Workplace Assertiveness, Conflict and Communication

Who is this course for?

It is built for individuals who want to grow their own confidence, and for whole teams who want fewer misunderstandings and a healthier culture. It suits all staff, managers and health and safety reps.

For an individual it is a way to handle difficult conversations without the dread. For a team it is a shared language that reduces conflict, friction and avoidable turnover.

Six modules, twelve short lessons

Progressively interactive, so you build from the foundations up to managing real conflict.

The law gives your people the right to speak up. Nothing requires anyone to teach them how

Section 59 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 sets out what engaging with workers actually requires. Among other things, workers must be given a reasonable opportunity "to express their views and to raise work health or safety issues in relation to the matter", and their views must be taken into account. Section 61 goes further and requires every PCBU to have practices that give workers reasonable opportunities "to participate effectively in improving work health and safety in the business or undertaking on an ongoing basis". Section 58 makes failing to engage an offence.

Read those duties carefully and you find they are all written about the employer. The Act creates the opportunity. It says nothing at all about whether the worker has ever been shown how to use it.

The people who most need the skill are the least likely to be taught it

This is not an accident of individual workplaces. It is written into how development gets funded in New Zealand. The main publicly funded route into workplace learning for the country's lowest-skilled workers is the Employer-led Workplace Literacy and Numeracy Fund. The Tertiary Education Commission states that the fund does not cover "leadership programmes, team engagement/collaboration programmes, time management programmes, industry specific skills, and staff professional development". Communication content is permitted only where it supports a literacy or numeracy outcome.

So the single national fund aimed squarely at workers with the least formal education is, by design, forbidden from teaching them how to speak up.

The older workplace data points the same way. Analysis of Statistics New Zealand's Business Operations Survey found staff participation in employer-provided trade-related skills training at 43 percent, against 17 percent for oral communication and 13 percent for written communication. That figure is now dated, and New Zealand has never fixed the measurement problem. A 2012 report for the Department of Labour stated flatly that New Zealand lacks reliable information about employer-provided training and skill development.

The gradient is measurable

The 2021 New Zealand Workplace Barometer surveyed 2,029 workers across 23 New Zealand organisations. Psychosocial safety climate, which measures how genuinely an organisation protects psychological health, scored 46.2 among senior managers and 38.3 among non-managerial employees. The conditions for speaking up get worse the further down the structure you sit.

Exposure runs the other way. Stats NZ's Survey of Working Life found 16.7 percent of community and personal service workers reported discrimination, harassment or bullying in the previous 12 months, against 9.2 percent of managers. The people most likely to encounter the problem are the least likely to have been trained to raise it.

And most of it never surfaces. KPMG's work for the Human Rights Commission found 29.1 percent of workers had experienced at least one bullying or harassment behaviour in the preceding year, while only 12.1 percent of those affected raised an internal complaint.

The honest counterweight

WorkSafe's own 2025 workforce survey found 85 percent of workers felt comfortable discussing health and safety with anyone at work, and 74 percent were satisfied with how their employer responded when issues were raised. That is a real improvement and we are not going to hide it.

But it sits alongside an older finding worth keeping in view. In a national attitudes survey, 75 percent of workers agreed their boss encouraged them to speak up about unsafe conditions, while only 53 percent felt their views were actually considered in health and safety decisions. Being permitted to speak and being heard are not the same measurement, and workers can tell the difference.

What a short course changes, and what it does not

It will not fix a manager who punishes bad news, and it will not substitute for worker participation practices that a business is legally required to have. If the system above someone is hostile, no amount of phrasing helps.

What it does address is narrower and more fixable. Someone who cannot raise a concern, hold a position under pressure, or decline a request without it turning into an argument is very rarely short on courage. Far more often they have simply never been taught, because nobody thought that kind of development was for them. That is a teachable thing, it takes about an hour, and in most teams it only takes one person doing it well before others start copying it.

Sources: Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, sections 58, 59 and 61 (legislation.govt.nz). Tertiary Education Commission, Employer-led Workplace Literacy and Numeracy Fund eligibility. Mason, Mok, Nunns, Stevens and Timmins, analysis of the Business Operations Survey, in Labour, Employment and Work in New Zealand. Coulon, Bellett and Sullivan for the Department of Labour (2012). Forsyth, Ashby, Gardner and Tappin, The 2021 New Zealand Workplace Barometer, Massey University. Stats NZ Survey of Working Life, via MBIE. KPMG for Te Kahui Tika Tangata Human Rights Commission, Counting the Cost (May 2024). WorkSafe New Zealand worker engagement guidance and workforce insights. Umbrella Wellbeing (March 2024).

Common questions

What is the course about?

It is an online, self-paced course that helps you communicate with confidence, understand the people around you, and manage conflict well.

Who is it for?

Individuals who want to grow their own confidence, and teams or organisations who want fewer misunderstandings and a healthier culture.

How long does it take and how is it delivered?

It is 100% online and self-paced, made up of six modules and twelve short, interactive lessons.

Is it interactive?

Yes. Every lesson includes a hands-on activity, and there is a full conflict-style assessment with a tailored PDF result.

Does this course satisfy our worker engagement duties under the Health and Safety at Work Act?

No, and we would not want you to rely on it for that. Sections 58 to 61 place duties on the PCBU to engage, to take worker views into account, and to have worker participation practices in place. Those are obligations on the business and a course cannot discharge them. What this module does is address the other side, which the Act does not cover: whether the individual worker has ever been shown how to use the opportunity your practices create.

Who is this course actually for?

It is written for staff who have never had access to this kind of development. Interpersonal and communication training in New Zealand has largely been treated as something managers receive, and the main public fund aimed at lower-skilled workers is explicitly not permitted to cover it. If you have people who deal with pressure, customers, contractors or difficult requests every day and have never been taught how to handle any of it, they are the intended learner.

Will it help with health and safety specifically?

It supports it, without being a health and safety qualification and without carrying NZQA credits. The connection is straightforward: your engagement duties depend on workers actually raising issues, and New Zealand research found that in the least psychologically safe teams, workers had 8.3 times the odds of reporting bullying and were far more likely to be intending to leave. A worker who can name a concern early is the cheapest safety control you will ever have, but it only works if the response they get makes it worth doing again.