文章基本信息

标题：Health Partners delivers training that works - 2002 Service - Health Partners' Organizational Learning Center
作者：Patrick J. Kiger
期刊名称：Workforce
印刷版ISSN：1092-8332
出版年度：2002
卷号：Nov 2002
出版社：Crain Communications, Inc.

Health Partners delivers training that works - 2002 Service - Health Partners' Organizational Learning Center

Patrick J. Kiger

Faced with big training needs and a constricted budget, Health Partners' Organizational Learning Center assesses what employees need, and brings them low-pressure, high-return training--often led by other employees.

It was October 1999, and inside the offices of Health Partners, the 360-person workforce was anxious. The nonprofit organization, which administers Medicaid and Medicare coverage for 130,000 patients in the Philadelphia area, had spent two and a half years and $3 million building and installing a major upgrade to its data-processing system. Technicians finally were poised to flip the switch.

To the company, the new system was a godsend--a software tool sophisticated enough to cope with the mountains of data on doctor visits, wheelchair authorizations, and other services that Health Partners had to make sense of. To employees, however, the unfamiliar program, with its complicated commands and multiple windows, was a monster waiting on their desktops to devour them.

There was a certain bitter irony to this, because Health Partners had paid tens of thousands of dollars to outside training consultants. However, because of delays in the installation of the system, those lessons now were a distant memory in most employees' minds. Obviously, a second round of instruction and follow-up support was needed, in addition to a motivational campaign to boost slumping corporate morale.

But how could the HR department provide all that without burning a hole in the company's tight budget? And how could the workforce find the time to take more instruction without losing days of work time and dangerously disrupting the company's business?

Fortunately, Vicki Sessoms, Health Partners' vice president for human resources, had somewhere to turn for help. She called upon the HR department's Organizational Learning Center, a three-person team that she had created just a few months earlier to beef up the company's in-house training and support capabilities. OLC's leader, HR professional Bill Austin, analyzed the problem and then rolled out an innovative, multi-faceted initiative that relied on ingenuity rather than more spending.

Instead of outsourcing the training, OLC identified a handful of employees who'd been top performers in the initial training course and persuaded them to become part-time instructors and support resources for the rest of the staff. Instead of presenting grueling daylong crash courses, OLC broke the training into a longer series of 45-minute sessions that employees could fit into their work schedules, and offered plenty of chances for employees to retake the training and reinforce their skills.

Rather than organize the curriculum by tasks, OLC organized it by department, and invited staffers from other departments to attend, too, so that they could get a better understanding of how the entire company utilized the system. Last but hardly least, OLC devoted a portion of the training time to talking with employees about the inevitable stress of going through changes in the workplace--and the benefits that might be gained from successfully weathering it.

It worked. Within weeks, managers reported that their staffers, who had been stuck pondering screen menus for 10 minutes at a time on day one, were able to click through in a third of the time after taking the courses. The initial wave of complaints from client hospitals and administrators about logjams just as quickly dropped to virtually nil. And the palpable sense of dread among the workforce had been replaced by an eagerness to sign up for refresher courses.

Given such a smashing initial success, it's little wonder that Health Partners kept turning the OLC loose on other corporate challenges. And in the three years since its launching, the program has proven to be invaluable. OLC has enabled the company to provide extensive training to its workforce in a wide range of areas, from the basics of giving a PowerPoint presentation to the intricate nuances of patient-privacy regulations.

Although the company hasn't attempted to calculate OLC's complete impact on the bottom line, it's clearly a money-saver. By recruiting instructors from its own workforce, OLC is able to deliver training for a typical cost of just $50 per student, less than half of what it might spend for outside trainers. By providing short on-site sessions that fit comfortably into employees' workdays, OLC minimizes the distraction from work at hand that often is the downside of training initiatives.

In the information-systems conversion, for example, Austin estimates that the learning center saved the company $25,000 in lost productivity. And although OLC gets the job done cheaply, it still provides effective high-quality instruction. In post-training surveys, more than 90 percent of the employees who've taken courses rate their own knowledge of the subject material as good or excellent.

Beyond that, the program has contributed to making the Health Partners workforce happier and more cohesive. Turnover, once a worrisome 19 percent, has dropped to just 8 percent, and employees often mention OLC's training courses as a key reason for their improved job satisfaction. In addition to providing employees with new skills and the chance to develop contacts with experts in other departments, OLC helps employees to perceive the corporate culture as teamwork-oriented, supportive rather than critical, and responsive to their needs.

Health Partners' OLC program provides a salient example of how a company can reach out to its employees and raise their skill levels while lowering their anxiety--and at minimal cost. For that reason, Health Partners receives this year's Optimas Award for Service.

Gathering internal intelligence and keeping in touch

In the case of the data-management system upgrade, OLC was able to step in and stave off what could have been a corporate disaster. In large part, this was accomplished because Austin and his team previously had been assigned by management to monitor the workforce's initial training by outside instructors. Not only did they possess firsthand knowledge of the software interface, but they also had met extensively with the instructors and had access to employees' training results. They understood the potential problems that employees faced, and also could identify individuals within the workforce who'd achieved some mastery of the new system. OLC's resulting success impressed upon Austin the value of good internal intelligence.

He has since taken that information-gathering to an even higher level. He tries to pick up signs of future training needs even before OLC receives a formal request. "We don't have the resources to spend a lot of time quantifying employees' performance," he says. "So instead, I've made a habit of walking around the organization every morning and talking to people, just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of what's going on."

He and OLC staffers Bonnie Smyczek and Lisa Cosentino routinely sit in on various departments' planning meetings, trying to maintain a continuously up-to-date sense of what different parts of the organization are up against--and how the OLC might help. "It's sort of like we're training the trainers," says Health Partners vice president Barbara Rebold. "They're with us all the time, working to understand what we do--listening to our ideas and trying to figure out how to get them out to the employees."

