Accor Hotels takes workplace literacy training in-house

In this case study Accor Hotels Learning and Development Manager, Nykkie Gibson, talks about Accor’s Skills Communication Programme — a year-long pilot programme rolled out in 2010.

"I believe there’s plenty to gain from having all our staff really proficient in reading, writing, maths and oral communication. They’re the basic building blocks to any job and any career."

• Overview
• Assessing our needs
• Implementing a response
• Measuring the outcome
• Improving for the future
• Top tips
• Any questions?

Overview

Who is Accor Hotels?

Accor Hotels (Accor) is an international hotel company with 27 hotels in New Zealand and more than 1,500 New Zealand-based employees. Accor is the largest operating hotel management in New Zealand and is a global group with 4,200 hotels across 90 countries.

Nearly 40% of employees speak English as a second language. They range from room attendants, housekeepers, porters and food and beverage attendants to kitchen hands, cooks, administrators, supervisors and managers.

How do they run their training?

Accor started out small with a year-long pilot programme for 20 Auckland-based employees in August 2010.

Employees were paired up (according to their literacy needs) and tutored by an experienced Workbase literacy tutor for an hour a week on site, in paid company time.

What did they expect to gain?

Managers wanted a better understanding of the company’s literacy issues before looking for a long-term solution — opting for a year-long pilot programme as a first step.

They wanted to understand if poor literacy and numeracy skills had an impact on business units’ bottom line and overall productivity.

They wanted to know if workplace literacy training was a good training solution for Accor’s large number of migrant employees. Did they actually need strong foundation skills to do their jobs well? Or could they perform just as well without training?

These were the questions they wanted to answer before making a long-term commitment to literacy training.

What were their key outcomes?

Accor managers found poor literacy and numeracy skills were an issue in the hotel group, particularly among migrant employees.

They also found literacy issues had an impact on the company’s bottom line and overall performance.

Employees with poor literacy and numeracy skills struggled to understand basic health and safety procedures, potentially affecting the company’s safety record and increasing company risk.

Some were unable to fill out timesheets accurately, skewing company data. Others found reading a roster too challenging – arriving late to work or failing to turn up at all.

The pilot showed literacy training could address these issues, while at the same time improve employee engagement and confidence.

It also gave managers the information and experience they needed to develop a long-term, sustainable approach to workplace literacy training.

Assessing our needs

Starting out

It’s taken a year to understand our literacy needs and the value of workplace literacy training for our business.

We’ve needed that time to assess the skills of staff, get buy-in from managers, set up training, trial it and collect data.

Overall, we’ve found poor literacy and numeracy is more widespread than we’d originally thought and it is a risk for our company.

Initially we doubted it was a big deal. We felt our people probably didn’t need high levels of literacy to do their jobs well.

But the results from our early assessment of speaking, listening, reading, writing and maths skills made us realise yes, it is having an impact on productivity. It is an issue for Accor.

From the sample group of 20, we identified 2 employees who had significant difficulty with all tasks. Others were competent in some areas and not others. More than half struggled to understand complex instructions and information.

Overall we found low literacy and numeracy skills were influencing people’s ability to engage effectively with management, guests and other team members.

We found they had the potential to negatively impact the quality of our guest service and lead to health and safety issues.

Improving the bottom line

About 70% of our employees are resident New Zealanders and about 30% are employed from overseas — this latter group tend to speak English as a second language and come from South America, Asia and Europe.

We enjoy the cultural diversity and commitment migrant staff bring to the workplace. However, they often struggle with verbal communication and understanding health, safety and legal jargon.

All Accor staff need to know how to identify a hazard and what to do if there is an accident. It poses a significant risk to our organisation to have people who can’t do this.

Implementing a response

Getting help

We employed Workbase to design a year-long training programme for three Auckland sites.

We started small (in April 2010) with just 20 employees (representing about 10% of employees across the three sites).

Our initial assessment clearly showed a big gap in people’s understanding of our health and safety information.

It became clear that even things we thought were pretty obvious — such as the headings in our manuals — challenged people.

A good cross-section of staff, from our Kiwi-born to our migrant employees, had no idea what the words ‘eliminate’, ‘isolate’ or ‘minimise’ meant. Yet, understanding this language is crucial to good health and safety practice.

In a hotel environment, you need your people to understand and follow instructions for safe operation of potentially dangerous equipment, be able to evacuate the building safely while taking care of the guests, and to report any incident or hazards that impact staff or guests.

Spreading the word

Our Director of Human Resources, Graeme Ham, and I were responsible for taking the early assessment results to our senior management team and getting their buy-in for setting up the pilot programme.

Our senior management team was quick to see the need for training. But many of our hotel general managers were sceptical. Getting their buy-in was more challenging.

Hotel managers found it hard to believe there was an issue. They couldn’t see it, for starters, and they generally felt the responsibility for solving the country’s adult literacy problem lay with secondary schools doing a better job.

We slowly changed their minds by sharing our literacy data with them and talking through the impact of poor literacy on Accor’s productivity, health and safety performance and so on.

For them, it was important to see exactly how the company’s operations were affected on a day-to-day basis. We needed to make it real for them.

Our Workbase trainers supported this approach by talking to hotel managers about how training would address the issues and – at the same time – improve the way we do things in the workplace.

They created an understanding that everyone could benefit from training in some way – the individual employee, his or her managers and the company as a whole.

