Joe Mull, M.Ed is a healthcare leadership trainer and keynote speaker who works with healthcare organizations that want their leaders to engage, inspire, and succeed. As an expert in employee engagement and healthcare leadership development, Joe gives physicians and managers the skills and tools they need to engineer teams that work hard, get along, and wow patients. After more than a decade in healthcare, Joe knows that when leaders develop skills related to leadership, communication, and teambuilding, they can stop putting fires out every day and prevent them from sparking in the first place. Bring Joe in to keynote your conference, design and facilitate a retreat, or beef up your leader training. For more info or to book Joe now visit www.joemull.com.
Last month a hospital CEO asked me to deliver a 2 hour training for staff on teamwork, based on my book No More Team Drama. He said the workshop had to be so good it impacted how employees showed up for the next year, because he didn’t have the time or resources to do anything else on the topic. I told him that while the workshop was quite good, if I agreed to his approach I’d be wasting his employees’ time and the hospital’s money. I’ll tell you what his approach was missing in this episode of Your Practice Ain’t Perfect, on Why Staff Training Doesn’t Stick. Play that funky theme song, please…
Here’s the deal. One and done training doesn’t work. If you gather employees to do periodic training on topics like teamwork, or customer service, or processes and procedures, and you expect a one-time event to change behavior over the long-term, you will be disappointed. Why? Because 50% of what your employees learned in the training is forgotten within hours of of the program, and 80% of it will have faded within a matter of days.
The only way to overcome this predictable phenomenon is to pair your training event with two additional components: a set of clearly spelled out micro-behaviors for employee use, and a reinforcement curriculum that unfolds over time.
Think of it this way: When you taught your kids to tie their shoes, did you review it once then toss them a Nike and say “good luck, sweetie!” Of course not, that would be absurd! I bet you did two things that made the learning stick.
First, you broke the challenge down into smaller, bite-sized steps. Second, you worked on it repeatedly over time, until they could tie their shoes without even thinking about it anymore.
These are the same two approaches that must be built into any kind of development efforts if you want knowledge to be retained and new behaviors to show up.
Your team needs bite-sized steps – micro-behaviors. To get them, your training content will have to push past the generic, descriptive language that is far too common in workshops. For example: Lots of training on Teamwork use words like respect, collaboration, support. Those are adjectives which are subjective and unclear.
When I teach teams how to be respectful or increase collaboration, I zeroing in on minute tactics like “repeat someone’s objections back to them to confirm your understanding” or “ask questions face to face whenever possible, use email as a last resort” This hyper-specificity is key to making change possible and making training useable.
Then, after the training event, those behaviors – and employees’ reasons for wanting to use them - must be reinforced again and again over time. I call this a reinforcement curriculum. This is all the ways you keep those specific new behaviors top of mind for staff in the weeks and months following the training. Your Reinforcement Curriculum can include sharing stories, posting reminder signage in backstage areas, revisiting content in meetings and huddles, or delivering bite-sized reminders, scripts, and tools via email. These things must drip-drip-drip out over time, to help the topic go from being something they heard to being something they learned.
The hospital CEO I told you about is a smart guy who is dedicated to his employees, his organization, and the patients they see every day. When I told him that his one and done approach wouldn’t give him the results he needed, and told him why, he agreed and we ended up partnering on a more sophisticated project where I built a reinforcement curriculum for him, to pair with my onsite workshop. The content will drip out over 6 months, requires little added time or coordination from hospital leadership, and the cost wasn’t that much more than a stand alone training.
www.joemull.com
