Transformational Change Module 6: Providing Training, Technical Assistance, and Workforce Development

MODULE 6: Providing Training, Technical Assistance, and Workforce Development

Focus on Job Satisfiers

Overview:

The learning curve for new staff entering the field is the highest it has been in the last fifty years. Research also suggests that turnover rates are the highest they’ve been in many years with the highest rates occurring amongst the newest staff. These three realities are all interconnected. For many years, we hired staff and “threw them into the water so they could learn how to swim.” They are drowning now instead of learning how to swim.

We haven’t adequately adjusted the ways we orient, engage, train and support staff. The demands of the field have changed dramatically and even the most experienced staff are having trouble keeping up with the pace of change. It is almost as hard for experienced staff to re-learn the ways of doing things as it is for entry level staff to learn new skills.

Change is unsettling for everyone. When we introduce a change, and staff appear to resist that change, frustration follows. But “resistance” has three levels. Some “can’t” do what we’re asking them to do because they don’t have the new skills they need. Some “don’t” do what we’re asking them to do because they have old habits that they’re having trouble breaking. And some “won’t” do it because they don’t believe in the change we’re trying to implement.

We need to redesign our training and support model. The new model should be planned to facilitate the implementation of change. It should be organized to adequately explain and support the changes we need to make before we begin to implement them. It should adequately aid staff in the development of the new skills they need, help staff to break their old habits when those habits are disrupting the changes, and to identify and then counsel out those few staff who refuse to support the changes we need to make.

The best way to develop a change-ready workforce is for leadership to create a teaching and learning community where everyone helps everyone else adjust to the changes.

“The traditional relationship between employers and employees is changing. The organization has the power to hire, evaluate and fire us. But while we are here, we would like a seat at the table to discuss those items that impact us the most. We don’t want to make those decisions. We just want to have an opportunity to discuss them.”

2. RECRUITING, HIRING, ONBOARDING, AND MENTORING

Streamline recruiting and onboarding strategies and provide adequate emotional support, intensive training, and mentoring during the first 90 days of employment.

Recommendations

• Provide leadership and supervisors training on team building and how to create cohesive teams that encourages engagement with staff and recognizes that half of the power of a good team comes from the dynamics of the staff members themselves and the other half must come from the leadership of the team.
• Senior leaders must support leadership and supervisors on building an organizational culture that supports the organizational values.
• Leaders must be able to encourage the sharing of different perspectives and ensure the need for diversity within their teams.
• Leaders and supervisors need to find ways to partner with staff when trying to find ways to resolve issues like productivity, documentation, and accountability while at the same time building a team culture.
• Senior leaders must evaluate leadership’s decisions based upon the impact they will have on staff and employee well-being and involve staff at various levels of the organization in these decisions.
• Leaders and supervisors must recognize that staff will treat those they work with as they are treated by the organization
• Leadership must fully engage with staff around those issues that relate directly to their personal health, safety, and well-being as this will send many messages about respect, compassion, concern, and partnership, which are the messages that will keep staff appreciating and respecting their organization.
• Create listening sessions throughout the organization with staff to engage them in discussions that create opportunities for true interaction and partnership with leaders, recognizing the “star performers” amongst the staff often want a chance to be more involved and to form a full partnership with their leaders.
• Follow up on input learned from the listening sessions and act upon those recommendations whenever possible.

