Employee Engagement and Training

The buzzword in the business world today is employee engagement. Without it, companies lose about $300 billion a year, according to the 2004 Gallup report.

With an engaged workforce, companies can experience innovation, growth and productivity, not to mention a vital environment where people are excited about their work – and stay.

A study in the Organization Development Journal (The Human Resource Craze: Human Performance Improvement and Employee Engagement. Organization Development Journal, Quarter 2, 2008, Vol. 26, No. 1, P. 69; Endres, Grace M; Mancheno-Smoak, Lolita) reports that companies that want to build an engaged workforce focus on the following things:

• Make sure that what your employees are doing is aligned with company goals and values.
• Give employees the tools and the freedom to innovate and to do their jobs well.
• Build, nurture and encourage teams.
• Recognize and reward worker accomplishments.
• Help workers grow and develop knowledge and skills.

Tall orders, especially for the company that has many sites, scattered over a wide geographical area.

In that situation, the company is frequently reliant on regional managers and community administrators or executive directors to implement and ensure these processes.

And therein lies some of the problem, especially if the company experiences turnover in their key positions.

One administrator told me yesterday that in the company he currently works, his 16 months of employment have made him the #6 person in seniority within the entire, multi-facility company.

Another mentioned the fact that her regional manager has changed three times in the past few years.

Turnover, even in key high-wage positions, is still a fact of life in this profession. It falls, then, to leadership at the very top to establish policies, procedures and, most importantly, systems that can be implemented company-wide to build the strongest direct-care workforce possible.

It’s a choice between constantly fighting fires to keep the corporate ship afloat, or having the resources to build an engaged, productive, energized workforce throughout the company – one that clearly knows the goals and values of the company and practices them in their daily work, regardless of management changes.

But can they learn online?

Let's take a look at generational differences and how they learn.

An article in the eLearning Guild’s magazine, Learning Solutions, is titled “Understanding Today’s Learner.”

This article takes a look at today’s workforce comprising individuals from four different generations, all still active in the workforce.

Age isn’t the only thing that separates these four groups. How they learn, and how they have adapted to technology also varies dramatically from group to group.

Veterans (born 1925-1945): These are the oldest workers still in the workforce. Many of them work in senior care as caregivers, cooks, housekeepers or managers. They tend to be “loyal, hard-working and dedicated” and, as learners, prefer the traditional ways of learning. These individuals are commonly thought of as the folks who don’t know how to use technology and who will resist it if introduced. And yet…

In a recent support group composed primarily of spouses and children of people with dementia (average participant age at least 60), all but two participants indicated a daily use of email and the internet. Many asked repeatedly, “Is there a website I can go to to learn more about this?” (Note to senior care providers: Who’s manning your website?)

This age group will use technology to find answers to their own needs, especially as it relates to their health, and will be thorough in their reading of a website or other digitally presented content. Many of these learners are the most focused in their approach to learning online. While you may need to encourage employees in this age group to get started learning online, once they master the basics, you won’t have to continue to encourage, reward and motivate this learner. They’ll be hooked.

Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964): This generation, frequently called the “Me” generation, focuses on personal accomplishments and achievement. Many of us have balanced career and family our entire adult lives and believe that, with focus and hard work, we can “have it all.” Many of today’s mid- and upper-level managers are from this generation.

As learners, this population didn’t grow up with their hand on a mouse, but they have adopted technology and use it in their daily lives. They are the fastest growing segment of new Facebook users (the social networking site that started as a college networking tool), and, when the value of e-learning is presented to them, they rapidly adopt and use it.

Generation X (born 1965-1979) and Generation Y (Born 1980 – 1995): These learners grew up with technology, especially the younger Generation Y folks. They tend to be highly social, multi-task easily and frequently and assume that learning is their right – after all, they never knew a time when the internet wasn’t available for them to “google” a subject and quickly gain knowledge.

As learners, this generation, our largest employee group, wants to see several things, whether in a classroom setting or online:

• They like small bites of information, and they prefer to have freedom to quickly explore and learn, following their own paths rather than prescribed paths of discovery and learning.
• They are easily bored (that’s a news flash!) and prefer their information delivered with more visuals, sounds, video and images rather than lots of text to read and digest.
• They love to interact with others while they learn, casually throwing off ideas, thoughts, or reactions, blogger or instant message-style, to their friends or co-workers.
• They prefer to have learning available to them so that they can access the knowledge when they need it; a “just in time” approach to learning that online learning has made possible and accessible.
• They can learn new things without close guidance. These are the kids, after all, that not only programmed our VCRs but learned to use their iPods, Google and other technology without our help.

