Palmerston North City Council builds firm foundations for staff

In this case study, we talk to Palmerston North City Council's Human Resources Advisor, Larissa Ranford, about the Council’s Foundation Skills programme.

"To me, the key to making literacy training sustainable is to remain open to constant change and improvement."

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

Overview

Palmerston North City Council is investing in workplace literacy training to improve the quality of the city’s most essential services and boost the skills of the employees who provide them.

Who is Palmerston North City Council?

Nearly 200 staff in the Council’s service delivery unit, City Enterprises, look after buildings, roads, parks, sports grounds and rubbish and recycling – vital services the community can’t do without.

What did they expect to gain?

Yet many staff need help to improve the basic reading, writing, maths and communication skills they need to do their work, complete industry qualifications and progress in their careers.

That’s why the Council embarked on its first-ever workplace literacy training course in 2009 and has gone on to develop three more under the broader title of the Foundation Skills programme.

What were their key outcomes?

In 2009, more than 20 City Enterprises employees graduated from the Council’s inaugural course, getting the foundation skills they needed to complete industry qualifications and develop their careers.

By the end of 2010, another 40 employees graduated from four separate Foundation Skills courses. This time many graduates picked up skills in leadership too.

Assessing our needs

Starting out

Our primary aim was to develop a training programme that would help staff in our City Enterprises unit get the industry qualifications they needed to progress in their careers and move up the pay scale.

City Enterprises provide some of the city’s most essential services, including the city’s buildings, roads, parks, sports grounds and rubbish and recycling.

But we soon began to see the wider potential of this work and a single class became the four classes that sit under the Foundation Skills banner today.

Improving the bottom line

The strategic vision of Palmerston North City Council is to be seen as a vibrant, caring, creative and sustainable city. We are also strongly committed to being financially responsible and having residents who feel they get value from their rates.

We can achieve that – in part – by upskilling our staff and by offering high-quality professional services through a well-qualified, skilled and motivated workforce.

So, you can see that workplace literacy training fits well with this direction and our overall vision.

Implementing a response

Getting help

One of the first things we did was look for a literacy provider. We decided on Literacy Training Limited because they had worked with organisations similar to ours and came with good recommendations.

They were also prepared to come up with a programme suited to our specific needs – which was a plus.

Their first step was to carry out a needs assessment of nearly 50 staff, many of whom speak English as a second language or left school with no or very few qualifications.

Our results revealed that, like most organisations, we had a range of abilities and varying levels of confidence in our reading, writing, maths and oral communication skills.

We found pretty much everyone could do with some kind of literacy and numeracy support.

Our next step was to approach our City Enterprises Management Team with a proposal to develop a training programme and to work out how to fund it.

As part of our consultation phase, we gathered a lot of ideas about what a good training programme would look like from managers and staff.

Their ideas were invaluable really. They helped us work out how to make the training fit with people’s workloads, they encouraged us to change training venues and helped us settle on a name for the programme.

In the end, we changed from calling it a literacy programme to the Foundation Skills programme. We wanted to avoid any negative connotations associated with low literacy and make people feel more comfortable taking part.

We successfully applied for Tertiary Education Commission funding to cover 40 hours of training per person and have since worked out a good rate with our provider to cover additional hours of teaching. The Council pays employees to attend training and provides the training venue (a local community facility – right next to the Council depot).

Spreading the word

We were really thorough about communicating about Foundation Skills – wanting to make it a two-way process. We let people know what we were doing and asked staff and management to tell us what they thought about the programme.

We talked about training at unit and section meeting presentations. We attached notes to pay slips and we asked supervisors to shoulder-tap people they thought would be interested in training.

We focused time and effort on keeping our senior management and our chief executive well informed and, as a result, continue to receive their strong support.

We have an Operations Learning and Development Steering Group made up of staff, management and union representatives. Tapping into this group was another good way to keep everyone informed and communication open.

They’ve helped improve our wage review process, which now takes Foundation Skills training into account as part of the performance review process.

I’m working with the unions on the possibility of linking workplace literacy training to a programme they run through workplace learning representatives.

Our unions include the Central Amalgamated Workers Union, the New Zealand Building Trades Union and the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union.

Supervisors play a major role in the success of Foundation Skills. They take part in the steering group, oversee employees’ training and development and develop future leaders. So they have an important stake in its success and making it work on a day-to-day basis.

We’re pleased with our approach so far. The programme now has a really high profile and people see it as a core part of business as usual.

Making it work

Making any training programme work doesn’t come without its challenges – and we’ve had a couple to solve.

Early on, our key challenge was attendance. Trainees sometimes felt reluctant to take part in training. Maybe people in their gang felt annoyed at them for taking a couple of hours off – that kind of thing was a barrier.

To change this attitude, we had managers speak to staff about the value of Foundation Skills, emphasising that training is work.

Also, after the success of our first year, we decided to use the programme to redevelop our in-house Job Coordinator Training programme, which we hadn’t run in a few years.

We used our same provider to plan the lessons and incorporate literacy, numeracy and communication learning into the programme.

We saw it as an opportunity to develop the managerial and leadership skills of our job coordinators and aspiring job coordinators, as we developed their literacy and numeracy skills.

We also saw it as an opportunity to help prepare people for the roles themselves – much like succession planning.

