Caring is child's play
Winning gold for the best e-learning project securing widespread adoption at the E-Learning Awards 2009, Care Management Group should save £300,000 a year by implementing e-learning in its business.
By Nige Howarth
The enthusiastic and widespread adoption of e-learning by Care Management Group (CMG) has transformed training provision and is delivering value across the business. The extent to which CMG has adopted learning technologies is all the more remarkable when you consider the working environment. The company supports around 600 people with learning disabilities and associated complex needs. It delivers its services in this challenging and highly regulated environment in more than 100 care homes across southern England and Wales.
CMG depends on the skills and effectiveness of 1,500 staff, mostly in the role of home manager and support worker. Its employees need to display a wide range of competencies including care specialisms, catering, housekeeping and basic business management skills. Although training was traditionally provided through face-to-face classroom courses, coaching and observation, this model was straining to meet the demands of a growing organisation and an increasing regulatory burden. In particular, training at CMG faced four significant challenges:
- Inefficiency: Training was expensive to deliver, and did not easily scale to fit a growing business.
- Inconsistency: The pressure on training resources had led local sites to take an independent approach, so training paths were diverging.
- Risk: The care sector is highly regulated and all CMG services are inspected annually. Maintaining staff competencies in mandatory skill areas presents an increasing training burden.
- Alignment with corporate values: The wide dispersal of training provision made it difficult to align learning and development with corporate values and link it to business aims.
Addressing the challenges
In 2008, the new owner of CMG recognised that enhanced staff training and development could support a range of new business goals. It identified that e-learning could bring greater consistency and efficiency to training provision, and provide a platform to communicate corporate values and aims. However, it also realised that implementing e-learning in a fragmented organisation, one with no existing technical infrastructure, would present a formidable challenge.
CMG selected Information Transfer as its partner. A creator of bespoke training and communication solutions, Information Transfer has experience in helping organisations drive adoption and embedding of learning technologies. The outcome of the CMG/Information Transfer partnership was a corporate blended learning programme. The programme, called Fulfilling Potential, combines bespoke content, learning management technology and offline learning activity. It delivers consistent training messages, aligned with corporate vision and values, and has been enthusiastically adopted by staff throughout the organisation.
CMG is a healthcare business. Its staff are carers, “people people”, who do not use technology as an everyday part of their work, and do not expect to. Stakeholder engagement was therefore crucial to employees adoption of e-learning, and their needs and expectations had to be addressed by every aspect of the solution.
CMG consulted its stakeholders, interviewing staff at all levels, auditing existing training provision and identifying specific training needs at local level. The outcome of this consultation phase was a project specification that took a bespoke approach to development of online content and learning management technology. Modular, structured e-learning content, linked to offline learning activities, would focus on core skills required by the vast majority of staff. And project development would be integrated with implementation of a new corporate technical infrastructure.
Learner needs
The initial consultation provided extensive evidence of staff attitudes and preferences towards training in general and e-learning in particular. The consultation exercise was supplemented by a stakeholder workshop, where 16 staff from across the business completed a series of exercises designed to establish learning needs and preferences. Staff feedback informed all aspects of project development such as:
- Extensive use of audio, as many staff had English as a second language.
- Simple, intuitive online learning for staff with low computer literacy.
- Case studies, scenarios and CMG photography to help localise the e-learning and build trust among users.
- Use of CMG subject matter experts to ensure high quality, relevant e-learning.
The stakeholder consultation and workshop were used to ensure that the e-learning would integrate with existing workflows, be accessible,and provide managers with enhanced access to better information about learning and development activity. Local services have no learning and development resource, so e-learning is managed centrally while local managers have access to individual staff reports. Learning administration and reporting is performed through intuitive, task-oriented interfaces. Importantly, time for e-learning is integrated into existing shift patterns.
Perhaps the greatest immediate challenge to implementing e-learning was the lack of any technical infrastructure. Until November 2008, local CMG services were not networked, had no email or online access (some care homes had no computers at all), and the plan was to go live with corporate e-learning in February 2009. As a result the development of e-learning was aligned with a major infrastructure roll-out.
Corporate values
A key objective was to use e-learning to communicate and reinforce the rejuvenated corporate vision and values of CMG. It wanted to create a powerful and memorable identity to encapsulate its values and provide a basis for the communications and internal marketing initiatives that would help drive adoption. A communication planning workshop was held with stakeholders to identify the key audiences and behaviours needed, the key messages for influencing behaviour, and the most appropriate channels to reach each audience. The outcome was a structured communication plan, detailing the communication strategy and practical activities needed to promote widespread adoption of e-learning.
Communication and internal marketing used cascade briefings, presentations, multimedia, email, roadshows, posters, newsletters and a staff competition to deliver key change management objectives. The plan wasn’t just about selling
e-learning to the learners. It meant helping line managers understand the benefits for them – to answer the question ‘what’s in it for me?’
Creating a strong identity was seen as key, so a 10-minute video was created to showcase the vision and values of CMG and how these are supported by learning and development. It includes contributions from a range of CMG stakeholders. The movie was loaded onto every PC at CMG immediately before the launch of Fulfilling Potential.
After four months of development, Fulfilling Potential was launched with six structured e-learning modules, covering a range of core training needs and delivered to all staff. Each module was accompanied by an offline learning activity and assessment. The focus has been on learner needs, integration with workflow and extensive internal communication all combined to drive enthusiastic adoption by CMG staff.
For core training areas now delivered via e-learning, Fulfilling Potential has cut costs by 90%, and is already saving CMG over £300,000 a year from the initial six modules alone (see left).
Key success factors
Fulfilling Potential has shown how e-learning can be enthusiastically adopted within a people-focused working environment and rapidly deliver considerable business impact. Significant barriers to adoption have been overcome and e-learning is now embedded at the heart of CMG operations. Key success factors have been:
- a thorough understanding of the needs of the business, and how learning and development can support them
- involvement of stakeholders from across the business in every aspect of development and launch
- use of effective communication, promotion and support
- measuring and evaluating success
This adoption of e-learning is delivering business benefits by improving efficiency, reducing costs, reducing risk and improving service quality.
David Spruzen, CMG’s chief executive officer, says: “Fulfilling Potential has had a huge impact for CMG. And beyond learning and development, that impact goes right to the core of our values.”
The Fulfilling Potential project demonstrates how a people-focused service can be enhanced by creative and sympathetic use of technology. CMG staff at all levels have adopted the technology and used it to make a difference for the organisation.
Nige Howarth is head of community development at Towards Maturity