How Syncrude Canada led the way in workplace education

Charles Ruigrok, CEO Syncrude Canada

Any CEO interested in literacy and essential-skills education in the workplace has an array of models and resources to turn to today — thanks to the groundwork of innovative pioneers. In fact, the genesis of workplace-literacy training can be traced back to Alberta’s oil patch, where Syncrude Canada Ltd., a consortium of oil producers based 45 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, spearheaded the development of Canada’s first such program, Effective Reading in Context (ERIC), beginning in 1988.

Almost two decades on, Syncrude has expanded its essential-skills training to encompass a wider range of courses, though ERIC not only remains at its core but is also a respected model that has been widely adapted by others. ERIC users have included such businesses as Schuller International Canada Inc., Imperial Oil and Alberta Power; unions such as the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union; and the Manitoba Manufacturing Industry, a group of companies that includes Palliser Furniture and Boeing. ERIC is a longstanding point of pride for Syncrude, but CEO Charles Ruigrok notes it was set up for sound practical reasons, not merely as a gesture of one-upmanship. “Being first is not what drove us to put the program in place,” he says. “We did it because we identified a business need.”

A combination of factors led the company to that point. The world’s largest producer of crude oil from oil sands, Syncrude supplies about 13% of Canada’s crude-oil needs. With a 3,600-strong workforce, it is one of Alberta’s largest private-sector employers. The consortium’s size, the extreme environmental conditions under which it operates, and the state-of-the-art technology it must continually employ call for a highly skilled workforce. Back in the mid-’80s, demographic projections suggested that the pool of skilled workers from which Syncrude drew would shrink in future, so the company realized it had to make the most of the employees it already had.

To do so, Syncrude decided in 1987 to move to team-based management. As part of the process, it conducted an assessment to identify areas in which its managers needed skills development. Surprisingly, the assessment revealed that about 25% of the test group had difficulty with upper-level technical reading. “We put a lot of money into training and development for folks at Syncrude,” says Lloyd Campbell, a 20-year veteran with the company, “so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll go out and buy an educational package.’” He realized he was sailing into uncharted waters when a North America-wide search turned up nothing. “Nobody even knew what I was talking about,” he says. “As far as they were concerned, either you could read or you couldn’t read. There was no middle ground.”

At that point, the educational community had not considered the needs of individuals such as those identified at Syncrude — long-term employees who had been out of school for many years and for whom reading had so far not been a significant part of their job. They were literate in a traditional sense, and yet when it came to the technical-reading requirements that were increasingly necessary for work, they needed to upgrade their skills.

Undaunted by the lack of precedent, Campbell approached Keyano College, based in nearby Fort McMurray, for help. The college arranged a meeting between Campbell and Mary Norton, then a graduate student at the University of Alberta, and Campbell ended up hiring her to design a reading-upgrade program structured specifically around workplace materials. The upfront investment would be sizeable, but Campbell says Syncrude stepped right up to the plate. “When I first identified the need to build this course, I indicated that it would need about $90,000 to get it off the ground,” he says. “It took me approximately 35 seconds to get that.”

Supplemental funding, private or public, has never been part of Syncrude’s formula because the company’s philosophy is to shoulder all responsibility for the training and development of its employees. Not only does this give the company ownership and control of its various programs, says Campbell, but it also reinforces the public commitment it makes to its employees. Launched in 1988, the resulting model, ERIC, is owned by Syncrude and administered by Keyano College in Fort McMurray.

ERIC begins with a two-hour individual assessment to determine the employee’s needs. For many, a few pointers are all that are necessary to sharpen reading skills. Other people are recommended for workshops that involve 12, 28 or 40 hours of class time. The classes are immersion-style, spanning full seven-hour days. A 28-hour workshop series, for example, is spread over four consecutive days. Those who need more assistance than ERIC can provide are referred to Write Break, a community-sponsored literacy program also administered through Keyano College. Employees attending ERIC bring workplace documents to classes of six-to-10 people and use the material to improve reading skills such as comprehension, recall, retention and reading speed. “Normally, when people can relate to the text they’re reading, that encourages more of it,” Campbell says. “We didn’t talk about chocolate factories. We talked about how you produce oil.”

