By Sharon K. Brothers
President & CEO, aQuire Training Solutions
Today’s regulations require more and more staff  training. Our resident population has higher care needs, and more complicated plans of care. Competition for the best staff is tougher than ever.
Fortunately, technology is more affordable and accessible than in any time in history.
At the intersection of these two market trends is one perfect point: e-training – the use of technology in training.
Consider these well-documented training benefits:
Training boosts morale. Many studies have shown that staff who have more training provided feel better prepared to do the work. They feel better about themselves and their own skills – and are more motivated to stay with you.
Training reduces staff turnover. Turnover costs money – big money. It also has a devastating effect on the quality of care you deliver. When staff who know a resident’s normal pattern leave, replacement staff may not notice when something is out of line or not quite right. The result? Increased health problems among residents and decreased satisfaction among family members and residents.
Training builds teams. A power filled e-training program will help you build a team of employees who work together as a team – not the group who continually question whether anyone on other shifts or other departments put in any effort at all. Training helps your team focus – together – on what you consider to be the most important. Good training can also help you build teams that work together to achieve even more than individuals can achieve alone.
Training is cheap – certainly cheaper than recruiting and hiring new employees. Whatever challenges your company or facility is facing, cutting into the training budget won’t fix it – it will probably just make it much, much worse as you end up spending many more dollars to fix problems. A perfect example of this is required training – it might cost a little now, but the cost to be out of compliance during survey will be much higher.
Training stimulates growth. Staff will only stretch to become the best they can be if you present them – frequently – with challenges and opportunities for growth. Don’t train, or provide poor training, including poor e-training, and staff will become mediocre – and so will your service. Stand out from the rest by offering exceptional staff training opportunities.
Training helps you keep pace with changes. You won’t stay competitive if you don’t keep up with the times. Imagine the difference in a visitor touring a building where staff are sitting at computers learning and laughing, compared to the tour where staff are doing everything efficiently, but not very energetically. That’s just on the outside – on the inside, well-trained staff will keep you current and competitive.
Training brings in money. Good e-training, focused on the important aspects of your work, can pay for itself many times over by raising morale, boosting efficiency and maintaining high standards.
Training creates a sense of value. It conveys to staff that you see them as professionals – highly valued enough for you to invest in their skills. Investing in e-training sends an important signal to your staff.
Training is a valued hiring incentive. Training is a much-valued incentive that will help you attract applicants who are motivated to continue learning, especially if you explicitly highlight you commitment to training during the advertising and hiring process. The added benefit of offering e-training will be seen as a significant advantage to younger, more tech-savvy applicants.
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Training doesn’t cut you out. Even with an e-training program in place the best training will also include training in person – times you focus on team building, or on applying what your team has learned about a concept to an actual resident. For example, learning behavioral interventions, and then discussing how to apply them to the newly admitted, challenging resident is the perfect place for blended training. Teaching minutes, too – those minutes standing in the hall during shift change, for example, are excellent opportunities to reinforce what staff have learned in their e-training courses.
Training well is an art. Even with e-training, good training is not guaranteed. Look for e-training programs that incorporate the following features to make sure you can gain the most from your e-training investment:
- It’s interesting. Good e-training should tell stories, use examples, and keep training from being dull. Stories are not only the oldest teaching technique we know, they are also clearly more effective in helping people internalize the concepts involved in the training.
- It’s engaging. When the learner’s attention is captured, he or she is learning. Bore her and no learning takes place at all. The learner must be engaged and involved in learning by using interactive learning technologies.
- It trains the whole person. In a field where we frequently talk about caring for the whole person you’d have thought we’d know all about training the whole person – but we don’t. You can’t achieve power in training unless you’re not only training the mind, you’re also training the heart. E-training that touches the heart and soul makes a difference in the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors – a real difference that shows in outcome and results. Music, stories, images are tools to training the whole person.
- It measures learning and reward. No longer is it even acceptable to read and sign and call that training. You need evidence of learning, and you need it in writing. A good e-training program should have testing, but the testing should be set up for success. It should measure real learning, and it should give you a tool for reward, too.
- It contains the courses you need. Look for an e-training solution that has the courses you need for compliance already created and ready to go. Don’t invest the time or money in custom courses if you don’t absolutely have to.
- It offers custom course creation. On the other hand, you may need custom courses that help you build your team, your culture, your way. Some e-training programs let you create your own courses, and that’s excellent if you have e-training specialists on staff. If you don’t, look for a company that offers affordable, rapid development of custom e-training courses, designed to meet the power training criteria.
- It targets YOUR training audience. Look for an e-training option that is created expressly for your staff group. Courses designed and created for nursing facility, for example, aren’t great for assisted living and community based care teams – they simply have different approaches and philosophies to care that permeate training.
How do you harness the benefit of training? Investing in an e-training solution that truly fits your needs may be an important first step. |
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