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Welcome to the era of the connected worker

Your employees order dinner, pay their bills and run their whole lives from their phones. Then they show up at work, and the schedule is pinned to a bulletin board, the pay stub is on paper and procedures are gathering dust in a binder.

That's the takeaway at the heart of the webinar “Welcome to the era of the connected worker”, presented on October 21, 2026 by Caroline Ouellet, CRHA, PCC Coach, OHS-HR Lead and Partner at BRIX, et Stéphane Morin, Sales Director at Folks RH.

Most HR software is designed for 15 to 20% of the workforce: the people who work in an office. Everyone else is a frontline worker with no desk and no computer, on job sites, in plants, mines and distribution centres, or behind the wheel of a truck.

And to the classic objection, “my crew will never open another app”, the BRIX × Folks duo has a simple answer: the pay stub. Every pay period, it lands in BRIX. That's the concrete reason to open the app every week, and once inside, employees also find their training, news and resources.

Millennials and Gen Z: instant is the new normal

As of July 1, 2023, millennials became the largest generation in Canada, ahead of baby boomers, and Gen Z moved up to third place (Statistics Canada). In Québec, boomers are still the largest group, which means a lot of retirements and a lot of know-how to pass on to the next generation.

On job sites, in plants and in mines, this next generation grew up with a phone in hand: according to data presented in the webinar, 96% of 18- to 24-year-olds own one.

So at work, they expect the same thing as everywhere else: accessible information, fast answers and simple tools. Waiting three days for an answer from HR or digging through a binder for a procedure makes no sense to them.

Stéphane Morin adds a nuance: no tech training needed, these workers already know how to use their phones. But if the app is complicated, it'll be forgotten fast. Technology has to adapt to the worker, not the other way around.

A retention issue… and a safety issue

An employee without access to information feels left out, and an employee who feels left out eventually leaves. Safety is on the line too.

In Québec, 21,960 workplace injuries were recorded among workers aged 29 and under in 2023 (ISQ, CNESST data). And regardless of age, workers in their first month on the job are three times more likely to suffer a lost-time injury than those with more than a year of seniority (Institute for Work & Health).

Having access to training, documentation and prevention guidelines from day 1, right on your phone, changes everything. The phone becomes a prevention tool instead of a distraction.

Folks RH : the HR source of truth

Folks RH is an all-in-one HR software developed in Québec and built for Canadian SMBs. It covers the entire employee lifecycle in a single platform: recruiting, HR management (employee files, onboarding, performance, workplace accident tracking) and payroll compliant with Québec and Canadian rules.

For HR teams, it's the end of scattered Excel files and double data entry. Folks also stands out for compliance: SOC 2 Type 2 certification, data hosted in Canada and granular access control, a real asset in the age of Québec's Law 25.

As Stéphane Morin pointed out, tools like Folks represent years of research and development and the expertise of customers who share their needs every day. That's a much stronger foundation than building everything in-house.

BRIX: the gateway to the field

BRIX is a mobile app from Québec built to communicate with, train and engage frontline workers. Born from years of experience in construction, it's designed for frontline workers in construction, manufacturing, transportation, mining and distribution.

BRIX Connect: the right information for the right person

Nobody opens the intranet when they wake up. They open their phone.

BRIX Connect puts employees in a news feed that looks like what they already know, with communications targeted by group, role or site: the office employee doesn't get the memo about ladder training. Add to that a chat, a directory, event management and a resource space for procedures and safety sheets.

BRIX Train & Engage: learn anywhere, get recognized

At BRIX, training is built as 3- to 5-minute micro-modules. It's the format the next generation already consumes every day, a far cry from 45-minute or 3-hour classroom sessions.

With BRIX Train & Engage, employees take a micro-training on their phone right before a task or after an incident, and find the information the moment they need it. Companies also create their own modules (video, PDF, quiz, SCORM), and skill cards are tracked along with their expiry dates. Gamification lets workers earn points for completed training and safety wins.

BRIX × Folks: two tools, one employee experience

No single solution does it all. Stéphane Morin put it in a way everyone recognizes: the kitchen drawer stuffed with tangled tools.

The answer isn't a giant do-everything platform or a homegrown app coded in a hurry, but specialized tools that talk to each other.

Folks is the source of truth, BRIX is the gateway to the field. Le parcours se fait naturellement :

What the integration does today, concretely: employee sync and pay stub delivery. Transferring other documents from Folks to BRIX isn't automatic yet, but it can be looked at case by case. The two solutions can also be adopted separately.