Read top tips from employers who have completed workplace literacy training and share their experiences so you can learn from what they found most important.
Remember if you want to ask a question or add your own tips, please send us an email. You can also read the actual case studies.
| Accor Hotels' top tips |
- Find out exactly how low level foundation skills affect your bottom line and company productivity.
- Use the data to convince others about the importance of literacy training.
- Don’t rush. Remember, good solutions take time to evolve.
- See literacy training as a tool to unlock the potential of migrant employees.
- Upskill your people to deliver training in-house and make it sustainable in the long term.
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| Air New Zealand's top tips |
- Don’t be afraid to strike out on your own. There’s plenty to gain from a modest start.
- Use workplace literacy training to unlock the hidden, untapped potential of your employees, in particular those who speak English as a second language.
- Seek help to find an external training provider – preferably someone who knows the industry well and can measure value for money.
- Look at using training to improve your customer service through better email, face-to-face and telephone communication.
- Share what you learn across your organisation to make sure it doesn’t start and finish with you.
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ASB Bank
| ASB Bank's top tips |
- Don’t rush into rolling out a workplace literacy training programme. Instead, take time to understand your issues and how to address them.
- Look at developing and providing a literacy programme internally. Employing an external training provider isn’t the only answer.
- Seek the opportunity to improve and adapt an existing training programme.
- Consider making literacy training part of everyone’s professional development.
- Find a training provider who shares your beliefs about working with and improving what you’ve got.
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| Canterbury Spinners' top tips |
- Find out about the support available to help you lift the foundation level skills of your workforce.
- Learn as much as you can about workplace literacy to make some lasting changes to your business.
- Choose external providers carefully. Take the time to do your research.
- Look at improving the way you recruit employees and your workplace documentation.
- Don’t underestimate the positive impact of foundation skills training on morale, teamwork and health and safety.
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Cardinal Logistics
| Cardinal Logistics' top tips |
- To create true change, you need to involve your employees.
- Value your staff and let them know it with workplace literacy training.
- It’s better to train people that you already have than to keep retraining new people.
- Communicate the importance of continued learning. Make sure employees know a literacy programme will benefit them personally.
- Celebrate success. Offer incentives. Make the benefits clear.
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| Counties Manukau DHB's top tips |
- Use literacy training to improve the quality of your service.
- Develop programmes that target a specific workforce group and address their specific literacy and career needs.
- Go for a workplace literacy strategy that’s manageable. Use it to prioritise and address key issues over time.
- Keep in mind that what might appear to be an issue of non-compliance or a poor attitude to work may actually be a literacy issue.
- Network with other organisations to garner support and energy to keep things going.
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| Downer's top tips |
- Spend time talking to other businesses that have been through it to get an understanding about what they did to develop a programme.
- Consider upskilling people within your organisation to provide training over the long term.
- Don’t try and do everything, for example, think about referring employees with specific needs to other organisations for help.
- Be careful not to underestimate how big literacy projects can get. But do see them as a powerful tool within a business environment.
- Take your time and link it to a broader philosophy of continuous improvement.
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| EasiYo Products’ top tips |
- See foundation skills training as a must for anyone in the food industry.
- Keep focused on the outcomes of training – that’s where the real value is.
- Talk to your Industry Training Organisation about linking workplace literacy training to other qualifications such as health and safety qualifications.
- Use the opportunity to train and upskill, to motivate and reward your people.
- Combine literacy training with organisational change programmes such as lean manufacturing to improve the outcomes of both programmes.
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| Fletcher Construction's top tips |
- Know there are a whole lot of people who can’t read, write and do maths – there are many more than you think.
- 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.
- Get buy-in from the people who manage and supervise trainees.
- Be very selective in who you choose (inside the organisation) to run your training programme and, in turn, support them with training.
- Share your story. Tell your own people what you’ve done, why you’re doing it and what the results are.
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| Juken New Zealand's top tips |
- Get help to select a provider and be clear up front what you want from a programme.
- Don’t underestimate the time and energy you need to start a workplace literacy programme.
- Develop key messages for your programme and communicate these widely and often.
- Work closely with your provider and tutors throughout the programme. Recognise companies need to have an ongoing role.
- Continue to show a strong business case for workplace literacy by collecting soft data, as well as hard.
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King Salmon
| King Salmon's top tips |
- See the huge potential of workplace literacy training – for us, it has improved productivity, reduced staff turnover, boosted health and safety compliance and much more.
- Combine it with the lean manufacturing method for best effect.
- Look at providing training yourselves to save money and improve relationships between managers and staff within the company.
- Use workplace literacy training to innovate and come up with new and better ways of doing things – we developed new measurement tools and made it part of career development.
- See literacy training as an opportunity to balance the excellent practical skills of your people with good reading, writing, maths and communication skills.
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Liddell Contracting
| Liddell Contracting's top tips |
- Employees will always need training but the funding won’t always be there. Look for ways to build literacy and numeracy training into business-as-usual.
