Fletcher Construction unleashes people potential with workplace training

Fletcher Construction Company General Manager Engineering, Graham Darlow, is unequivocal about the value of foundation skills training for employees at the lowest level of his organisation. Raise their ability to read, write and do maths, he says, and be amazed by the results.

"I don’t really care how lean and mean or otherwise an organisation is. If I became general manager, director or business mentor of another organisation, this work would be an area I’d look at. I’d persuade the manager to spend some money on it. Because there’s a benefit that way exceeds the cost."

Read on for a deeper insight into Graham’s 3-year journey overseeing a foundation skills training project that’s now become part of the company’s everyday approach to doing business.

• Overview
• Assessing our needs
• Implementing a response
• Measuring the outcome
• Improving for the future
• Top tips
• Employees tell their story
• Graduation ceremony
• Any questions?

Overview

Fletcher Construction Company (Fletcher) is boosting the reading, writing and maths skills of up to 60 employees a year with BOOST, a new foundation skills training programme.

Who is Fletcher Construction?

Fletcher, one of the country’s biggest general contractors in New Zealand and the South Pacific, employs around 2,500 people across its various operations, with more than 800 working in its engineering division.

How was their training run?

Firstly, employees are selected and assessed. Next they attend weekly lessons on site, during work time, at the company’s expense. Lessons cover reading, writing and maths used in the workplace and in everyday life.

Trainees and their managers get together at the programme’s start and finish to share information, build morale and celebrate success.

What were their key outcomes?

Employees use the training to get unit standards, become more competent at work and move up the company ladder to leadership positions. Many become more confident talking to colleagues and managers, presenting to large groups and helping their children complete homework.

The company, meanwhile, is slowly improving the quality and efficiency of its services. Managers are promoting more labourers into leadership roles. Employees are safer at work. Teamwork is improving too.

Assessing our needs

Starting out

We knew we had a whole lot of fantastic people working for us, who potentially could be promoted to leading hands, foremen and superintendents. But their lack of education meant that they would probably never make it.

We knew that we had a dramatic shortage of workplace leaders and we knew that the best place to find those people was within our own organisation.

These were the fundamental reasons behind our decision to implement a reading, writing and maths training programme.

Improving the bottom line

Improving the reading, writing and maths skills of our employees is great for our bottom line. It links to our broader aim of achieving sustainable earnings over a long period of time, it gives us growth.

The majority of the people we targeted (and still do) were not that well educated. They were people who didn’t really understand the value of education in their teenage years. Yet they were very often people whose roles demand leadership of some kind.

To get things built, you need teams of people. For teams to operate in an efficient way, they have to be well led. Leaders must be able to plan and organise.

We find team leadership is best done by people who have ‘come off the tools’. But, if you can’t fill out a supervisor’s form or you can’t multiply, add, subtract and divide in terms of dimensions, then you’re never going to be anything more than a labourer.

We could see other benefits that would by far exceed the reading and maths training itself - things like building someone’s self-confidence, self-esteem and effectiveness as a leader.

In the workforce you need people with high self-esteem and confidence. It helps them operate efficiently, take responsibility and be accountable.

Implementing a response

Getting help

We’ve run two reading, writing and maths improvement programmes. Both were run by our former training provider Sadler and Associates (Sadlers), who’ve been great. (Fletcher is now working with training provider Literacy Aotearoa).

Our Sadlers trainer was extremely good. He was a former primary school teacher who was very down to earth, very practical and who developed a very good rapport with our trainees, particularly our Māori and Pacific Island people.

Trainees would come back to the workplace and say: ‘I’m really loving this programme. The guy who teaches us is fantastic.’ It was good feedback for their direct managers (superintendents) to see and hear.

Spreading the word

Committing to making programmes work well from the start is worth it. We decided to take the time and make the effort to let people know what we were doing, how and why. Now there’s a whole tide of belief within the organisation. But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

We had initial opposition from our superintendents, who tended to think training was a waste of time.

They could see that for 1 to 3 days a week they were going to lose a person for an hour at a time. That was a huge part of their reluctance.

The superintendents and foremen are the ultimate leaders of our trainees. They are intelligent, practically-minded people who need proof before they change their belief. They’ve been central to the overall success of the training.

