Enhancing Employee Success using Evidence Based Practices

As organizations who provide youth care and community services, we are familiar with employee shortages and higher than desired turnover rates. We are also familiar with the resources it takes to effectively onboard, train and support new employees. While this cycle has always created some stress for non-profit youth and community serving organizations, the workforce impacts of the COVID 19 pandemic over the past two years have elevated the need for new and innovative solutions to this ongoing critical need.
Research teaches us that initiatives and programs which focus on employee felt sense of safety and efficacy help enhance employee success on all levels. Amy Edmunson and colleagues have identified psychological safety as a key factor in determining the likelihood of employees asking for help, asking questions, adapt well to organizational change, and even innovate quickly (2018, 2021). Psychological safety in the workplace begins to develop on day one through supportive and effective employee onboarding, training, and performance support.
Historically, research has demonstrated an ineffectiveness of employee training practices in the human service field leaving employees without the target skills and competencies required to provide quality care. However, insights and research from the field of behavioral analysis provide a framework for developing effective staff training and performance support practices and tools. Effective staff training is known to be linked to a positive impact on overall employee satisfaction, performance, and retention.
This presentation will offer research support, tools, and strategies to help organizations, leaders, and supervisors, integrate evidence based staff training and performance support practices as a method of increasing felt sense of safety, efficacy, and overall employee wellbeing as a means of sustaining a highly skilled workforce in youth and community serving organizations.