Beyond kia ora

But Air New Zealand’s involvement with te reo Māori goes deeper than a single film, Baker says. “I wrote an Māori strategy for Air New Zealand, in which the language acquisition and the language initiatives that we’re making across the business goes into the strategy, but the strategy is a much wider kind of understanding of how and where Air New Zealand should be engaging with Māori culture. Our greeting of choice is “kia ora”, and when we say farewell to people our farewell of choice is “mā te wā“ which is kind of like ‘mañana’, see you later.”

Baker also notes that “there is a move for us to take a lot more care about how we pronounce our Māori destinations like Rotorua and Taupō, and to have some understanding of the meaning of these names — and the significance to the area and to the destination — of these Māori names, all the way through to our executive training, where our chief executive and his direct reports obviously need a much deeper understanding of Māori culture in terms of values and protocols so that they can better understand conversations with Māori stakeholders like iwi [tribe] leaders and Māori business leaders.”

“There’s some context,” Baker notes, “around why they see the world through a slightly different lens so, in terms of our people we have a wide range of activities including a program we call “mahi rangatira” which introduces Māori leadership values into our middle management and senior management leadership development programs.”

On the customer side, “increasingly you’ll hear flight attendants use phrases like ‘nau mai, haere mai ki…’ and that’s simply giving everyone a very warm welcome. In the next twelve months or so we will be extending the range of that. Often our flight attendants and people at the airports are having people speak more Māori to them, so we’re going to run a program which will introduce the most three or four common phrases that someone might ask you after you say “kia ora”, like “how are you” or you know, “it’s a great day isn’t it”, “are you having a good day” that kind of stuff.”

Inflight, “on our domestic main trunk routes on our jet aircraft, which has a drop-down screen that shows the Air New Zealand quiz, that has become really popular with our domestic travelers. Last year we introduced the answers to those questions in Māori as well as English, so we have bilingual answers to all of these questions. That exposed over 5.1 million people in the last year to the Māori language. We’ve had really great response from our customers: it’s an opportunity for them to broaden their knowledge of not only New Zealand, but also to understand ‘oh, there’s a Māori word for sausage’ or ‘there’s a Māori word for France and that’s ‘Wīwī’”.

Elsewhere on the fleet, Baker says, “we’ve also increased a lot of the indigenous content on our inflight entertainment. This reflects a lot more content that’s being created in New Zealand, but also gives people a sense of the contemporary living culture that Māori culture has. Whilst the haka and the traditional dances are a really popular part of people’s tourism experience when they come to New Zealand, actually New Zealand has an evolving and growing culture, so a lot of the content on board is reflecting innovative and young nature.”

“Then we kind of stretch a little bit out to our customers and our stakeholders,” Baker explains. “We have strong relationships with government but we also have strong relationships with tourism enterprises, and we have relationships with New Zealand Māori Tourism Council, and we’re are actively supporting the growth and devolopment of Māori tourism businesses, particularly those in the regions. In Northland and in Gisborne for instance, we’re working with people there to help them develop their tourism enterprises and their cultural stories, and then also with our networking and our distribution to enable people to come and see them and experience them. This is great for regional economic development — it provides opportunities for employment, but also it enables local Māori communities to tell their own stories with their own voice and in the the way that they want those stories to be told.”

“Aligned with our sustainability framework,” Baker says, “we have focused a little more on Northland and the East Cape, understanding how we can work with Māori organisations and initiatives like goods and services. For instance, a lot of Māori tribes have assets in forestry, so there’s an opportunity for us to work together on offsetting carbon credits. Many iwi have direct access to fisheries products, so we are looking at how we can work with iwi to get some of these indigenous products on board our aircraft, and into our lounges. We are talking about things like wine and honey and fish — the conversations are growing, and the range of products that are available is really diverse, so we are working with organisations to see how we can be a customer, as well as a partner, in a lot of these things.”

In terms of partnership, Air New Zealand recently led work creating an emblem to show at a glance that a staff member speaks te reo, like national flags for international language speakers. “We went to our friends at the Māori language commission and said ‘Do you have anything, like a pin or insignia, that allows people to understand that the person wearing that pin can speak te reo Māori?’ They said no, so we created one,” Baker explains. “We went to New Zealand Māori Arts and Crafts Institute, to our master carvers, and we asked them to help us design one. Alongside our design consultants, we created an image and that image was crafted by these master carvers into a three-dimensional object, which we’ve had made into a pin. Vodafone, ASB, Auckland Council, the Department of Conservation, and a number of other corporations have embraced this language speaking pin for themselves. It now recognises people who can speak Māori across the whole country.”

For the future, Baker says, “we’re looking at in the next twelve months or so introducing the Māori language into our kiosks so that you’ll be able to select the Māori language as a check in option at our kiosks.”

Also on the IT side, “We created a language app, which is an association with a company called Kiwa Digital: they’re an electronic learning development organisation, and they have cutting edge technology to engage with iPhones and iPads. When you touch a Māori word in the app it speaks to you, and so you can tap it to say the word. You can double tap it to pronounce each syllable of the word, and then swipe to read (and therefore learn) welcomes and speeches and songs and all sorts of great content. We created that over a year ago and we are currently developing an external face and iteration of it, which we’ll make available to our customers to download free of charge in the iTunes store.”

The work Air New Zealand has been doing isn’t simply limited to a sense of corporate social responsibility, Baker notes. “We could’ve got involved in the culture at a really shallow level and only applied ourselves to quite technical projects, but we’ve taken to weave the Māori strategy into our business, and so it crosses over into our people, our inclusion, our diversity and our regional economic development strategies. It’s one of the key pillars in our sustainability framework, that we have an indigenous culture, we have a heritage which is rich, and people come here to New Zealand to engage with it and celebrate it and they’re interested by it. We are keen to have more Māori represented within our business, both at the customer facing level and throughout the business in key decision making areas. It’s a commitment to one of the premises of Air New Zealand’s key work, which is that we honestly believe we can facilitate the supercharging of New Zealand’s success.”

“We fly to 22 different regions around the country,” Baker says. “We are by far the biggest carrier of tourists into New Zealand, and that is now the biggest industry — we’ve outdone dairy for the last 12 months or so — and with all of the networks and the distribution that we have, we employ 12,000 people, we buy a lot of products and services in New Zealand, and so this idea that we can supercharge New Zealand’s success naturally flows into the Māori space and so if we can supercharge Māori sectors, by default we supercharge New Zealand’s success.”

“This is a much more strategic long term play,” Baker explains. “We expect that it will be good for business, but we also expect that it will be good for our national identity, it will be great for Māori culture, it will be great for regional economic development and, at the end of the day, we want to create a sustainable business. Having partnerships and people who represent who we are in New Zealand as a country is a fundamental part of any kind of sustainability plan.”