That background knowledge gives Austin and his team a running start in responding to departmental requests to create new training programs. Minimizing lead time is critical, Austin says, because one of the core tenets of OLC is "just-in-time" training.

He knows that when managers ask him to provide instruction to their staffers, they're usually trying to deal with a looming problem or challenge rather than peering into the future. "They don't want to hear something like, 'Well, we can do some research, draw up a design, and then you'll need to approve it,"' he says. "They won't tolerate someone who'll get back to them next month, because by then, their needs may have changed. What they want to hear is, 'We can have something ready for you next week.' We emphasize quick turnaround. By delivering on that consistently, we've been able to win managers' confidence."

That, in turn, has enabled OLC to obtain a high degree of cooperation from managers--in terms of both encouraging their staffs to participate in the courses and making subject experts on their staffs available to the OLC when the need arises.

Finding teaching talent and expertise internally

While Austin does hire outside training consultants, he does so sparingly. Usually he develops expertise within the Health Partners ranks by turning trained employees into volunteer instructors. "I found a business-writing consultant within our price range," he says. "I used her six times to teach courses. But we've got enough people who've mastered the material that from now on, we can teach it in-house."

One obvious reason that OLC relies on employees to teach courses is cost. But in addition, Austin says, "there's more of a comfort level when you're learning from someone you see every day. And you know that if you need help down the line with something, you can go up to that person in the hallway or the kitchen and casually get the advice you need." And because they understand the company's business, employee-trainers tend to be able to make the knowledge they impart directly applicable to their students' work.

Austin says he has relatively little difficulty lining up in house trainers, even though they are not paid more for the work. "One thing I try to do is make it as easy as possible for someone to teach a course," he says. "For example, there was one guy I wanted, a manager who was perpetually busy and kept saying that he didn't have time. I said, 'I'll have one of my people interview you, get inside your mind, and we'll put together some slides based on that.' After he taught his first class, it turned out that he enjoyed it so much that he came up and said, 'If you need me again, just let me know."'

Besides capitalizing on the satisfaction that comes from teaching, OLC works to retain instructors by making sure that they are recognized within the company for their efforts. Austin and his staff have organized an annual appreciation day, at which time trainers are treated to dessert and presented with gifts. Beyond that, managers note that volunteer instructors' performance and satisfaction level in their regular jobs often seems to improve.

To fill the company's training needs, Austin and his staff are always on the lookout for quick learners who 've mastered a skill that the rest of the staff must learn. "One of Bill's secrets is that he's really persuasive," says company VP Rebold, who herself has taught courses on data integrity and other subjects. "Once he's got you to teach once, he keeps coming back with ways to use you again, any way that he can." OLC's staff works with prospective trainers, helping them to write their programs and critiquing their presentations in advance to give them more polish.

Providing learning that doesn't clash with employees' work obligations

Instead of taking employees off-site for intense day- or weeklong courses, the OLC team prefers to deliver learning right at the company's Philadelphia headquarters, and in shorter segments--never longer than an hour and a half, and often as brief as 45 minutes. "When you give information to people in large blocks, they tend not to retain that much," Austin says. "It's better to give them a quick, digestible amount of information and then let them go back to their desks and put it to use."

By offering shorter classes, OLC also eases employees' worries about catching up with work they've missed. "When I sign up for a training course at 9 a.m., I know that by 10 a.m., I can be back at my desk," says quality management nurse Laura Brown. "The phone and e-mail messages aren't going to be piled up when I get back."

Additionally, OLC likes to schedule numerous repeat classes, to give employees another chance to reinforce the material if they feel they need it. When OLC trained employees to use the new data-processing system in 1999, for example, it offered them a chance to sit in on the course again when it was subsequently offered to other departments. That not only helped employees to develop more mastery, Austin says, but it also gave them a chance to meet people in other departments and learn about how they utilized the system in their jobs. As a result, day-to-day cooperation among workers in different parts of the company seems to have improved. "When you do training across departmental lines rather than keeping everyone separate," he says, "you help to shatter barriers, rather than helping create more of them."

Using training to build morale

In OLC's initial challenge of helping employees cope with a new data-processing system, perhaps the most immediate problem was employees' sinking spirits. In response, Austin and his team focused on providing workers with reassurance as well as new skills. "We concentrated on getting as far away as we could from the 'you've failed, you're not getting the concept' sort of pressure," he says. "If they were ashamed because they couldn't do it, they wouldn't want to come back for more training. Instead, we tried to project the message that this wasn't their fault, that the company recognized that the timing of the rollout had gone awry, and that we were there to support them with the help to which they were entitled."

To that end, OLC also provided a non-technical motivational program to augment the software nuts and bolts. The course was based on Dr. Spencer Johnson's storybook-manual on coping with change, Who Moved My Cheese? Employees liked the program so much that OLC now offers it on a quarterly basis to both new hires and veteran employees who feel that they need a lift.

"One of the things the course accomplishes is to give the employees a common language to describe what they're going through," Cosentino says. It was particularly helpful when they recently got a new CEO and went through a corporate reorganization. "We would hear people jokingly comparing themselves to Sniff and Scurry, the mice in the book. One person took it further and started calling herself Velveeta, saying that her cheese had been shredded. It was a great way to reduce the tension."

OLC continues to work hard to stay abreast of Health Partners' continually evolving training needs, offering courses ranging from medical privacy to a monthlong, four-session class on leadership for top executives and managers. Austin considers it a measure of success that even people at the top of the company are finding time to squeeze OLC's courses into their schedules. "It's 45 minutes, in and out, zip," he says. "And when they say that it isn't long enough--well, that's a criticism that I really welcome."

[workforce.com]

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