#84 Creating & Delivering Effective Training Programs

Training is critical to enhance the skill set and knowledge of our individual team members, particularly during the labor shortage.  This episode the Divas will discuss how to make training programs effective and fun. 

Training Resources:

• OSHA Bloodborne Pathogens Standard - https://www.osha.gov/bloodborne-pathogens/general
• World.edu- https://world.edu/how-to-create-an-effective-training-program/ 
• Indiana University Center For Innovative Teaching and Learning - https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/teaching-strategies/games-learning/index.html  

                                                 https://www.thecompliancedivas.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:05

Welcome. I'm Leslie Cannon.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

I'm Mary Gavoni. I'm Linda Harvey. I'm Olivia Juan, and together we are the Compliance Divas. Welcome to the Compliance Divas Podcast. My name is Olivia Wann and I'll be your moderator. Our topic today is creating and delivering effective training programs. As the Compliance Divas, we bring clarity and simplicity to compliance by navigating regulatory compliance to keep you on course. Please subscribe to the Compliance Divas podcast through your favorite podcast channel, or you can visit our website at thecompliancedivas.com. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode can be found on the Compliance Divas website. Please submit your questions to support at the ComplianceDivas.com. So we think this is going to be a great topic to talk about with the Divas about creating and delivering effective training programs. I hear from my audiences as well as from clients about the labor shortage and how now, more than ever before, we have to enhance the effectiveness of our training programs, particularly with our dental hygienists and dental assistants. So some of the topics that people are talking about, like for example, with dental assistants, would be whether to provide additional training on maybe a skill set that is lacking, maybe simple, simple as pouring up models or making a perfect stone model or how to put on a rubber dam. Lots and lots of topics, including compliance. But I'd like to talk to Mary for a bit on where do we start? How do we even plan what we need to talk about? Mary, can you help us here?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Absolutely. That's a great question. Where do we start? Because once you start mentioning to um team members that they have to have training, they kind of do the eye roll and they kind of want to disengage. The doctors many times are hesitant to have downtime from the practice for training, but we have to do it so that everybody is going to perform their job functions safely. So there's two times, actually, three times that training is required by OSHA. One is for new employees, they must be given safety orientation into the practice. And so that would include, of course, bloodborne pathogens, infection prevention and control training, hazard communication training, what are hazardous chemicals, where are safety data sheets, those types of things. And then general safety training that if you see something that could cause someone to trip and fall, then you need to take notice of it, try to fix it immediately. Those are very simple, basic, common sense kinds of things. And then the bloodborne pathogen standard has some language that tells us exactly what needs to be covered. Um information on bloodborne pathogens, so HIV, hepatitis B and C. But also we include, because it's not included yet in that bloodborne pathogen standard, we include other like airborne transmissible viruses and other diseases. We have to train on methods used to control occupational exposure, the hepatitis B vaccine, medical evaluation and post-exposure follow-up protocols if somebody gets an instrument poke or a needle stick. And the training, again, must be provided on initial assignment before they start performing at-risk functions. Then we also need to have an annual training, a refresher update every year. And then any time when new or modified tasks or procedures might put an employee at risk for exposure to blood-borne pathogens. So training is really an ongoing thing. It shouldn't be, first of all, it shouldn't be overlooked when somebody new comes into the practice. And many times I hear from clients that say, well, my employee was trained in another in another practice, or they just graduated from a dental assisting program, and so they've already been trained. You don't know what that training entailed. You don't know how effective it was. The only thing that you can, as an employer, um, attest to is how effective your training was. And that can be done, of course, by um evaluations after the training. But again, initial training is critical, annual training, and anytime we change procedures.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Great information, Mary. I like how you pointed out that we don't want to disengage an employee. So it has to be meaningful training. And also, you mentioned about you know the doctors or management might perceive it as downtime rather than how valuable the training time is. So thanks for pointing that out. And also, you mentioned about having a needs assessment, particularly for a new employee. You mentioned it well that they might be coming right out of dental assistant school or hygiene school. And this is what we're running into that maybe they did very well in school, but to learn how that individual practice handles these tasks might be a completely different story. So we do have to make the time to train people to enhance their skill set. But in putting together our training program, Linda, how exactly do we create training materials when dentists or management are training their own staff?

