talk about today. The idea for Safe MIND originated from the company’s management, driven by their commitment to enhancing safety and development. This is one of my proudest achievements and projects that I’ve done in my career so far.
Let’s start by explaining a little bit about your users. Who are the users of this platform?
Currently, users are all employees of Lafarge Serbia, but we plan to expand that to all of our visitors, subcontractors, etc., and after that, who knows? We’ll see.
And you actually implemented this as a white-label solution. So why did you decide to go that way?
Well, the part that took the most time out of these projects was finding the right supplier, the right vendor, because 90% of potential suppliers already had learning management systems. And we needed something different. We needed something that is 100% editable. We needed something that would follow our business, not the other way around. So this is the part which was maybe even the hardest part of the project.
“We needed something that is 100% editable and customizable. This was the hardest part of the project—finding the right vendor.”
You named it Safe MIND. Why that name?
Well, health and safety are priority number one at Lafarge Serbia, and everyone who knows us knows we do not mess around with safety. Safety is the most important thing for us; it is how to be safe in our minds and do our jobs safely. This is one of the most important things in our company, so we call it Safe MIND. We just merged the two.
“Health and safety is priority number one in Lafarge Serbia, and everyone who knows us knows we do not mess around with safety.”
How hard was it to convince the management to invest in the project?
For us, health and safety is very, very important. This is not the case where you can calculate the ROI, but you can see how much time and money is spent on the training done regularly. Our CEO approved it right away because he truly believes in the health and safety culture. So it wasn’t an issue.
How long did the building and the implementation last?
Oh, that’s a good question. We spent almost six months finding the right vendor, and then it took less than a year to implement everything. So, 35% of the time went into finding the supplier because we wanted to do it right. Counting everything—the test phase, the preparation of the materials, the training recording, and the development—it took less than a year from the CEO’s decision to do it until the full implementation.
And what were some of the biggest pain points that you wanted to address with this platform?
Well, there is the reporting part, which is the first thing. We have very complex reporting in the health and safety department for the Holcim group because it is the priority number one. So, we created custom-made reporting according to our group; you cannot do that with standardized LMS.
The second thing is that we need to shorten the training time, travel costs, and salaries. When you train people traditionally, and we do business all around Serbia, you must bring people to a certain location. And it doesn’t add to the efficiency for the theoretical part of the training; there is a practical part, which is the other thing. However, the theoretical part can be done from anywhere.
One more thing that is very important to us is that all of our employees have access to the safety knowledge base. So, when they create their profiles, they can access it anytime. They don’t have to call our safety department to ask questions; they can just go to the platform and see everything they want to know.
“All of our employees have access to the safety knowledge base anytime they want. They don’t have to call our safety department to ask questions.”
How did the collaboration with the Bridgewater Labs team go? What was that experience like?
It was like a partner relationship because Bridgewater Labs didn’t have experience in this industry, and we didn’t have experience building the LMS. So we learned together. We designed it together. We created content together. My colleagues Ivan Štetina from the safety department and Marija Đurić from the communication department played significant roles. Ivan was instrumental in preparing training materials, and Marija handled the aesthetics, scripts, and scenarios. We worked closely with Ivana, the Project Manager from Bridgewater Labs, who was 100% available for all our requests and put up with me and my requests for the platform. So we did. We did it together as partners and as one.
And during the implementation, how many people from the HR team participated in that?
In the beginning, the three of us, Ivan, Marija and I, agreed that we’d manage the project. I’m officially a project lead, and I was in charge of the functionality, user-friendliness, negotiations, and finding the right supplier. My colleague Ivan, as I said, was in charge of training materials, standards, and most of their production, while Marija, my colleague from the communication department, was in charge of esthetics, scripts, and scenarios. We have two project supervisors, the Country Health and Safety manager and the O&HR director, who were there with the comments to support us. We were well organized, and that’s why it went so smoothly, I guess.
Is the content something that you created in-house, or were there vendors involved? How did you handle that part?
