Lights! Camera! Building service contractor (BSC) training!

Hooray for Hollywood and for Xemana, a California-based company and BSCAI Affinity Partner that offers workplace training videos for the building maintenance industry that implement engaging storytelling techniques. Xemana (Spanish for “work week”) was founded by David Braun and David Lewine, two veterans of the TV and film industry who saw a need for delivering light comedy and drama in workplace education.

Braun has produced and financed film and TV projects for Disney, NBC, CBS and PBS. Earlier in his career, he managed a radio station in San Francisco where he produced broadcasts of the Monterey Jazz Festival for many years. For his part, Lewine has launched TV and home entertainment projects for Jane Fonda Fitness and Sandoz Pharmaceuticals over a 35-year career in media.

The co-founders have collaborated with experienced trainers and risk management managers from the building maintenance and services industry to deliver engaging and dramatic video courses that are available in English and Spanish.

The videos themselves are where Braun and Lewine’s true talents, honed from years in the entertainment industry, shine. Industrial training films, in general, can be dry and not very memorable. The two Davids treat each of their training videos as if they were mini-movies, employing professional actors who stand in as BSC employees. The “stories” these short films tell often dramatize the wrong way to do an assigned task and then the right way based on input from the client. The key is engagement. By making a training video entertaining, Braun and Lewine say the information being dispensed will be that much more memorable.  

Speaking directly to the BSCAI membership, Braun says, “This is about your people. We’re not training across other fields. This is for BSCs. David and I were amazed at how small some of these companies are. At the outset, we said, ‘Wait a minute. There is no software program that they’re generally using. There’s no leader in the field.’ That’s not to say there’s no competition. There is just no one up there like a Salesforce that has 20% of the market.”

“I think we got a tiger by the tail!” Lewine says. “We found that numerous companies in this industry were either a) too small to offer training or b) had an empty toolkit when it came to training.”

Xemana’s easily accessible desktop and mobile-based application offers video training courses under 10 minutes each. The company’s research shows that workers retain as much as 95% of a message when they watch it on video.

“I’m not a techy,” Braun says. “I had to learn all of this stuff myself. We wanted to make this desktop and app easy to use, one that’s right at their fingertips and very much a needed product. If there is an accident and somebody comes after you and you can’t show that you trained this person, you’re in big trouble.”

He believes a lot of the BSC companies “woke up” when the COVID-19 pandemic hit with the cost of turnover becoming a bigger number than before. At a recent convention, he recalls hearing a piece of counsel from an industry leader that really drove this point home: “If I lose a worker I’ve had for more than six months, the person I hire to replace them won’t be that productive for months and may not even stay long enough to reach the former employee’s level of productivity.”

With Xemana’s training platform, owners and managers onboard employees into a personalized dashboard and assign various courses to their profile. Xemana can also craft video content as part of a continuous learning program that reinforces safety awareness amongst existing frontline workers. The training content goes to a worker’s phone in the form of a text that can indeed be downloaded and completed in a matter of minutes.

Lewine concludes, “It’s taken some time, but we’ve come up with something that really works for that smaller company,” he says. “For the bigger company with an HR department and a brand, we can now integrate and customize. We’re talking to a company now that has a big franchise side, and they really want to make their brand impactful enough that a potential franchisee says, ‘Yeah, I can give these guys a piece of my revenue, because look at what I’m getting.’ We can now integrate the kind of training they have. And when we build new videos, we can make sure we cover what they want covered. We got it covered!”

For a sample video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) of Xemana’s entertaining training content, click here.

Xemana is a BSCAI Affinity Partner.