Hiring

• Use initial screening phone calls to determine potential applicants’ general communication skills, attitude, and timeliness which can typically be done by the HR Department
• After the HR screening the next interview should be immediately set up, HR staff should have access to the schedule of the next interviewer.
• The interview process needs to move quickly or candidates who are looking at multiple opportunities will move on to another offer.
• To speed the hiring process when you have multiple openings invite a group of potential applicants to a group interview process / informational meeting with selected supervisors and employees present, who can then identify candidates who should either be immediately interviewed or invited back.
• Interviewers should use a structured interview process with all potential employees (with 10 to 15 questions at the most and do not ask ANY follow-up questions).
• Always have two interviewers present and organizations must find ways to incorporate youth and family in the hiring process
• Rate each answer on a scale of 1-5 and for each question have an example of the best possible and worst possible answers to help your rating of applicants
• One interview question should be: “Tell me a story in your life that connects with the purpose of this organization”
• Have a specific interview question to help evaluate the fit between your organizational values and the valises of the potential candidate
• One interview question to assess a candidate’s empathy around families and the difficulties of raising a youth should be “Tell me what you would do the same as your family did in raising you and what would you do differently and why”
• Interviewers should listen more than they talk
• Find ways to give candidates you are interested in a realistic perspective of the work they will be doing, e.g., showing a video “a day in the life of a worker”; offering a face-to-face meeting with other employees in the role capacity they are applying for to talk about the position; shadowing a worker
• Provide observation of staff in real work situations (videos are ok) and opportunities to interact with youth if in a residential setting
• Background checks should be conducted in accordance with licensing and best practice guidelines and include vaccination status
• The organization needs to determine how it will process exemptions, within its state’s guidelines, when minor criminal convictions appear, especially for parent partner positions.
• Put all job offers in writing

Onboarding

• Provide a robust onboarding and agency culture overview led by the CEO, senior leadership, and key staff before beginning the work assignment, if possible, but no later than the first 30 days.
• Orientation should include re-stating the values of the organization and include discussion with current employees about how their values mesh
• Supervisors need to know how to build self-confidence, offer encouragement, and promote inclusivity with their staff.
• Request feedback from new employees on the onboarding process

Mentoring

• Develop a mentoring system that pairs current staff with new employees during the first 90 days since that is the typical time period in which an employee decides to stay or leave
• The mentor should be in addition to the employee’s supervisor
• Ensure there is a formal job evaluation within the first month of hire done by both the mentor and supervisor

Recommendations (a number of these recommendations come from “A Checklist for Success” presentation by Bruce Anderson)

Recruiting

• Recognize traditional patterns of recruitment, hiring, training and support aren’t addressing current workforce needs and new practices need to be developed
• Ensure your website’s home page has a link for “perspective new hires” that targets the information behind that button to a social justice marketing platform and allow easy access to complete an on-line application
• Conduct salary surveys in your local community and state to determine if your salaries are competitive with other similar organizations
• Explore offering telework and work from home opportunities to staff whose positions allow for such flexibility and develop policies to support these practices
• Clearly articulate upfront your vaccination policies to potential employees
• Consider offering retention bonuses to employees to reduce costly turnover
• Consider offering recruitment Incentives to current employees to help recruit new staff with an increased incentive when the employee is a returning employee

“I want to know that someone in the organization is watching out for me and is truly interested in assuring my success.”

3. MISSION AND LEARNING

Make sure leaders can connect the daily work to the Mission and can appreciate the power of celebrating successes while working to install a learning environment that allows for mistakes and offers ongoing support and encouragement.

Recommendations

• If a Mission is to be effective, it must be the Mission for everyone in the organization, the Board’s, the CEO’s, the Senior Leadership Team’s, and staff
• Invite staff members to help to figure out the best ways for the organization to advance its Mission.
• Develop a process to review your organizational mission during all major strategic planning activities and the process should involve input from individuals at all levels within the organization, i.e., staff, leadership, board, parents, youth, etc.
• Design your organization to facilitate teaching and learning to help staff feel calmer and less anxious about the work
• Help staff handle their mistakes, deal with any embarrassment, and move on with the work

“I surely don’t stay because the work is so hard. That would be crazy. I stay because the hard work is so important.”

4. RETENTION AND ADVANCEMENT THRU CAREER LADDERS

Because turnover is such a significantly expensive proposition for an organization the focus should be on efforts to retain employees ensuring opportunities for growth and advancement through such tools as the presence of a career ladder that is fair and equitable for everyone.