SPEAKER_02 6:16

That's a good question, Olivia. Creating training materials can seem overwhelming if someone is new to compliance. So I'd like to talk about that from two different perspectives, if you will, because sometimes somebody's brand new as the safety coordinator and they're tasked with setting up the annual training for the year and don't really know where to start or what to do. So maybe they've purchased a CD-ROM that they can just sort of do a plug and play, if you will. And oftentimes those come with the post-test. So let's use that scenario for starters. So instead of just passing out the post-test and expecting everybody to fill it out and kind of going through the motions, Olivia, it's possible that even someone new to compliance can just interject a little bit of fun. So maybe they toss out the questions as a group, or they ask each other the questions, or they think of something fun to make it more enlightening than just sitting there watching the video that they're eating through and talking over and not paying attention. So that's the main thing is just having some engagement and thinking of ways to just talk about what's happening during the training and what the video was that they just watched, and maybe they ask them as they watch the video, there's three points they want you to keep in mind. And then everybody writes, you know, makes notes of what those three points are as they watch the video, and then they can discuss it after fact. And that doesn't even take creating a worksheet or anything, it's just a little bit of advanced planning. So there's different ways to make it fun if you're the new safety coordinator, not to be overwhelmed or anything. And if you're not new to compliance and you're done the training several years in a row, then you're you are looking for something different to do. So let's talk about, you know, whether there's PowerPoint that you've created, you're using a video. Maybe you can incorporate something hands-on if you've not done that in the past, a demonstration of some sort. Everybody can demonstrate how they take off their gloves and see who does it differently and how they dispose of them because they might learn um a better tip from their coworker from what they've been doing, likewise with mask or PPE, or just how to wrap cassettes or pouch instruments. So it could be any simple task that you have some fun with. And I've done some things in the past where I've taken what I call a field trip in the office. And I bet you all too have done this, Diva. It's when working with an office, perhaps, and I'm that it's a new client, don't know much about them, and I see a lot of concerning things that I want to talk about. But instead of pointing fingers and lecturing, we do what I call a field trip. We do a few key PowerPoint slides, and then we get up and as a small group, we walk to sterilization, we walk to different areas, and we talk about what's happening. And then I can ask them to explain more about what they're doing. So we're interactive, we're standing around for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, not a long time, because people get tired of just standing in one spot. You know, think of standing in a line, it's boring, right? You want to keep moving. And we just talk about that particular topic of whatever I see that needs as an opportunity for improvements. So we could do something likewise in an office as well. And then for experienced trainers, one thing I did one year, Olivia, that our clients just loved was our compliance survivor challenge game. So I had them divide up into teams depending on the size of the practice. It might have been two or three teams, and I had different lists of items that they were all in charge of finding in the practice and bringing back everything from a fire extinguisher to the AED to the first aid kit, just different things that they brought back. And then I incorporated them into the topics that we have to cover for the bloodborne pathogen standard and other safety items. And then I also added in a word puzzle that I had created, two different, three different versions of it. So they all had different words that they were finding as a team. Each team had one puzzle to solve, and then they took the words in those puzzles and made a skit or a song or poem. They had the best time with that creativity, and it didn't take much longer with about the same time frame for the, but they loved it. I videoed them, got permission to put it on Facebook, and they just had the best time. So they came out being refreshed, but it wasn't sitting there with what you call death by PowerPoint. So that was a fun year. Kind of hard to repeat the next year because you know they're doing the same thing. But I will share with you before I finish uh wrap this section up, Olivia, that one client that we worked with was so enthralled with what we were doing. He was video um casting it live on Instagram at the time. So everybody got into the motions and just had a lot of fun with it. So I think let the creativity abound. Um, our listeners are always welcome to reach out to us with an email if they have a question about a tip or a training strategy or looking for a fresh idea, and um and just have fun with it is the main thing. Have fun and be effective at the same time. Thanks for asking, Olivia. That was a great question.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Linda, that's a lot of great information that you've shared. And I totally agree with you that it has to be a fresh idea. You can't be just doing the same training over and over again. I mean, there's one thing training a new hire on different areas of dental assisting that you want to improve or something like that. But when it comes to compliance and training on OSHA and HIPAA, if it's dry, we lose their interest. So thank you for giving some ideas. I like the one that you mentioned about jotting down the top three points that they uh took as great takeaways that they could share, incorporating video. That's a very good idea, Linda. And also avoiding Death by PowerPoint, where there's so much text in the PowerPoint that you don't even really need to have it. It's like reading a document, and also incorporating games. I want to pick Leslie's brain a little bit because she's really good with games as well, Linda. Leslie, what can you share with us about incorporating games into a learning method?