In the end, it was going to happen whether they agreed with it or not. And quite quickly they came around. They could see the success of the trainees and that was what counted.

Getting buy-in from senior management wasn’t so crucial. Here, the management team tends to let you get on with things. They’re interested in results.

We have a big regular forum where everybody comes together twice a year (it’s very large, with hundreds of people attending).

I got some of my team to give a presentation on what we’d done, why we’d done it, what the metrics and evidence showed and so on. They drew on a couple of the individual’s stories too.

It was very well received. Now the programme is part of our business-as-usual – it’s mainstream.

Making it work

We started this work in 2007, with our first pilot course.

A factor that made a difference was having people on the project (at Fletcher) who were utterly committed to it and making it work.

One of our stars was a site superintendent. The other was a talented personal assistant (PA). They were the sort of people who were outgoing, persuasive, gregarious types.

Our site superintendent got right in behind the programme. He, like me, could see the benefits without first needing to see the proof. He did a great job of presenting the programme’s benefits and data to others within the organisation.

Our PA was great at following up trainees. She knew how to rattle the cages of the young guys. She’d chase them if they’d missed a class. Or, if there was an early start, she’d ring them the night before and say: ‘You haven’t forgotten tomorrow, you’ve got to be at such-and-such a place, at such-and-such a time.’ She was that kind of person.

Both people could see the personal and professional benefit in making it a success. They could see it had the potential to rub off positively on them and improve their standing in my eyes and in the eyes of the organisation. And it paid off. They proved their worth and received significant promotions and better money.

To put some extra weight behind things, to make the programme seem worthwhile and to show our people we meant business, I went and talked to trainees about the programme.

It was great. It meant I got to know the individuals. We had shared breakfasts as the programme got under way and at its conclusion. We still do. We also have award ceremonies. The idea of both is to keep everyone motivated and engaged and it furthers my relationship with the trainees.

Developing a training model

To date, we’ve put about 30 to 40 people through the programme – from young people to people in their 40s.

The first course involved 10 employees (for 2 hours a week up to a total of 40 hours). Participants were grouped according to their needs and took part in training in work time.

A typical trainee in that first course would have been a 28-year-old Māori or Pākehā male, with about 3 years’ experience with Fletcher in a labouring role.

Sadlers specially designed a literacy needs assessment tool, drawing on workplace texts and activities.

They assessed course participants and set up a control group (as a way to gather comparative data). Eventually, our control group went on to complete the programme too.

Sadlers used the assessment results to develop the programme with our input. We wanted the course to give employees the reading, writing, speaking and maths skills they needed to become leaders, be promoted to the role of foreman or supervisor, work and complete work alone and keep on task.

Our second course had similar aims, a similar set-up and focused on workplace numeracy and vocabulary skills, health and safety, completing relevant unit standards and form-filling.

The Sadlers classroom exercises were based around everyday things like filling out an application for a bank account, as well as things relevant to the workplace.

I was surprised at how willing people were to get into the programme. I don’t know if we can put it down to selling the programme well or whether people were genuinely aware of their own shortcomings and thought this was their opportunity to learn something they should have learned at school.

Measuring the outcome

Reflecting on the data

At the end of the initial pilot (in November 2007), most participants completed between two and three unit standards and rated the course highly at 5.3 (on a scale of 1 to 6, where 6 is the highest).

Their attitudes towards their work, their confidence and their interest in training improved. Assessment data showed a measurable improvement in reading and writing.

Research data from the second course, meanwhile, showed it wasn’t rated as highly by participants (mostly due to the perception it was too easy) but showed improvements in reading and writing all the same. Self-assessments showed participants thought the course improved their skills across the board – in reading, spelling, writing and maths.

Listening to our people

The proof for me, though, was found in other things - the first-hand experiences of our participants for one.

I went along to one of the shared breakfasts and found people were reading the newspaper. For some it was the first time they’d ever done that. They’d never picked up a paper until going on the course.

That was an amazing moment for me to be honest. I mean, no-one was saying: ‘Hey, you better read the paper. The boss is coming.’ That, for me, was evidence.

Another guy stood up at the gathering and said: ‘This is the first time in my life I’ve ever received a certificate.’

