Author: Myra Wilson, Director

Elder Care: It Takes a Village

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If you have an aging loved one — grandparent, parent, aunt, uncle, or family friend – living in a senior nursing community or being cared for at home by a home health organization, the people performing the most menial-sounding jobs may be the most important people in their lives. They are the van driver who takes them for a day out to the mall or to the clinic for dialysis; the laundry worker who picks up their dirty clothes every morning and brings them back clean and carefully hung or folded; the activities director who brings music, art and crafts to engage their minds, bodies and hearts; the housekeeper who cleans the floor no matter what mess s/he encounters. They also are the groundskeeper who mows the lawn and manicures the flower beds; the custodian who hangs a new memento on the wall; the hairdresser who keeps them neatly groomed.

My mother spent the final eight years of her life in a nursing facility. That became her permanent home, and almost everyone treated her as if she owned the place. She knew most of the staff by name and would share with me her interactions with them. It became clear after a few months that she only spoke in detail about the employees that I mentioned in the first paragraph. The nurses and aides, of course, were giving her the physical caring she needed to stay healthy, yet the non-clinical staff were the people she told me about. She knew about their marital status and family life, what they did on their non-working time, and their favorite hobbies. Mom didn’t get to know the clinical staff on the same personal level; they had many residents who demanded their expertise, and her interactions with clinical staff were focused on medical needs.

The next time you visit your aging loved one living in a senior community, pay attention to the staff:  not only those who are giving the meds or changing bedpans, but also those working behind the scenes to make life more comfortable for the residents.

Elder Care Certificate

Alber Enterprise Center has created a new training program for those on the front lines who would like some help understanding the challenges of the elders in their care. The Elder Care Certificate program, designed for anyone who cares for or interacts with older adults, is a wealth of information about issues facing our aging population. This program will transform the way participants work with elders and enhance their status as caring individuals. Participants will gain expertise in dealing with the aging population, will have a better understanding of the challenges seniors face, and will be better equipped with the interpersonal tools to function as contributing members of a caring team. The modules include topics in gerontology, personal effectiveness, communication, problem-solving, and leadership/customer service skills.

The 16-hour pilot program was delivered in 2017, and the 14 participants who were randomly selected to experience the program offered high praise for their experience. One stated, “The thing that touched and inspired us the most is that it changed our attitudes and the way we look at our residents.”  Another commented: “What is the #1 thing that I will use in the future? Listening:  Making each resident or coworker feel that they are very important and have my undivided attention.”

To be clear, there are actually two aspects to this program:  the full, noncredit Elder Care Certificate program (dates will be announced soon) and the Elder Care Certificate Train-the-Trainer, being offered at various locations in Ohio throughout the year. The Ohio State University has licensed the Elder Care Certificate curriculum, and the train-the-trainer workshop will ensure that the certificate program is delivered to as many workers as possible across the state. (Certain criteria must be met to become a certified trainer.)

For more information, contact  Myra Wilson.2025@osu.edu or Anne Johnson.6754@osu.edu.

Are Your Employees All the Way In?

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Employees can be fully “in” and performing well, checked out and simply filling space, or somewhere in between. This is called “employee engagement,” which can affect job satisfaction, productivity and teamwork. According to Gallup®, “… only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work.” Is this why we should care about employee engagement?

Gallup has conducted research for years regarding various levels of employee engagement and what those mean in terms of performance and business success.  Robyn Reilly of Gallup advises in her article, Five Ways to Improve Employee Engagement Now, “Converting this group of (not engaged) employees into engaged workers is the most effective strategy that any organization can implement to increase performance and sustainable long-term growth.” This begs the question:  How do we get employees more engaged?

The late Dr. Donald Clifton of the Gallup organization spent decades researching human nature and organizational behavior. One of my favorite quotes from Dr. Clifton, who founded the strengths movement, is:  What would happen if we studied what is right with people versus what is wrong with people?

Performance management has always been focused on trying to find ways to “fix” weaknesses in employees to make them better rather than looking at and enhancing their strengths. Weakness-fixing only prevents failure, whereas strengths-building leads to excellence.  Building on the strengths movement, Gallup research has shown that organizations that focus on their employees’ strengths and who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged in their jobs and three times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life than those who don’t.  In addition, employees who know their strengths are also 8% more productive and teams that focus on strengths everyday have 12.5% higher productivity. Our society has few, if any, places where people can learn about their talents, in order to capitalize on their strengths.

Think about it:  if workers understand their strengths and those of their team members, they are more likely to find their work to be rewarding and motivating.  While on the job, those same employees are more likely to be involved, “here” instead of somewhere else mentally or just waiting until their next break.

Alber Enterprise Center has found CliftonStrengths® to be a valuable set of tools and a mindset for providing a pathway to better understanding and more creative, positive ways to get things done – together. Organizational leadership and management practice; vision, mission and values; and business performance, structure and value creation are all positively affected by focusing on individual strengths and how they build a cohesive team.

To learn more about how to bring out the best in your people and work toward increasing employee engagement, please contact Alber Enterprise Center, alber@osu.edu or call us at 740-725-6325 to start the conversation.

 

Reinforcement: What, Why, & How?

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Reinforcement – What, Why & How?