Initially intended only for managers or those on the management track, ERIC was so well received that, in 1990, it was made available to all Syncrude employees. The classes take place mostly on paid time, though if a day off falls on a class day, employees are expected to continue to attend. The cost to the company is about $60,000 per year for contract work and release time, though Tildy Hanson, Workplace Literacy Coordinator with Keyano College, notes that, a couple of years ago, Keyano overshot its budget and Syncrude management covered the extra without complaint. “It’s a relatively modest investment when you put it in the context of some of the decisions that we are asking our people to make and the impact of those decisions,” says Ruigrok. “If one person who attends this training makes a better decision in their day-to-day job, it’s likely they will cover a good portion, if not all, of the costs we might incur each year for people to attend that particular program.”

In 1994, Syncrude received Canada Post’s Corporate Canada Literacy Award. The award had been launched the previous year to herald the important contributions recipients were making to literacy in Canada. Not that Syncrude has ever been big on waving the L-word around, sticking instead with safer terminology such as essential-skills retraining. “They structured the program to set people up for success and to help allay concerns about being perceived as not having required skills and hence not being qualified for the role,” says Ruigrok.

Participation in ERIC has always been confidential and voluntary, with two qualifiers. Supervisors must know that an employee is taking a course because they have to authorize the release time, but they receive no other details and there is no evaluation. Also, although attendance is voluntary, training staff or human resources may refer some employees to ERIC if they face such setbacks as, for example, failing pipefitting exams twice. Says Ruigrok: “Communicating in the right way is crucial, so people don¹t perceive the offer of the program or their nomination for it as a sign of weakness, but as an opportunity to upgrade their skills to deal with a changing workplace.”

Just as the workplace continuously evolves, so too has the program. In 1997, under the umbrella of essential-skills training, Keyano also began offering Syncrude employees a similarly structured math-upgrade program called Working in Numeracy (WIN). This refresher of math skills ranging from fractions and decimals to geometry, statistics and introductory algebra has since been renamed Syncrude Applied Math (SAM). More recently, the company added Workplace Writing Fundamentals, a writing tune-up service in which employees are invited to send in writing samples — not necessarily work-related — up to twice a year, and then meet with a writing instructor for a two-hour consultation. Syncrude also offers an advanced math class for engineers, and applied mechanics and physics on demand. “All of this has tied in well with efforts to improve business literacy within the organization, so that people have a good grounding and an understanding of the business ramifications of their everyday decision-making and what that means for the business, what that means for the bottom line,” says Ruigrok. “Having a line of site to the performance of the business was a big piece of what drove us to expand the program.”

More than 1,500 Syncrude employees have participated to date, more than one-third of the company’s entire workforce. Employee feedback indicates that the courses are useful both personally and professionally. They improve self-confidence and morale, and help employees deal more effectively with workplace literature or prepare them to pass trades tests they have pre- viously failed. “The program makes them more effective and safer employees,” says Keyano’s Hanson. “If you can have someone who’s going to have their warehouse ticket as opposed to someone who’s failed the test three times, it’s worth it.”

Ruigrok cautions companies considering similar programs against becoming obsessed with quantifying the return on investment. “If you try to measure the absolute contribution of these programs to improve business results or decision-making, it’s very easy to dismiss the value of these programs too quickly. I think you have to think of these programs at a more strategic level.” Employees, he continues, note an improvement in their ability to make better business decisions as a result of Syncrude’s programs, “and that’s enough for us.”

There are, however, also indications that the use of workplace materials in the program has direct benefits for the company. One employee, for example, was having difficulty with compressors and brought his manual to ERIC. Together, the whole class worked on mapping out a compressor to see how it was constructed and how it worked. That not only helped the employee who brought in the manual sit a trades exam successfully, but it also gave classmates a better understanding of technology used by the company. While ERIC was set up in response to a specific business need, it has evolved as a tool for such continuous learning. “When you go back into the history of the program,” says Ruigrok, “it’s pretty easy to appreciate the need for continuous upgrading of people’s essential skills, especially if you look at the evolution of technology and what that has meant in terms of both the volume and complexity of information that people have to deal with in the workplace. There’s an ongoing need to help our employees deal with all this information, and ERIC is an important part of that.”