He had this massive grin on his face as he said it. Then he raised the certificate above his head to really make the point. It was very moving. We took a photo of him and he appeared in our company magazine. He was probably 19 or 20. He’d been right through the education system and never once received a certificate in his entire education. I couldn’t believe it.

I’ve also seen young, shy teenage boys who can’t make eye contact develop into young men who can read and write with this work. It’s meant they can now stand up proud, talk to you face-to-face, make eye contact, joke with you. I’m talking quite dramatic changes in appearance and conduct.

It was pretty evident to me that these guys were getting a hell of a lot more out of the programme than just being able to read and write.

Improving for the future

Embedding change

Our aim now is to put about 60 people through the programme every year. It’s a good rate, one that enables us to bear the cost of taking people away from the workplace. After 10 years, we’ll suddenly find we’ve trained 600 people out of a division of 800.

We are looking at employing our own trainer, rather than going through consultants. It seems sensible. It’ll mean we can keep the programme running a lot longer for less cost, in a more effective way.

My big concern is to ensure our trainer is able to keep abreast of what’s happening in literacy, language and numeracy. We want to keep them linked in to that body of knowledge at a national level. I’m certainly not in favour of becoming our own ship that sails off over the horizon and misses out on the ever-changing teaching and learning evidence base.

Making it sustainable

To get to this point, we’ve used mostly government funding provided through the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC).

Over time, we’ve funded it more and more ourselves through the Fletcher Building Education Fund. Fund earnings go towards the education and training of all employees and their families.

We haven’t done an extensive cost-benefit analysis of the programme. But I’m certain we get a large payback. Higher productivity, higher employee engagement, reduced turnover, lower recruitment costs and better leadership are some of the benefits. Our business turns over $400 million a year, so the gains far outweigh the costs.

Taking stock

I’d guess most organisations underestimate the detrimental effect of having workers who can’t read, write and do maths.

Some might look at us and think: ‘Oh, they’re a big fat corporate that can afford a programme like this and we’re a sharp organisation and we can’t.’

I don’t really care how lean and mean or otherwise an organisation is. If I became general manager, director or business mentor of another organisation, this work would be an area I’d look at. I’d persuade the manager to spend some money on it. Because there’s a benefit that way exceeds the cost.

I’d say anything we can do as a company to improve workforce quality has got to be good for the nation, good for productivity and good for a whole lot of other things.

I’d also say that – thanks to the success of the past few years – we’re picking up people who’re ideal for the training but who might’ve gone unnoticed. Nowadays, people say: ‘Hey, I’ve heard about this programme. How do I get on it? Because I don’t reckon I’m very good at reading or writing. Or I think I might be dyslexic or something.’

We’ve also got foremen and superintendents saying: ‘Hey, this guy’s really good. But I don’t think he’s up to the job yet because of his reading and writing. I’m worried because these things are a really important part of being safe.’

The experience of the past few years has also encouraged us to make other important changes to what we do.

We’ve decided to try to simplify and improve our health and safety information by introducing more diagrams and pictures. It’ll take a massive amount of work. We realise you can’t do everything at once.

We’ve also reflected on other aspects of our health and safety practices like how we communicate. We’re pretty good with our employees who speak English as a second language. We identify them easily for starters.

What trips us up is ensuring the Pākehā boy, who’s smart and articulate but who can’t read, knows everything he needs to know. In many ways he’s less visible.

That’s why I’d caution other businesses by saying there’s possibly a whole lot of people working for you who can’t read, write and do maths. But you don’t know they exist.

Top tips

1. Know there are a whole lot of people who can’t read, write and do maths – there are many more than you think.
2. Improving reading, writing and maths skills will bring a variety of benefits to your organisation – beyond an individual or group being able to do their jobs a little bit better.
3. Get buy-in from the people who manage and supervise trainees.
4. Be very selective in who you choose (inside the organisation) to run your training programme and, in turn, support them with training.
5. Share your story. Tell your own people what you’ve done, why you’re doing it and what the results are.

Employees tell their story

We talk to Fletcher employees who explain how workplace literacy training has helped them.

Employee case studies

Graduation ceremony

Read about a BOOST graduation ceremony.

Any questions?

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