Kelley [00:00:02]:
Hello, everybody. Kelley Tenney here. Welcome back to the Caring without a Care podcast. Anand and I have been talking about the four principles of lean care, and today’s topic is all about training. Welcome back, Anand.
Anand [00:00:18]:
Thank you, Kelley. It’s good to be back again.
Kelley [00:00:20]:
I know in our previous episode you explained a little bit about training and what training actually has to do, why it’s one of those core foundations of lean care. And today I would love to ask you to explain, expand a little bit on this concept of training and talk more about why and how training is important for the success of a care management business.
Anand [00:00:42]:
Kelley, at the heart, long term care is a people’s business. We have individuals taking care of other individuals, supported by a lot of individuals. So training is important because at the end of the day, we want everybody to be better in what they do. So if they are, if you are a caregiver, you get better in caring for your clients. If you’re office staff, you get better in doing what you are supposed to do. And if we all get better, the world will be better placed.
Kelley [00:01:13]:
I love that. And as you know, many of you know, I have a long time background in education. So my heart is always in the training conversation. Right. But when it talks, you know, when we’re looking at someone who might be listening and saying, okay, you know, I know that there are some mandatory trainings that we in this industry have to attend and maybe the staff have to attend as well. But for a business owner, when they are thinking about training internally, where do they start? How can they start developing that plan to implement and to deploy the trainings within their company?
Anand [00:01:48]:
Kelley, it all begins with an introspection or self assessment. So if you are a business owner, you know, ask yourself, what is the one thing that keeps you awake at night? What is your biggest problem? What is the biggest hurdle that you face every single day that sometimes forces you to think, should you stay in the business or should you quit? What is that? If you find that one thing, then start answering, answering these questions. And why do you feel that way? And most of the times as you start asking these questions, caliber people will find that they can get better in certain things. For example, if I am losing my peace of mind because of employee retention issues, perhaps I need to get better in employee retention because the world around me is not going to change. We have the inflation pressures. We have people who are quitting at a faster pace. We cannot change all of those behaviors, but we can change that certain things internally within ourselves, as individuals, and also within our organizations. So start with that one thing, and then eventually you will follow a blueprint of your own.
Kelley [00:03:04]:
Thank you for that. And I know you have such an extensive background and expertise when it comes to care management. I would love to have you share some of your insight around what types of trainings that you’ve seen to be most effective. When it comes to training a team.
Anand [00:03:21]:
In this industry, I find that the most practical are on the job trainings. So, for example, if I am a business owner, I would like my new employee, whether it’s a biller or scheduler, to be trained on the particular function that I am expecting them to work on. So that’s the first part, which is a functional training. Then the second training is more of a behavioral training, which is on soft skills. If you are hiring people who are not coming from this industry or even if they have been in this industry, but they would need to polish their soft skills. That area, the importance of that area, I cannot overstate because soft skills are some things which people sometimes take for granted. But in our multicultural society like ours, you know, how you address individuals matters a lot. Just giving an example.
Kelley [00:04:17]:
And I really think it’s important to talk about too, like the length of training, right. Because we want to keep in mind that while you’re training, whether it’s in soft skills or your specific industry related skills, that you’re training people that are working right, you’re training people that have a job, they’re potentially working for you part time or full time. They probably have families and other things to do. And, you know, I really think that the length of training is something that we want to keep in mind so that we don’t further overwhelm our staff. Can you speak to that or can you speak to training and length? When we compare, for example, some of those mandatory trainings with the time and length of training that we should be providing internally.
Anand [00:05:01]:
So, Kelley, in this industry, generally, the mandatory trainings, which are 8 hours, are called in service trainings. And usually I have seen them work from anywhere from 15 minutes duration to 30 minutes duration, especially in a classroom setting, even in the virtual courses. But what we are talking about here today, and that’s where I would value your expertise too, is even a shorter duration of micro learning. Because what we are finding, especially after COVID era, is people don’t have patience to even sit in front of a screen for 30 minutes, especially if the total training of 30 minutes is for 30 minutes and they really care for three. So what are your thoughts, Kelley? Let me ask you this question on micro learning is what have you seen work in the past two and three years?
Kelley [00:05:50]:
Well, that’s an interesting question. I mean, something we see about microlearning, especially coming out of the pandemic, is that more and more corporate trainings have moved into this microlearning concept. And the concept of micro learning is that it’s very short and specific. So if, for example, and I know we’ve used billing as an example, if there’s a ten step process to billing, microlearning would maybe provide specific trainings around each step versus a very long training that shares all ten steps. So giving the staff member space to go through each process, each step, one at a time, at their convenience, instead of requiring an hour or 90 minutes to go through the entire step. And what this will do, you know, and you talked about, like, on the job training, is this will allow them to practice each step on the job before they move on and master the next step, which I think not only reduces overwhelm, but increases the mastery and the skill as well.
Anand [00:06:56]:
I think that’s very well put. And I think this is something that you and I, we’ll be talking about a lot in our future episodes as well.
Kelley [00:07:04]:
Yeah. And I do want to add the importance of assessment as well. Right. Recognizing that when we’re doing micro learning, just because the learning is short doesn’t mean that we should skip the evaluation or the assessment piece. And Anon, just off the top of your head, what are a few things that are specific to care management that would be important to assess in terms of the skills within your team?
Anand [00:07:37]:
So, Kelley, when we look at our team’s skill level, we always look from two perspectives. Consider that as a XY chart. Efficiency and effectiveness. So, by efficiency, I mean, how much time does it take for someone to complete a task in effectiveness is whether the task was done the right way. So if you think from the perspective from Biller, the example you mentioned, you know, was the biller able to complete the billing in a shorter amount of time frame? And secondly, was it done without making mistakes? So if you start analyzing the effectiveness of each training, you will find that, you know, the entire agency or the entire business gets better, both, not only in terms of saving time, but also in delivering better quality results. Thank you.
Kelley [00:08:28]:
And I know when it comes to training and education, that lack of assessment or evaluation is something that’s often missed in a lot of corporate training. So I appreciate you sharing that and giving our audience an idea of what some of those evaluation points might be. So thank you again for talking to us today about training and talking a little bit about the different types of trainings and things that all of our listeners could be considering if they’re looking at developing and implementing some type of training within their business. I know on the future sessions we’re going to continue these conversations around lean care. So Anand, as always, thank you for joining us.
Anand [00:09:10]:
Thank you. Gali thank you.
Kelley [00:09:13]:
Thank you to all of our listeners with the Caring without a care podcast. Be sure to subscribe and share this podcast. If you know others that are in the caregiving industry. We will see you back on future episodes.