Recommendations

• The immediate supervisor is potentially the single most important person in improving staff retention and the quality of the relationship is very important. Supervisors need to motivate, encourage, challenge, teach and provide emotional support to staff, especially in times of crisis.
• Retention depends upon supportive supervision and leadership’s ability to maximize job satisfiers and minimize dissatisfiers.
• Retention can be enhanced when staff see the work as more of a career than a job.
• Stay interviews should be conducted during the first 90 days that ask the questions: “what will it take for you to be here for 1 year of more?”; “what should stay the same”; “what should change”.
• The direct supervisor should do stay interviews, not management or leadership.
• Build celebrations into your organizational culture and connecting those celebrations to your Mission to help to improve retention.
• Ensure equity in advancement and address DEI issues in making these decisions.
• Maximize the IT capacity within your organizations to find efficiencies and strategies that support staff in their work.
• Resolve any issues related to work/life balance, flexibility, and supervision for staff.
• Create more inclusive work environments that permit perspectives to be freely shared including executive accountability.

“A career ladder is only attractive for me if I can be given the opportunity to climb it. If I can’t see me in a leadership position, then it can’t be me in any leadership position”

5. SUPERVISION AND APPRECIATION

Help every supervisor to learn the best ways to proactively motivate, encourage, challenge, support and teach while working to assure that all leaders understand the absolute importance of expressing daily appreciation to all staff.

Recommendations

• Assure that your leaders and supervisors have received the same training that the organization is offering to your new staff
• Effective supervisors have a “share-vision” where both sides can sometimes take the lead and both sides offer perspectives that are considered.
• Supervisors need to be well-trained, self-confident, and self-aware before they can begin to share responsibility and authority with their staff and teams.
• Leadership needs to recognize the differences between supervisors who focus exclusively on management issues and supervisors who balance management needs with the application of leadership skills; the exclusive focus on management issues, can lead to high levels of frustration while the balanced approach can lead to higher levels of job satisfaction.
• Leaders and supervisors must create a consistent pattern of expressing appreciation to staff for the work they do; if that pattern can be installed within the culture of organizations, it will, in all probability, eventually have a positive impact on staff retention.
• Conduct exit interviews prior to the last day of work and again 60 days after the last day of work and ask for highlights of benefits of working for your organization
• Develop leaving rituals for departing staff and find ways to positively acknowledge employees departing for cause

“I will either stay for a good supervisor or I will run from a bad supervisor. Supervisors are that important.”

MODULE 6: Providing Training, Technical Assistance, and Workforce Development

Focus on Job Dissatisfiers

Overview:

The learning curve for new staff entering the field is the highest it has been in the last fifty years. Research also suggests that turnover rates are the highest they’ve been in many years with the highest rates occurring amongst the newest staff. These three realities are all interconnected. For many years, we hired staff and “threw them into the water so they could learn how to swim.” They are drowning now instead of learning how to swim.

We haven’t adequately adjusted the ways we orient, engage, train and support staff. The demands of the field have changed dramatically and even the most experienced staff are having trouble keeping up with the pace of change. It is almost as hard for experienced staff to re-learn the ways of doing things as it is for entry level staff to learn new skills.

Change is unsettling for everyone. When we introduce a change, and staff appear to resist that change, frustration follows. But “resistance” has three levels. Some “can’t” do what we’re asking them to do because they don’t have the new skills they need. Some “don’t” do what we’re asking them to do because they have old habits that they’re having trouble breaking. And some “won’t” do it because they don’t believe in the change we’re trying to implement.

We need to redesign our training and support model. The new model should be planned to facilitate the implementation of change. It should be organized to adequately explain and support the changes we need to make before we begin to implement them. It should adequately aid staff in the development of the new skills they need, help staff to break their old habits when those habits are disrupting the changes, and to identify and then counsel out those few staff who refuse to support the changes we need to make.

The best way to develop a change-ready workforce is for leadership to create a teaching and learning community where everyone helps everyone else adjust to the changes.

