Lift literacy for better business, says Ryman Healthcare

In this case study Ryman Healthcare's Projects Manager (Operations), Mary-Anne Stone, talks candidly about lifting the literacy skills of Ryman’s frontline employees through training. She traces the immediate benefits, as well as those they expect to see in the future thanks to improving company documentation and their referral processes.

"I’ve personally had feedback from employees saying the programme has changed their lives. Of course, no-one else can really take credit for that. They are the ones who have taken the opportunity they were presented with and that’s thrilling."

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

Overview

Ryman Healthcare executives agree that improving employees’ speaking, reading and writing skills has made a positive, qualitative difference to their business.

Who is Ryman Healthcare?

Ryman, a retirement living provider, has 21 villages, 4,000 residents and a workforce of more than 1,700 caregivers, cleaners, laundry employees, nurses and managers.

How do they run their training?

The company is running a foundation skills training programme for frontline employees across the country, using a one-to-one teaching approach.

What do they expect to gain?

The programme has resulted in good improvements in reading. Participants also say they feel more confident talking to managers, writing progress notes and understanding company policies and procedures.

Some note their ability to complete company paperwork has improved. Others say they’re better at talking with residents, taking phone orders and speaking English as a second language.

What are their key outcomes?

The programme itself is likely to finish by 2011. But Ryman managers say it has made a lasting impact on the business.

For example, the company will continue to identify and refer employees to external providers for help with reading, writing and maths. It will continue to work with external providers to make sure company documents are easily read and understood. Site training officers will continue to upskill in literacy education.

Assessing our needs

Starting out

We didn’t have a lot of in-depth knowledge about the speaking, reading, writing and maths skills of our 1,700 employees before starting out.

We were aware we had a very multi-cultural workforce with skills reflective of the lower end of the employment market. We knew verbal communication in the workplace was often difficult for many of our employees.

If we thought about it, we would have guessed the literacy skills of our workforce would’ve been lower than, say, those of the general population.

But we didn’t expect to find that the skills of most of our employees were lower than what was required to understand our written policies and procedures.

And we didn’t expect to find some of our training materials and internal documents were poorly designed in relation to our workforce literacy level.

Improving the bottom line

There were two key reasons Ryman Healthcare got involved with this work. The first was about improving quality and the other was about fulfilling our board’s interest in giving something back to our people.

We have always believed in the quality of our service and product. Our internal audit and external compliance data bear that out. Yet at the same time we believed there was room for improvement and we could see that by improving core workplace literacy skills we could make an impact on quality.

Also, our board decided it wanted to find initiatives that would give something back to employees. So, this work sat in that broader strategic context and, as such, was supported by our executive team and the key people at the top from the outset.

We could see other positive benefits too. We could see the potential for improving the way we attract and retain employees and our image as a positive employer and an employer of choice within our sector.

Implementing a response

Getting help

In 2008, we began working with the Horowhenua Learning Centre (HLC). They’re an experienced training provider, with experts who assessed a sample of our workforce.

They found a significant number had difficulty with reading, writing, listening, taking part in meetings and communicating orally.

They found 20% of caregivers, for example, didn’t have the reading and writing skills they needed to do their job. It was quite an eye-opener.

Data showed employees also had difficulty filling out our incident reports, progress notes and understanding some of the words and terms we used in our workplace documentation.

Given the assessment results, Ryman committed to developing a foundation skills training programme called Upskill Yourself, which involved more than 150 employees across 15 different sites.

It was designed to give each participant about 40 hours of one-to-one tuition over the course of a year.

We worked with HLC to customise training materials using our own documents, forms and policies to ensure employees felt the immediate relevance of the training they received.

HLC also coordinated a national network of sub-contracted providers in every geographical location to deliver our training programme for us.

At the same time, we used the feedback from HLC and other literacy providers to update our induction and internal training materials to make sure the language we used was pitched at the right level and everything was presented in a more visual way.

My advice would be to talk to someone else, another business, with experience working with providers and implementing a programme like this. Checking out all the related resources is a good idea too.