How effective is your organization’s training? According to the Association for Talent Development (ATD), 90 percent of training is forgotten within days no matter how skillful or engaging the trainer is.  If research studies are accurate, very few of your learners have actually changed their behaviors as a result of training. Reinforcing knowledge and skills learned in training or professional development programs is a process that takes time and strategic investment. Ultimately, your training will be more effective because of reinforcement.

What is reinforcement? Basically, “…training reinforcement is a solution that uses your current training material, learning objectives, and (reinforcement) goals to reinforce important skills and knowledge learned during a training event or course.”[1]

One explanation – and one aspect to reinforcement – is the Ebbinghaus Retention Curve, which displays the percentage of a topic that we recall after paying attention to it repeatedly. Named for psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus, this concept is about teaching people to remember something important. Ebbinghaus hypothesized that it is much harder for learners to retain something that is not meaningful to them, and that learners will have more success if the learning is stretched out over a period of time, instead crammed into a short burst. However, remembering information is only part of the issue when it comes to training and development.  Changing behaviors and/or developing new habits based on one’s training – that’s the other part of the issue.   A good reinforcement tool maximizes your training investment dollars and helps to change your learners’ behaviors.

So how do you change behaviors? Training reinforcement focuses on changing old habits and developing new ones. “Without behavior change, you’re not reinforcing; you are only reminding.” – Anthonie Wurth.  One of the founders of Mindmarker®, Wurth understood that your training content must be reinforced with small, bite-sized messages to engage the learner. More than a reminder service, Mindmarker® is considered the leader in training reinforcement.  The three learning phases of your reinforcement program are: awareness, knowledge and skills, and behavior change.  Of course, timing and content are critical to the process through each phase.

Just a few of the benefits of training reinforcement, according to Mindmarker®:

  • Training reinforcement leads to better training practices, which creates superior performance results.
  • A fully-integrated training reinforcement program helps decrease the amount of knowledge lost post-training.
  • With the training dollars spent by businesses each year, it’s critical to obtain the highest ROI.

Alber Enterprise Center has been integrating post-workshop reinforcement for clients who want specific behavior changes in workshop attendees, and those clients have seen positive results.  As you can imagine, instead of the normal 10-20% retention of the workshop material, clients are realizing a much higher return on their training dollar investment.

[1] From Mindmarker “Beginners Guide to Reinforcement” page 6

BRIDGE: How a Signature Program Got its Roots

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Not all problems are created equal.  Using one’s intuition or past practices might work for solving very simple problems.  Yet our past and our view of the future may limit our solutions.  When we are facing an issue or challenge that requires a fresh solution and has many interrelated components — perhaps several different constituents are involved or can be effected by the solution — a more robust process will bring you a clearer, more novel solution.  Based on Snowden’s (2007) research, there are four levels of problems – simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. As director of the Alber Enterprise Center, I helped to develop an issue management model specifically designed to resolve our clients’ complex problems.

In my own research comparing The BRIDGE Issue Management Process with other, more basic problem-solving models, I determined that there are three features that differentiate our model.  The BRIDGE:

  1. Identifies a system of interrelated solutions that resolve the issue;
  2. Provides templates for clients to document the desired outcomes, action steps, measurements, and resources into formal documents; and
  3. Gains buy-in from their respective organizations to implement and sustain the solution.

Deciding how to solve problems and issues can create a challenge in itself.  Giroux (2009) conducted a study of the decision-making habits of small business owners and entrepreneurs in Canada.  Using one’s intuition seems to be a common practice, as was learning from past incorrect decisions.  Also, emotions may unduly influence the decision if the problem is critical to the success of the business.  Without a formal process that helps them view the problem objectively, small business owners sometimes lacked the ability to make sound decisions (Giroux, 2009).  They are limited by their past experience and their view of the horizon.

There is history in the phrase “issue management process.” It was coined by the late Howard Chase in 1976 to describe a process he crafted for corporations to manage their public relations image and to influence public policy. Although Chase restricted his model to the corporate and public policy environment, issue management eventually progressed into a discipline used by other types of entities to develop strategies for a wide range of issues in their respective environments.

Extension’s new “signature program,” The BRIDGE: Issue Management Process, is not actually a program as educators know it.  It is a tool that anyone experienced with facilitating groups can utilize to solve complex issues with their constituents.  The BRIDGE creatively incorporates adaptations of several organization analysis tools designed by business scholars arranged in a logical flow.  First, the facilitator carefully chooses stakeholders familiar with the issue and invites them to a workshop to guide them through the process.  The facilitator then coaches the participants to storyboard what they can control or influence about the issue; to reflect on where they are currently and what they want as an end result in measurable terms; and to identify forces driving the issue as well as barriers that must be overcome.  The group then designs a comprehensive, multifaceted solution that specifies the action steps and addresses the human resistance to change that may hold back implementation.  Creating an evaluation plan for monitoring the outcomes is the final phase of the process.

We use The BRIDGE when 1) there are many components to an issue that are interrelated, and minor changes to one component could cause major consequences to others; 2) we want a creative solution that has not been done before; and 3) we have a short time period to resolve the issue.

I hope that this post helps to broaden your perspective on problem-solving vs. issue management, and that the next time you’re faced with a complex issue, you’ll reach for The BRIDGE tool kit.