We have health and safety standards, which we must follow, but we implement them at the national level. The content is ours, but we had a video production house that made the materials for us. It’s all done in our locations; whether it’s a ready-mix base, a plant, or an aggregates location, it doesn’t matter. It’s all done in Lafarge, Serbia.
So, once the implementation was over, did everything go smoothly with the team? What kind of feedback did you get from your users? I know that you did the survey once everything was finished. So what did you notice? What did you learn from that?
Firstly, it was very important for us to do the survey to see how everyone accepted the platform. We heard many good things about it, very few bad ones, and I think that was due to the fact that we’d done the test phase of the platform first. We launched it for 40 people we knew would give us honest and objective feedback. We fixed everything, and then when we launched the final version for all employees, it was very user-friendly. People said the training was simple and straightforward, and everything was one click away. Although the platform is very user-friendly, we have a user manual right on the homepage, so everyone can just click on it and watch the video, which is less than two minutes long. So, it’s a very user-friendly platform.
Did you have to train people to use the platform?
We have a user manual on our home page that explains the process. We didn’t want to send emails for 5,000 trainings and receive calls from everyone! Before the test phase, the three of us working on the project decided to train some people on how to use the platform. The whole safety department, HR, and managers knew the answers, but the user manual did about 95% of the work.
And usually when these types of implementations are done, the HR team kind of gets the impact of that first use. How big was the impact on the HR team?
When we did the test phase, some things needed to be fixed. Let’s be honest; that’s why we did the test phase. So we fixed almost everything then. After the final launch, we had a couple of phone calls where people just asked us what to do. That’s normal when you implement something for over 400 people at once, and for over 5000 trainings, you know that you’ll get a couple of calls, but it’s really less than expected. So it was fine.
“The training was simple, straightforward, and everything was just one click away.”
What would be the next steps for you with the SAFE Mind?
Well, we translated the platform to English, mostly because of our visitors. And that is the step we are currently working on. It will be available for all visitors because they have to go through the safety training as well. After that, we will do the part for our subcontractors, which is very complex because we have to upload the training documentation, etc. It will be time-consuming, but it will, I think, be much more efficient than we are right now. You know how it goes with the documentation and the training: “Does this man have this or this or this?” And now we will not have that because we have everything in one place. We even have the green light next to the people who went through all the training and have all the documentation. If they are green – they can get in.
After that, we plan to use it as our onboarding tool for new employees since safety is mandatory for all newcomers. We can also implement other things, like mentoring and handover meetings with relevant colleagues, so we are looking in that direction. This is the beauty of it. The platform is 100% customizable, and we can do whatever we want with it. Our business needs onboarding. Fine. We’ll do onboarding in the next six months. So that’s how we do it according to the business needs.
“This is the beauty of it. The platform is 100% customizable, and we can adapt it to meet any business need.”
Enterprise companies often purchase and implement tools that really can’t support their business and their process in the best way. So what they do is instead of looking for flexibility to customize and adjust to their needs, they actually try to fit their processes into what’s already there, right? So that’s kind of why you went with the flexibility and the ability to really edit the platform to support you in the best way.
Another thing could be that the global LMS solutions don’t necessarily support local languages, especially, you know, the smaller ones with smaller populations, such as Serbian. It’s a big question whether or not the cost-benefit would justify if they used such a solution.
Ana: Thank you. You mentioned you had an excellent relationship with our team. I know you wanted to emphasize that part and the whole collaboration process. Is there anything in particular you could single out or anybody in particular that you wanted to give a shout-out to?
Nikola: Of course! Ivana is the project manager, and I love working with her. She’s 100% in the project. She is there with us through thick and thin. So when it’s good, we celebrate together. When it’s hard, we push together. So, as I said, we work as one team, and she’s really great!
This interview took place during the HR Week in November 2024 between:
Ana Pegan, a Product Manager at BridgewaterLabs, and
Nikola Spasojevic, Learning and Development, Recruitment, and HR Project Manager in Lafarge Serbia