Recommendations

• Organizations must promote the importance of engaging in ongoing conversations with their staff around both the significance of their own well-being and the willingness of the organization to provide them with support and assistance.
• Help teams build skills of open communication in order to reduce the stigma connected to staff members admitting to feelings of fear, anxiety, and frustration.
• Organizations need to be prepared to respond both proactively and compassionately to dangerous situations involving their staff; they do come up and staff need to see that the organization cares about both the staff member and the youth by how they handle dangerous situations.
• Organizations need to ask their staff what the organization needs to do to help them to feel safe and not attempt to minimize the importance of their fear; fear is a very powerful force and staff leave the field when they feel they are no longer safe in the work they do.
• Build the capacity for emotional regulation into the training offered to supervisors who must be quite expert in emotional regulation; experts in practicing it themselves and experts in teaching its use to those they supervise and support.
• Train staff in the dynamics of anger; how trauma can create and power someone’s anger. Help staff learn how to help avoid anger escalations and to deescalate presentations of anger when it can’t be avoided.
• Develop teams so they will embrace a commitment to provide mutual support and accountability to all their fellow team members and encourage them to adopt a cultural value that focuses on supporting the wellness of all their team members.

“Once you start feeling very anxious it can be hard to settle yourself. You can get very anxious for a lot of reasons, if you make a mistake, if you don’t know how to do something you need to know how to do, if you forgot to do something important. It can snowball on you”.

2. WAGES

Since wages tend to be seen as indicators of safety and security for employees every effort must be taken to assure all positions are paid at the market rate that is connected to those positions.

Recommendations

• Recruitment and retention issues will continue to be a challenge as agencies face wage inflation with limited capacity to impact their rates.
• Recruitment will be driven by marketplace rates that offer family-sustaining wage expectations.
• Organizations need to explore non-traditional staffing options to recruit and sustain employees.
• Recognize wages tended to be seen as indicators of safety and security for employees.
• Explore enhanced and non-traditional benefit packages as a method of enhancing wages

“A lot of us have decided that we can’t really raise a family on these wages, you can get more money by leaving for another job in the same field or by getting a job in another field”.

3. FATIGUE/EXPECTATIONS/BALANCE

Train all leaders in self-care and then establish the value of self-care as a key element of the organization’s culture, review all job descriptions to assure that everyone in the organization has a “doable” job while assuring that a work/life balance is an organizational value.

Recommendations

• Supervisors must recognize the concept of “burnout” today as both emotional and physical exhaustion and provide emotional support to staff, recognizing the special challenges they face in providing those emotional supports remotely to staff working from home.
• Review job descriptions at least every two years to assure they are current and accurate and eliminate non-vital expectations that are no longer relevant or required.
• Supervisors must reconsider their expectations of staff around the need: to respond quickly to emails and texts, even when not working; to respond to a change in scheduling at a moment’s notice; to be expected to take calls at home. and to work on projects at home.
• Assess if your organization’s culture truly permits and encourages a work- life balance.

Recommendations

• Executive Leaders and Senior Leadership need to have continuous communications with their employees and need to be visible to staff in all parts of an organization, even large ones, by taking periodic opportunities to be physically present.
• The challenge for many Executive Leaders is to know what their staff most want to hear about. The only sure way to know that is to ask, even though whatever is requested will surely change over time.
• The answers to what staff need most around communication will probably keep changing so leaders have to just keep asking what their staff need most in terms of communications.
• Ensure the purpose of any meeting held within the organization is clear to all participants
• Ensure there are ritualized endings, especially when someone is “no longer here” and from an HR basis you cannot give the reason why, but need to communicate their departure to staff, because if you don’t address this with the team, they will create their own story of why that person is no longer there and that story may well become part of the culture and live on forever
• Leaders need to be truthful and transparent – don’t sugar coat situation if someone obviously has not done well in the organization, but you can still evaluate with the team the humanity of the individual

Recommendations

• Leaders need to recognize for some staff developing the new skills is the greatest hurdle, for others, it’s the replacement of those long-standing habits and there will be a few who won’t agree to the changes because they just don’t believe in them.
• Leaders need to patiently teach the new skills, support staff in replacing their old habits and stay positive through the process of helping staff to adapt to the needed changes.
• To minimize the high levels of dissatisfaction with the non-negotiables, some organizations have begun to engage their staff by asking how the organization can help them to make those non-negotiables more endurable. “We can’t do much about what we have to do but we can talk about how we should go about doing them.”

“Leaders should forecast the changes before we have to make them. Give us some time to talk about them. Let us fight about them a little bit. That’s just normal stuff. Listen to us. Be patient. Answer our questions. We’ll agree to make the changes. But changing is hard.”