By Mark Rushworth, Group CEO of UP Education
As the vast majority of the UP Education team and students live in lockdown conditions yet again, we’ve been asking ourselves how to best support our community in the fight against COVID-19.
Tertiary and vocational training is a bridge into the workforce and reaches into so many communities. It’s so important we make learning environments as safe as possible.
Vaccinations are the best tool we have to plot a path back to normality, but people need to be motivated to get vaccinated quickly.
With a 14,000+ learning community of domestic and international learners across mainly Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, we want to play our part in the collective effort of ending the pandemic. We’re going to do this by supporting as many of our people as possible to get vaccinated.
This has seen us launch a group-wide initiative, Roll up your Sleeves, to help educate our team about the vaccine. As part of this we’re giving employees a one-off bonus when they show us that they are completely vaccinated.
We see this as a small contribution to support vaccine uptake and to thank our team for doing their part. I hope it will inspire them to get vaccinated quicker and take their families along at the same time.
Then I hope that our team can take the money we give them and spend it in their communities or donate it to charity. That way we can also play a small part in filling the economic holes these lockdowns are creating.
Employers are uniquely positioned to provide support around COVID-19-vaccine adoption by creating supportive work environments, building confidence through education, offering rewards and recognition and expanding impact into the broader community.
Our overarching goal is to have 85% of employees across the group vaccinated by the end of the year.
So far the response from our employees has been overwhelmingly positive. Our team are going above and beyond to operate in lockdowns, and they are ready to step up to the plate to get vaccinated.
For any business thinking about giving their team a nudge to get vaccinated – do it! We can’t just rely on our governments and health officials to do the work for us. We need to get out there and support the vaccine drive.