- Take the opportunity to assess the learning needs of your employees. Use what you find out to improve your internal systems and processes.
- See literacy training as a tool to help you grow and improve your business.
- Understand the positive spinoffs that come from employees who can read, write, do maths and communicate well.
- Consider improving your health and safety practices with workplace literacy training.
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Longveld Engineering's top tips
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- Believe literacy training is an investment, not a cost, because the payback is enormous.
- Use training to lift company productivity. Use it to improve skills and knowledge and to reward and motivate people.
- Get the most from your training programme by using what is relevant to improve workplace materials and practices and other training programmes.
- See literacy training as something that works for a range of employees in different ways.
- Talk to people running programmes. Visit a company. Ask questions. Listen. Make up your own mind from there.
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| Millennium Hotels and Resorts' top tips |
- Come to this work with your eyes open and realise an in-house model like ours is likely to take a lot of administration and time to set up.
- Make it a priority to develop a good working relationship with the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) if you plan on funding your programme through their funding streams. Collaborate on setting and adjusting timelines and achieving business continuity at the same time.
- Stay learner focused. It’s easy to get bogged down in the set-up. Stay in tune with what your trainees need.
- See the value of group work, don’t assume that one-to-one coaching is your only and best option.
- Recognise the importance of professional development for employees who oversee literacy training – it’s a specialist area that requires expert knowledge and training.
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| New Zealand Army's top tips |
- Achieve organisational excellence by investing in the literacy skills of your people.
- Understand that literacy training is good for individuals, the organisations they work for and their families and wider society.
- Use literacy training to strengthen and get more from other training programmes.
- Read and follow the evidence on effective literacy training. It shows training should reflect a learner’s own working and living environment for best results.
- See literacy training as something that is ongoing and long term. Don’t see it as the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
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| New Zealand Post's top tips |
- Adapt your programme as you go. Start small and learn from your mistakes.
- Look for a provider who relates well to your employees. It’ll make a huge difference to employee motivation and learning success.
- Retain knowledge about workplace literacy where you can. Ask your provider to develop a set of training resources, alongside the programme itself, for use in the future.
- Track a programme’s impact with measurement tools like an engagement survey.
- Get a first-hand perspective on training by talking to your employees and asking how it’s impacting their personal and professional lives.
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| Palmerston North City Council's top tips |
- Be open to continuous change and improvement of your programme – that way it will stay fresh and last longer.
- Make training relevant to your organisation by involving staff unions and staff themselves – it was key for our programme.
- Use workplace literacy training to help employees gain industry qualifications and build their careers.
- Help managers and employees buy in to workplace literacy training by making them understand that training is part of their work.
- Don’t dismiss big, bold suggestions from staff – they could be the very things that will make a literacy training programme work well.
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| Ryman Healthcare's top tips |
- 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.
- Think through the investment the business will need to make before starting out.
- Plan upfront and get really clear about what you want your training provider to deliver.
- Keep it real. Ensure all your training materials draw from real-life examples and materials found in the workplace.
- Make it sustainable by applying as much as you can to other parts of the business.
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SKYCITY Auckland
| SKYCITY Auckland's top tips |
- Instead of offering a generic programme, adapt training to meet the specific needs of each student.
- Take on board all tips offered by your training provider.
- Measure performance so you can see the achievements.
- Recognise and reward all employees showing star qualities.
- Encourage your managers to coach and support trainees throughout their training.
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| Spotless' top tips |
- Talk to other organisations that have run literacy programmes – the more you know before you start the better.
- Understand you will still need to make it relevant to your company – there’s no cookie cutter approach.
- Consider starting small and learning from that experience before launching into something big.
- Be aware that you’re likely to stimulate a passion for learning in people – think about how you can support that after the programme ends.
- Work out the level of commitment your business is prepared to give this work – would you stick with it through bad times?
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| Stevenson Group's top tips |
- Roll up your sleeves and get involved – CEO (Chief Executive Officer) involvement will mean your programme is effective from day one and receives widespread support.
- See workplace literacy as more than reading, writing and maths to get the most out of it.
- Take time to develop a strong working relationship with your learning provider for a programme tailored to suit your needs.
- Understand literacy learning is good for all companies – regardless of the industry you’re in.
- Go out into the workplace and observe the impact of learning. Ask your people what difference it’s made. Talk to their managers to find out.
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Te Roopu Taurima o Manukau Trust
| Te Roopu Taurima o Manukau Trust's top tips |
- See workplace literacy training as a good way to improve the quality of social and disability sector services.
- Combine it with industry-based training to encourage employees to learn the basics and gain qualifications.
- Choose your provider well and go for an organisation who can tailor a programme to suit your needs. Think about working with more than one provider.
- Make workplace literacy training part of other initiatives designed to retain staff and show employees you value them.
- Be patient and take the time you need to get your approach to workplace literacy training just right.
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