Which cliché best applies to your field staff training –“It’s never too late to learn” or “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”?

Change is hard. Getting people to alter their routines or to adapt new skills is a challenging task, especially when most people are reluctant to do so. The home healthcare industry, specifically, is quite infamous for pushing off reform in order to avoid the hassles of change.

Now that the industry is facing dramatic shifts with the help of technology, many agencies have started to implement new tools and strategies to help increase efficiencies and improve employee processes—but that’s not to say it’s an easy process.

Without any direct threat or urgency being expressed around the need for improvement, many field employees believe what’s worked for them in the past is still sufficient enough, or that it’s too late in their career for them to adapt to new processes.

Training staff on new processes in an environment tainted with lingering philosophies such as “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” will yield strong resistance. 

Change is hard, but not impossible. Agencies not only need a strategy for change, but they also need create an environment that welcomes the process.

David Garvin and Michael Roberto, professors at the Harvard Business School, stated that, “to make change stick, leaders must conduct an effective persuasion campaign—one that begins weeks or months before the turnaround plan is set in concrete.” Their strategy for change involves creating a campaign leading up to the implementation that sets the stage for acceptance and allows employees to interpret information before jumping into new processes. Their strategy is summarized here and in the figure below:

Reinforcing a change strategy with the appropriate messaging and company wide communication can make all the difference.

Create the new company philosophy emphasizing, “It’s never too late to learn.” Campaigning to field workers ensuring them that the changes being made are in the organizations best interest and their lives will be easier as a result, can evoke acceptance and hopefully excitement about what’s to come.

AlayaCare has great software, but as intuitive and easy as the solution is, our client success team adopts training best practices for all stakeholders and users of the software. 

Call and ask for one of our Client Success managers and they’ll share how we can help foster change.