Harness the Power of Learning

Education turns jobs into careers and day-to-day tasks into a mission. It changes the lives of staff, their families, and their customers. And education reminds us that we are in the business of changing and positively impacting the lives of our customers.

Successful education within a business is based on three elements: passion, organization, and accountability. The first element, passion, requires giving some thought as to how best to motivate employees to learn. For education of any kind to work requires a passion for learning from the top down. You cannot force people to learn; you can only give them the opportunity to learn. Present education as an encouragement. Make it part of your company’s culture.

The second element, organization, is equally evident. For training to be effective, it must be part of an overall vision and plan. If you cannot write the education plan down, there is no vision. Ask yourself what are the talents, prior experience, and needs of the staff. Then create a plan to meet those needs.

A good education plan should include timelines, incentives, reviews, rewards, and encouragement. Ideally, it is a cooperative step-by-step plan between management and staff. As each step in the plan is accomplished, every staff member should be able to answer the question, “What is next?”

Finally, create time and space for education. You know that if your employees knew their jobs and customers better, they would make fewer mistakes. However, the urgency of correcting those mistakes overwhelms the importance of making certain the mistakes never happen. Time will never be found—it must be created. So make time for education.

The last element, accountability, means making sure your employees understand you are serious about learning and rewarding their education efforts. Monitor and encourage the successful completion of each step of an education program through testing, certification, or evaluation.

Some companies use incentives to reward employees for continuing education while other companies make continuing education part of their job requirements. Consider creating a certificate program to give your employees a finish line to strive for.

Proper employee training that is part of a corporate vision improves performance, profitability, and possibilities. Customers prefer to deal with educated staff. In addition, educated staff members are usually more satisfied and have lower turnover. Finally, an educated staff is more likely to think creatively and be open to suggesting, implementing, and embracing operational changes.

Computers Pave the Way
Technology, such as online education, offers exciting training opportunities and alternatives. For companies with multiple branches, online education use means a consistent message and foundation can be presented from branch to branch. For small companies that have found access to education difficult, online training from a common source makes this knowledge accessible and affordable.

As we grow more technologically sophisticated, other approaches, such as e-conferencing and Web-based interaction, will create even more education possibilities. However, while technology offers some great tools for presenting training, valid and relevant content that is specific to our industry and the needs of our staffs must be the core of the training we create.

What better career can there be than one whose primary mission is changing people’s lives—and what better describes the common purpose of education and of our industry? One employee at a time, one customer at a time, we are changing this world for the better.

Gary Schwantz, PhD, teaches in the College of Human Sciences at Texas Tech University and serves as the Director of Educational Services for The MED Group, Lubbock, Tex.

Make the Toughest Part of HME Easy

Since 1989 there has been somewhat of an argument among HME managers and owners as to what is the hardest part of our industry: getting paid or finding and keeping good employees. Both are tough, but there is one thing we can exert some control over and that is the way we hire and train our employees.

Even in today’s post-September 11 economy, it is still hard to find good experienced employees. For the most part, salaries in our industry are moderate at best and many employees can earn more money in other industries. It is expensive and time-consuming to find employees so, once we do find good people, we need to try to keep them.

Recently, two of my clients had to hire additional staff. We waited until after the holidays to place advertisements to fill the positions. To our surprise both companies received two or three times more resumes than they had ever received before. There were quite a few good candidates that we wanted to talk to but very few had HME-specific experience. Many had held some medical industry-related positions, but they lacked the exact the experience we hoped for.

This is a common occurrence in our industry. We all see good people we would like to work with, but they do not know a commode from an elbow splint, to clean up an old phrase.

I suggest that if you must choose between either hiring someone you are not excited about but who has HME experience or hiring a bright person that you, your staff, and your patients will enjoy working with but who lacks HME experience, you should hire the latter. It is now a lot easier to train good people without HME experience in our industry.

New learning resources, such as Internet-based education, are creating simple ways to make complicated HME jobs easy to understand. Good ongoing education for every employee will result in fewer mistakes and happier employees. When excessive mistakes are avoided, stress levels in the workplace are reduced and longevity in all staff positions increases.

Internet Education to the Rescue
Once the only practical way an inexperienced employee could gain knowledge about our industry was through on-the-job training. Other methods existed, but usually they were either too expensive or too difficult to administer. For example, seminars given at state and national meetings are often expensive to send people to and the information offered is sometimes biased. In addition, many well-known industry consultants put on seminars, but these are even more expensive to attend and the seminar subjects tend to be concentrated on billing. Books, a few videotapes, and some computer CDs offer education and training. However, these resources contain fixed information. If new rules, new products, or new procedures come out, you must purchase the educational materials all over again. Also, if you use books, videotapes, or CDs for training, you must devise, administer, and grade tests, and it is difficult to track the education completion and success rate of your employees.

However, with the Internet available on almost every desk in the industry, training and educating staff is simpler. There are 11 main advantages to Internet-based learning:

1. A true interactive Internet-based system will automatically check the employee name through the Office of Inspector General (OIG) database for excluded persons. This is very important to your company and a feature that your system must have.
2. In a good system, there will be specific tracks for every job description in the company, including professional medical staff.
3. A good system contains at least 100 to 200 individual courses.
4. The system can be customized to fit your needs.
5. The courses in a good system meet the standards for accreditation organizations.
6. A good system has courses specifically designed for HME companies.
7. A good system insists that an employee must retake each test until 100% accuracy is obtained. That allows your company to demonstrate that it made adequate educational efforts.
8. A company with a good system continually updates and adds new courses for all levels of employees.
9. In the long-term, Internet-based education is less expensive than sending employees to seminars or continually updating books, videotapes, and CDs.
10. Employees can learn at home or at work.
11. Progress can be monitored so managers can find out the status of each employee in seconds. Some companies require the successful completion of a specific number of courses each month to be eligible for the company bonus program.

Where To Find Educational Systems
There are several companies that offer good educational information and training. The better ones have defined study programs for more than 70 HME-specific job descriptions. They also have 150 or more individual courses. Some other learning companies require that you purchase a system shell and create the courses yourself. There are also some companies that use a CD to create an interactive training environment. This can work, but recording keeping is almost impossible and testing is difficult. Also, as things change, you have to get new CDs.

Some of the buying groups have started to offer education solutions. Be sure to check to see if they are online, are interactive, and have direct OIG links. Be sure to get several references from HME companies that are successfully using the system before you purchase it.

Now you can hire the best people and have an effective way of training them in our industry.

Steve Lutzker is principal consultant with The Lutzker Group Inc, Escondido, Calif. He has presented seminars and authored articles on hiring and training staff. Contact him at (760) 480-9060 or at consultlutzker@sprynet.com.