PTEP: Making it work
Understanding barriers to employment
To help us further understand the challenges of engaging the long-term unemployed back into the workforce, GJK worked closely with the Brotherhood of St Lawrence. This relationship gave us valuable insights into the difficulties facing tenant employees, many of whom struggled with a range of issues including language and literacy, mental health, cultural differences, childcare challenges, and drug and alcohol dependencies.
All of these issues created further challenges to public tenants in the battle to break entrenched habits of unemployment.
GJK was proud to be part of the success of this pilot, by absorbing the financial and related operational risks associated with providing services to the estates.
Tailored management practises
Such a high-risk operation required an additional layer of management to address the training, supervision and problem-resolution that would be required. But by gaining an understanding of the obstacles these tenants faced, GJK was able to develop comprehensive leadership and management strategies to foster a sustainable career path for our new employees. These strategies include:
A social worker who regularly visits the sites
Support for tenants (facilitated by GJK’s relationship with the Brotherhood of St Lawrence) to access support services including legal aid, family support, counselling, childcare and drug and alcohol dependency support
Vocational management and ongoing training program to ensure tenant employees were adequately equipped to provide service delivery
A buddy system, partnering new employees with experienced cleaners, enabling new staff to learn on the job
I was proud of the way in which existing GJK staff-members readily went the extra mile to ensure our new employees felt like part of the family. As the project grew, stories of tenant employees conquering seemingly insurmountable odds to change their lives for the better became part of the foundations that made GJK staff proud of the company they worked for.