Spreading the word

We recruited employees into the programme through posters, newsletters, manager talks, one-on-one meetings and so on. We found the multi-pronged approach to be a good one. I wouldn’t say that one approach worked best. Instead, I think you need to recruit people using a range of tools.

We wanted employees to see it was free (in monetary terms), voluntary and for people keen to improve their reading, writing, communication and problem-solving skills.

But it also required commitment on their part, too. They had to do half the course in work time (on full pay) and the other half in their own time (unpaid), which meant they needed to come in before or after their shift and/or on their days off.

A typical participant was a 45-year-old female caregiver who had worked with us for about 2 or 3 years.

We sold the benefits of increased personal and workplace confidence, improved workplace safety and customer service.

The evaluative data found we’d done a good job across the organisation overall and that employees had a pretty good idea of what they signed up for.

The data also gave us an interesting insight into the initial expectations of our employees. Most of all they wanted to improve their English. By the end of the course, though, they rated ‘get new skills for my job’ and ‘do my job better’ as the top two outcomes.

Making it work

My role involved deciding how the training model would run within our organisation – that’s something all businesses need to take account of from the outset. This role takes time and a significant investment that’s easy to underestimate.

Every business will need to figure out how to refer and bring people into the programme, how to alter the timetable to allow employees to attend training, how to adjust business processes to make it work, what they need to communicate with managers in terms of running shifts and so on.

It was also my role to keep our executive team appraised through project reports. My reports focused on operational issues mostly (as opposed to benefits and outcomes). That’s because, with so many significant changes going on in the wider employment market at the time, it was impossible to draw conclusions about any possible impact on bigger strategic topics such as retention.

We could measure hours of training provided within the programme, and what the focus had been, but it was difficult to make the jump from that to improved retention, satisfaction or quality.

Developing a training model

The Upskill Yourself model had several strengths.

The training model was a one-to-one teaching model, which meant teaching was tailored to suit an individual’s needs. Everyone received an individual learning plan that set out what they needed to learn and tracked their progress.

It also drew from a lot of our organisational documents, as well as our in-house computer programme (called V-Care) – making it relevant to the workplace.

Participants reinforced what they learned on site with homework exercises that tended to focus on reading or computer skills. Homework was followed up at the next session.

These were all good things. The downside is that it’s a very expensive model to maintain.

Measuring the outcome

Reflecting on the data

We are in the process of evaluating the impact of Upskill Yourself using data we received from independent researchers and anecdotal evidence gathered from programme participants and their managers.

We imagine that the data and evidence will tell us a lot about the programme and its impact on individuals and aspects of our business operation.

But it’s hard to imagine the data will provide the information we need to draw conclusions about any possible impact on bigger strategic topics such as retention and recruitment. In part, that’s because we’ve got several different organisational programmes all running at the same time – and the environment has changed so much during the course of this programme.

We know from the data that programme participants rated the programme highly – most rated it 5.5 on a scale of 1 to 6, where 6 is the highest. Managers (who were surveyed) were pleased too.

Tests showed improvements in reading scores among participants, but little effect on writing scores. The majority of participants said they were reading more and a little more than half said they were writing more.

Comments from participants showed they felt more confident about talking to their manager, writing progress notes and understanding company policies and procedures.

Some felt their ability to complete company paperwork had improved. Others noted improved communication with residents, taking phone orders and overall pronunciation.

Meanwhile, manager assessments showed participants’ English speaking and writing had come along in ‘leaps and bounds’, while others had gained valuable computer skills and were quicker at solving problems.

One participant had this to say about the new way they related to family and friends: ‘Talking to my son [who is at polytech] am not afraid to try and help him with things.’

Listening to our people

We know from individual examples that this programme has had an impact on the rate at which employees are upskilling and gaining the industry certificates they need to progress in their careers. That’s an important target.

In the meantime, I’ve personally had feedback from employees saying the programme has changed their lives. Of course, no-one else can really take credit for that. They are the ones who have taken the opportunity they were presented with and that’s thrilling.

Their comments show the feeling behind the programme and represent some of the positive feedback we’ve had from some participants. The training has been really quite major in their lives.