By our second year, we had 24 staff take part in training, half were already job coordinators and half were aspiring job coordinators. Now we’ve got a waiting list for the training because it’s been so popular.

We continue to develop Foundation Skills in response to feedback from the people taking part and from their managers.

In that way it’s always changing, always fresh and continues to get buy-in from staff and management.

We recently set up a peer support group. It has representatives from each class, as well as representatives from management – the group’s role is to provide feedback and help continuously improve the programme.

Developing a training model

The four Foundation Skills courses:

1. The first Foundation Skills course is what we call the core group course. It teaches basic reading, writing, maths and oral communication in the workplace.

   It is also for our people who need help communicating effectively such as employees who speak English as a second language. We’ve got 10 people enrolled this year.

2. The second course is for people who need to improve their basic literacy skills to achieve the national certificates within their chosen industry. This is the first course we ran.

   It runs for two hours, where the first hour is spent on literacy, numeracy and study skills and the second hour is for people to work on their own study. In 2009, 23 people successfully completed this course and went on to finish industry qualifications. This year 14 people are doing it.

3. The third course is a leadership support group for future (or aspiring) job coordinators. It features literacy and numeracy – as well as communication and leadership training. We’ve got 19 people in this course.

4. The last course is for job coordinators – the majority of whom are older workers. We aim to build up their leadership, literacy, numeracy and communication skills, while still respecting their skills and experience in the job.

   We have 13 enrolled in this course this year.

We do have a big range of people involved in training – some are in more than one course. They vary in age, ethnicity and job type.

Measuring the outcome

Reflecting on the data

How do we measure the programme’s effectiveness? We look at how many staff are currently studying, as well as how many staff are completing a qualification.

Since starting Foundation Skills in 2009, we’ve had 42 staff pass or make good progress towards completing a national certificate. This compares favourably with previous years, when far fewer staff were successful in their studies.

Right now, we have had 15 staff complete their qualifications, while 27 are studying towards a qualification.

With the revamp of the programme this year, and the involvement of the staff in developing the programme, we now have more than 40 staff regularly attending Foundation Skills training, with many working towards an industry qualification involved in the programme.

Our company data shows gains in reading, writing and maths, with the highest gain in ‘write to communicate,’ which is extremely important in our industry.

The target hasn’t quite been reached for ‘make sense of numbers to solve problems’. But we’re working on maths and hope to reach our target before the end of the year.

When we look at the learning data itself, we can clearly see people have improved their skills and knowledge across a range of learning (or literacy) strands, progressions and steps.

Meanwhile, staff who’ve taken part in training all point to specific aspects of their work that have improved. Often they say they are taking what they’ve learned home to their families and to their children – so there’s a positive spin-off for the wider community.

At the employer level, we see a lot of tangible, measurable results. For example, we’re seeing:

• less rework
• more staff bringing forward ideas
• increased confidence with written communication
• better quality written communication
• improved reading and maths skills
• improved problem solving
• better team work
• more employees working towards and completing national qualifications
• more employees making the move into leadership roles.

Listening to our people

A recent staff survey shows 35% of staff believe the programme is delivering more than what they expected and 65%  believe it is delivering what they expected.

Nobody believes it’s delivering less than expected. Everybody is getting something out of it.

Improving for the future

Embedding change

Right now, we’re keen to keep working with our peer review group to improve and build on the programme.

We’re also looking at providing more support to staff who speak English as a second language. We may even develop a class specifically for them.

We had someone suggest holding training outside work hours so family members can attend as well – it’s a big, bold idea. But these are the kinds of things we’re prepared to look at.

We’ve learned a lot about how to match training to the NZQA framework and to career development through this process. And we’d like to bring that knowledge and experience through into other parts of the Council.

Making it sustainable

To me, the key to making literacy training sustainable is to remain open to constant change and improvement.

You’ve got to make it relevant to your organisation – from staff and training participants themselves through to your managers and important stakeholders like the unions.

I’m really pleased with the various ways we’ve kept ideas and communication flowing. I think you’ve got to be prepared to act on and use the information you receive.

Taking stock

Of course you need to look at the data to work out if a training programme is worthwhile. I think our Council can be really pleased with how things are tracking.

But we’ve also solved some bigger issues and learned a lot about our organisation through this work.

We’ve learned how to develop a whole training programme and a series of courses targeted to meet specific needs. That’s something we couldn’t have done without input from unions, staff, managers, steering committees and so on.

We’re developing the leaders we’ll need for tomorrow and we’re improving the quality of services we provide, thanks to having better skilled, more motivated staff.

I think we’ve also sent a strong message to our staff that we believe in their professional development and genuinely want to see them succeed.

I listen to our employees to gauge the success of the workplace literacy training. To me, it’s their experience that counts.

Top tips

1. Be open to continuous change and improvement of your programme – that way it will stay fresh and last longer.
2. Make training relevant to your organisation by involving staff unions and staff themselves – it was key for our programme.
3. Use workplace literacy training to help employees gain industry qualifications and build their careers.
4. Help managers and employees buy in to workplace literacy training by making them understand that training is part of their work.
5. Don’t dismiss big, bold suggestions from staff – they could be the very things that will make a literacy training programme work well.

Employees tell their story

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

Employee case studies

Any questions?

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