This learner wants to learn quickly, easily, and without being bored. They will be clear that even online learning can be boring, especially when presented with linear, simplistic content that doesn’t allow or encourage freedom to navigate and explore.
This is the employee, too, that will begin to demand options to mandatory training. They’ll assume that any large, sophisticated company will offer training options that fit their needs and their schedules. They’ll seek out information on topics when they need and want it, whether it is company-provided or not. They may, in fact, choose an employer that offers more learning opportunities above one that does not.

Today’s workforce is the most complex in history. Knowing how your employees learn, and adapting your training programs accordingly, will help you build the strongest, most effective team possible to compete in today’s market.

Challenges Bring Innovation

Challenges bring innovation.

We should be ripe for a lot of innovation, if that holds true in this particular stage in history as in the past.

Here’s one area we’re involved in offering an innovative solution: Providing pre-employment training to individuals who have lost their jobs, making them job-ready to work for you, the senior care provider.

The challenge: One of the highest rates of unemployed workers in the US in decades.

The innovation: Offering unemployed individuals an opportunity to gain a hiring advantage in the workforce by pre-training them for jobs providing care to seniors.

The result: Employers (like you) can hire individuals who have proven computer learning skills (a plus for the world where computerization is spreading to everyday tasks in caregiving) AND training that proves their knowledge base at a higher level than the unskilled, untrained (but willing) individual. An added bonus to you? You may be able to use documentation of their pre-employment training to fast-track the person into their jobs, avoiding the time and expense for new employee training. Orient them to your organization and to the clients in their care, and they’re job ready, quickly, efficiently and at a lower cost to the employer.

It’s a small step in solving a huge, national challenge. But if it fast-tracks the individual into needed positions in senior care businesses and saves you, the provider, time and money, it could be a small innovation that works.

Want more details on how this could work for you? Contact me today!

It's about Culture, not Compliance

You’ve heard me harp on and on about compliance, and how traditional inservice approaches to staff training don’t make that happen very effectively. You’ve read the reports about legal and regulatory liability risks when you’re out of compliance. I guess on the hierarchy of corporate needs, survival is the most basic, so should, in fact, be “job 1.”

Adequate, compliance training really is a survival issue.

In Texas, a lawsuit filed against a facility alleged that the nursing home was “responsible for the abuse because it did not send the worker to job training.”

According to the California Injury Blog, “understaffing and the lack of training are the most common issues that lead to nursing home abuse.”

Training is very firmly fixed on the radar of nursing home abuse and neglect attorneys, many of whom are targeting assisted living communities now in addition to nursing homes. Any time compliance is not clearly, cleanly 100%, you’re a potential target.

So that’s the survival picture.

But what if you’re ready to move beyond just survival? What if, confident that your QA programs are in place and your compliance is met, you’re ready to attack the finer points of customer satisfaction and loyalty? Of building a highly engaged workforce and clientele?

At this level, it’s all about building culture, not just compliance.

It’s about training every member of your team not just on compliance issues (resident rights, safety and caregiving skills) but also on culture: how to treat every person, resident and guest, in a way that sets you apart from the rest.

Talking about building culture is very in vogue these days. The actual doing part, however, often lags far behind.

One of my favorite books is Fred Lee’s “If Disney Ran Your Hospital.” It’s aptly subtitled “Cultural insights from a hospital executive who became a Disney cast member.” It’s all about making the word “culture” mean something – something that, in this case, becomes synonymous with your brand identity.

Lee points out that, while it begins (and builds and grows) with training, it is also dependent on leadership – leadership that is clear in goals, outcomes and what the definition of the corporate culture truly is. Leadership that rewards, models and reinforces the behaviors that reflect the culture every single day.

One of our newest employees made the comment the other day that a course we were developing still needed to be “aQuire-ized.” What he meant was that it didn’t yet reflect our internal standards, standards that include story-telling, high-impact visuals, motivational/inspirational elements and more. I felt, at that moment, that we were beginning to develop a corporate culture that everyone on the team could understand – down to the very newest member.

Companies looking to establish a foothold in today’s business climate, and, more importantly, wish to grow solidly in the future need to think beyond mere compliance. They need to think – and build – culture.