I know of a key worker stuck at the bottom of the pay scale who used the training to get her national certificates. She’d been with us for a long time and felt slightly offside with work. She wasn’t fully engaged.

Since completing the programme (and her national certificates), she’s had two significant pay increases, has more responsibility at work and has turned herself around. All this in 9 months!

She was so grateful for the opportunity that she sent me a card saying the programme had changed her life and made her dreams come true.

That’s just one example. Another employee, upon hearing about the programme, revealed she wasn’t literate and had major learning disabilities that she’d always kept hidden. It was very emotional for her. And, in spite of past difficulties, she went on to complete the programme, achieving a major life milestone.

Yet another employee, a woman from the Pacific Islands, used the programme to complete her industry qualifications and win a ‘best learner’ award from the national certificate provider.

Ryman hosted an awards ceremony and afternoon tea for her and her family. We made a real fuss. It was an incredibly proud moment for her and for our organisation.

Improving for the future

Embedding change

Overall, the programme has benefited us by giving us the information and practical experience we needed to improve and change some of our existing business policies, processes and documentation to better reflect the literacy level of our workforce.

We’ve reviewed our workplace materials (as mentioned) and we have changed our internal processes to formally identify people with literacy needs and ensure they receive support.

We have put processes in place to identify employees with speaking, reading and writing needs during the course of their duties. And it’s become the role of supervisors and managers to offer them the opportunity to participate in training.

A lot of the time, employees have poor reading and writing skills because they speak English as a second language. These people are much easier to come alongside and identify. It’s much harder to identify employees who have a learning disability or who have missed out on something crucial in their education.

Making it sustainable

Right now, we have a new contract with the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) until the end of 2010 to continue to purchase one-to-one training from a third party provider at each site.

It differs from the original Upskill Yourself model in that we hold the funding contract with TEC directly and manage the multiple provider sub-contracts ourselves. It removes a layer of administration and means we have had to internalise more of that cost – so more of government money is spent directly on training outcomes.

It builds on our experience to date and will enable us to see the project through to its natural end and embed what we’ve learned from the last few years.

We’re currently working out how we can sustain the momentum from Upskill Yourself within the company from 2011 onwards.

At this stage we imagine that the future shape of the project, now that we have a better understanding of our organisational needs and the government services and support available, is to have the right identification and referral processes in place so that we can refer our employees appropriately to externally-provided programmes funded by TEC.

Once our funding is used, we won’t continue with an internally-run programme like Upskill Yourself per se. But we won’t stop offering the sorts of training opportunities provided through the programme either and we will continue to work with external providers.

We’re planning, for example, to encourage the industry training officers in each of our villages to complete a National Certificate in Adult Learning and Education as a way to improve their skills as training officers and the work they do with our employees - and to ensure we retain the skills and knowledge around literacy education. It’s a good way to keep what we’ve learned within the organisation.

We will also continue to work with literacy training organisations to ensure our policy documents, internal training materials and workplace forms all reflect the literacy needs of our workforce.

Taking stock

One of the major lessons we’ve learned is that releasing people from their day-to-day work to participate in training is difficult. So too is timetabling and scheduling. These things are unavoidable challenges in my view.

And, while our supervisors enjoyed referring employees to the programme, they didn’t enjoy the resulting interruption to their daily routine or the extra workload of the project.

As a business, I believe you have to be committed to this work. You really have to be prepared to muscle your way through it and to find solutions.

Of course, we have achieved some stunning outcomes, we’ve learned a lot and solved many tricky issues along the way. Still, we see these things as a nicety, not a need. And that’s something that others will have to work out for themselves too. Do you need to do this? Or is it nice to have?

Top tips

1. Recognise there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. You have to work out how to make this work deliver for you. It’s very much horses-for-courses.
2. Think through the investment the business will need to make before starting out.
3. Plan upfront and get really clear about what you want your training provider to deliver.
4. Keep it real. Ensure all your training materials draw from real-life examples and materials found in the workplace.
5. Make it sustainable by applying as much as you can to other parts of the business.

Any questions?

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