SPEAKER_03 12:00

Olivia, when people have fun, it's memorable. And we want to make sure that our training is memorable and repeatable. And I love that Linda talked about getting up and moving because people sitting in their seats tend to start rolling eyes and falling asleep and checking their cell phones. So getting up and moving is so important. And I love Linda's idea of having that skit. I've actually seen her skit on social media, and I believe that uh at heart we are all yearning to have our 15 minutes of fame, and people just love to do that. I like to incorporate games to break up the monotony of training and also help people compete a little bit and remember. So, one thing I do is I have a competition uh called shaving cream on gloves. When Linda talked about uh people removing PPE, we have our team members wear gloves and then we ask uh to have them hold out their hand and I put a dollop of shaving cream about the size of a marshmallow into each uh palm of a gloved hand. I ask the team members to rub the gloves together and like it was hand lotion. And then I say, use your imagination, pretend the shaving cream is blood or body fluid or saliva from the patient. Now your job is to take off your gloves without getting shaving cream on your skin or on your clinical attire or on each other. And it's always so much fun because that shaving cream is slippery and uh everyone is going so carefully at trying to remove their glove. They're almost like a strip tease, just you know, one glove uh then the other. And then we debrief because inevitably there'll be shaving cream that ends up back on the skin. When we talk about that, we say, you know, okay, so uh what does this tell you about your gloves? And we debrief the group and they say, well, gloves may not protect us fully. Uh what's on the outside of the glove can sometimes land back on our skin or on our uh our body or on each other or on surfaces. And so, you know, ultimately they come up with the uh the bottom line is we need to wash our hands when we take our gloves off because those gloves don't protect us 100%. And you know, when I do this exercise at conferences where I have a group of people, that's when the cell phone cameras come out and they lean forward in their chair and they're recording it and they take it back to their team and they they do the exercise at their own offices. And that's what is memorable and repeatable. So that's kind of fun. The other thing I like to do is I like to encourage and motivate by prizes. So by giving the right answer, uh, there may be something as simple as a candy bar or uh a $5 or $10 Starbucks card, something that is just a motivator to participate. Uh, you can do this with the seasons. For example, at Easter time, I might put some kind of a question inside of an Easter egg and have them draw a plastic Easter egg out of an Easter basket. And the question might be uh you know, related to needle stick. What's the first step in a needle stick incident? And it will be usually uh after we've covered what you do for exposure incidents. So it should be fresh in their mind. And uh it's it's the winner, you get the right answer, you you get a prize. Now, at Christmas time, you can go a little bit further with uh doing something like white elephant, which is really fun, is that they get the prize, but then you don't get too attached to your prize because uh the next person that wins can steal your prize or pick a new one. So that creates some competition and fun, and it really reinforces the learning. At the end of the day, I think that when people talk about, hey, you know, uh what did you learn at your training program today? Uh they come up with, well, uh we had shaving cream or we had Easter eggs or we had a white elephant, and it helped us reinforce the concepts of uh the bloodborne pathogen standard or HIPAA or whatever it is. So it's a lot of fun. And I know, uh Olivia, I shared with you one game. We were sort of batting around ideas, and I said, tossing out a soccer ball, and uh with when whoever catches it, whatever their thumb is on, if there's a uh subject that you've used an ink pen on the soccer ball, the person who catches the ball has to talk about, just give one key point about that. Olivia, you took it a step further and you said, I'm gonna make that soccer ball multi-purpose, and I'm gonna put a number on the various different parts of the soccer ball. And I'll have a list depending on whatever I'm teaching, HIPAA or OSHA. And I will uh ask them if okay, it was number one. So, number one on my list is uh, you know, uh, how long can you maintain patient records uh, or how long do you have before you have to release patient records for HIPAA? And so, you know, it there's you can do this a number of ways. It makes it fun, it makes it entertaining, and it makes it memorable. And the more we can entertain our information, into infotainment, is that the right word for it? Is as much as we can do that incorporating into our regulatory subjects, the better grasp our our uh clients and our audiences have on the material that's covered. So I I love games, and I will not uh lecture on anything where I can't include some kind of a game that's going to help the audience with the concepts.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

