Look at environment before trying to'fix' staff
There are times when health care organizations don't need to train, according to veteran educator Louis Phillips, EdD.
"What we often do when a group of people are not performing as they should is send them to training as a fix," says Phillips, a Greenville, SC-based education and training consultant.
"Then we send them back to the workplace, and nothing changes." Many times, that's analogous to taking a fish from a polluted lake, cleaning it off, and then putting it back into the polluted lake, he says.
Phillips suggests trainers learn to be internal consultants to their organizations, identifying the reasons for nonperformance and suggesting the most appropriate solutions. "Sometimes the most appropriate solution is not training, but some other form of intervention," he says.
If your access services department has an absentee or a low morale problem, for example, do a needs assessment and find out what's causing the problem, Phillips advises. "It's usually [the employee's] relationship with the supervisor or the manager. It's not that they don't know how to do the job, but that somebody's keeping them from doing the job."
He uses the figure "Y" to illustrate the minimum requirements for a person to perform competently. (See illustration.) At the bottom of the "Y" is the competent employee. On the line branching to the left is the individual's repertoire, and under that heading are these attributes: knowledge, skills, capacity to do the job (both physical and mental), and motives. The line branching to the right represents the supporting environment, which includes data (information and feedback), tools, materials, and incentives.
Interestingly, Phillips notes, money is not an incentive once the employee's needs are met. Rather, the No. 1 incentive is a sense of achievement. Subsequent incentives include recognition, enjoyment of the work itself, and responsibility. When employees are not performing as they should, there's a tendency to focus on the left branch, and send them out for training, he says. But the problem usually is not in the repertoire but in the supporting environment, Phillips contends.
When employees aren't performing, the organization should do a needs assessment, Phillips says. He suggests looking first at the supporting environment to see if the situation is caused by the following factors:
· poor supervision;
· lack of timely information;
· inappropriate incentives;
· lack of feedback;
· inadequate materials or tools.
Only then should the focus move to the individual's repertoire.
"What a needs assessment does is analyze this whole model we've looked at, but in most needs assessments, [managers] ask the wrong question, like,'What courses or training do you need?' What they should ask is,'What are the problems and issues that keep you from performing your job as you know you should?'" Phillips says.
Staff may not know the solution, he says, but they will know what the problem is. "Then it's up to you and others to figure out the appropriate intervention. If you screw up the first question, the whole program is wrong."
Or, to use another Phillips analogy: "When the boat misses the harbor, it's rarely the fault of the harbor - and when an educator misses the target audience, it's rarely the fault of the audience."
You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content