Overall, I’d say our organisational awareness of workplace literacy is now starting to develop. It’s heartening and proof it takes time to understand the issues and what they mean for your business. You need to see and track real change before you can really buy into it.

Making it work

We called our pilot programme the Skills Communication Programme to avoid the stigma of poor literacy and highlight the value of training.

The name worked well. Our employees enjoyed being part of the programme, which was important.

It meant they talked about the programme favourably with others, they turned up on time and they committed to learning everything they could from their tutors.

Developing a training model

We offered training to everybody — despite the final number of people selected being quite small. We wanted to make sure everyone had an opportunity to put up their hands and express interest.

Our early promotion recruited about 12 people, leaving eight spots to fill. Then we decided to go and shoulder-tap others.

Mostly we recruited people who spoke English as a second language across a range of age groups — we had people in their early 20s through to people in their 50s.

We had a hotel duty manager, a regional office finance person, a couple of chefs, a few room attendants, receptionists, an executive housekeeper, a couple of supervisors, a sales person. It was a great cross-section of people.

Trainees were tutored by a Workbase tutor in pairs for an hour every week. We paired people up according to their key areas of need. Everyone was paid to attend.

Some groups looked at workplace documentation. Others focused on email communication. For others, the issue was verbal communication, which meant they needed to practise speech patterns and so on. It was really dependent on what each trainee’s particular needs were.

One of the biggest challenges was to set up training times and dates that worked for everyone – the business, employees and so on. Incorporating training into weekly rosters and taking illness and holidays into account was tough.

These organisational and logistical things definitely make workplace training difficult for firms operating around the clock. But they can’t hold you back. You just have to be creative in how you tackle training. Starting small, for example, is one way to go.

Measuring the outcome

Reflecting on the data

We’ve yet to gather all the data on the success of our pilot programme. But — even without it — we’ve seen positive changes.

Our monthly reports show employee confidence and foundation skills are up. We’re getting positive feedback from managers. They say staff are more engaged in their work and able to operate at a higher, more sophisticated level at work.

We’ve had supervisors (of fairly senior staff involved in the programme) say the standard of written communication has jumped up. They say employees who attended training are better able to manage paperwork.

Listening to our people

From my perspective, one of the most significant things to come from literacy training is the increased staff engagement.

Trainees are more committed to their jobs and to performing well. In that sense it’s definitely helped our company meet its workforce development aims.

We also know our training has had a positive impact on people’s lives.

One of our trainees, for example, was going through the disciplinary process because she wasn’t turning up for work. Through training, however, we realised she couldn’t actually read the roster.

We’ve since asked the head of department to colour code the roster so the trainee could clearly identify when she was working a shift (it was colour coded red) and when she wasn’t (it was colour coded green).

These stories make you realise we’ve made some incredibly simple, yet important leaps ahead.

In the situation I just mentioned we were on the verge of losing someone really good and reliable – and we turned that situation around through such a tiny intervention.

Improving for the future

Embedding change

We have since employed two on-job trainers qualified in the National Certificate in Adult Literacy Education — which means we’re bringing the assessment and tutoring expertise in-house.

We’ve also updated our company training materials to make them easier to read and understand. But, mostly, we’re focused on using our new on-job trainers to give our people the one-on-one, tailored help they need to build up their foundation skills.

Making it sustainable

Our plan is to have more on-job trainers (our operation supervisors, for example) skilled in identifying and meeting the literacy and numeracy needs of the people they work alongside on a daily basis.

We’d also like to develop some top-quality training tools and resources — visual aids, for example, to help on-job trainers deliver good-quality training.

Our primary aim is to have employees learn reading, writing, maths and communications skills at the same time as they’re learning about tasks and concepts relevant to their roles.

One concept many new recruits struggle with is filling out a timesheet, using the 24-hour clock. So, we’d teach maths and writing skills at the same time as we’re teaching that individual to fill out his or her timesheet accurately.

Right now, though, we’re looking at the data from our pilot programme, together with some new assessment data we’ve gathered through our employee induction programme. Then we’ll decide what to do next.

In the short-to-medium term, I’d say it’s likely we’ll keep working with an external provider to offer literacy training to employees. We’d like to see training extended beyond the frontline, for example. And we will continue to work on our ability to deliver workplace literacy training internally, too.

Taking stock

Overall, we’re pleased with where we’ve got to in just 12 months. We’ve learned a lot. For example, we can see there’s plenty to gain from having all our staff (supervisors and managers, too) really proficient in reading, writing, maths and oral communication. They’re the basic building blocks to any job and any career.

We are more knowledgeable about how to make training like this work.

You need to put time into internal communication. It’s so important to keep talking to your people about how and why you’re investing time and resource into literacy training.

You need your own people’s buy-in to make these programmes work well and to make them sustainable over the longer term.

Taking things slowly is another approach that’s worked well for us. We looked at a lot of different options and a lot of different programmes early on. We definitely had the opportunity to jump ‘full on’ into training.

But, actually, looking back, I think it’s been really important for us to take our time and get a real understanding of workplace literacy training.

Top tips

1. Find out exactly how low level foundation skills affect your bottom line and company productivity.
2. Use the data to convince others about the importance of literacy training.
3. Don’t rush. Remember, good solutions take time to evolve.
4. See literacy training as a tool to unlock the potential of migrant employees.
5. Upskill your people to deliver training in-house and make it sustainable in the long term.

Any questions?

If you have a question about this case study, please send us an email.