And you're great at it, Leslie. Yes, you did give me some ideas with the soccer ball, and I was challenged with one of my practices that I've been serving for many, many years because one of the young clinicians seemed to just want to look at their phone. And so I was trying to come up with an idea for that annual update to make it more interesting, and we used the soccer ball game divided by topics, and it was just what we needed to fully engage everyone. And what I loved about it is we made the question site specific. For example, you know, how many minutes should your surface disinfectant remain on the surface? You know, what is the name of your surface disinfectant? So it made it customized to their individual practice, and the senior dentist truly appreciated that. So I love both you and Linda's game ideas. Linda, did you want to supplement a thought?

SPEAKER_02 18:28

I did, thank you, Olivia. There's a little um online polling program that I use called Mentimeter, M-E-N-T-I-M-E-T-E-R, Mentimeter. And I think for our listeners, there may be even a free version. But talking about using their phones made me think about this program, Mentimeter. So many times I have I engage them with their phones because they have their phones there already using them. And if they're sitting in a break room or they've got them in their lap and they're sometimes subtly playing or looking what I don't know what they're doing on Facebook or texting others, and that's has them use their phones. So you put your polling question up on your PowerPoint slide, they go to the Mentimeter page. Uh, you have to hop over there online to join them to activate the poll, but they can ask any number of questions that you do, and you can put time allowances on them. So they have to answer like in 10 seconds or whatnot. And then at the end of these few questions that you might have, it gives a scoring. Everybody can pick up first. It starts, let me back up. First, when you log into this, as you just put in like any name you want, if it's your first name or uh a goofy name, whatever, because at the end it shows who answered the fastest. And those names come up on the PowerPoint on the screen in front of them. And then that person is like, my winner, Leslie, and I'll give them a gift, as you mentioned. And but the confetti comes down on their phone. So we joke about the fact, oh, you've got confetti, this is great. Nobody has to clean up the office, and they get excited because they want to know who were you? What was your name? What was your trade name in here? Who, you know, your whatever, because people don't always put their real name, which is fine because Mentimeter does not collect names or emails, it's just for the sake of the game. You can put in whatever name or nickname that you want to, and they have a lot of fun engaging with their phones too. That works with audiences of all sizes.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

It's a great idea, Linda, because people are pretty connected to their phones. Mary, I'd love for you to talk with us about utilizing online education because we see so many people offering online education. But how do we ensure that our training group is engaged and truly learning from that online program?

SPEAKER_00 20:31

That's such a great question. Um, I have to go back to Linda's um suggestion on Mentimeter. I'm all excited about that because that's like whole everywhere on steroids. It seems like it does so many more things. So I'm very excited about that. So if you're going to engage in online training for your team, what my recommendation is is you need to use um a consultant, a company, someone who uses a learning management system so that you can validate participation in that online program. So these learning management systems typically will time um how much time someone has spent um watching a video or listening to an audio program, and they have to periodically answer a polling type question to validate that they're still there, not just I logged in and I walked away, and then I'm still logged in at the end so I can get my credit time. They have to be um interactive in that. And the best case scenario is that these are live programs, but they may not be. They may be on demand kind of programs. And we need to make sure that anyone who participates in those programs has an opportunity to ask questions of the trainer so that they can get. Their questions answered. So it's kind of a buyer beware. Make sure that whoever you engage has a good reputation in terms of a trainer, that they're using a specific management type of learning management system, and that they will make themselves available to answer questions. And they should have to complete some type of a quiz or post test at the end of their training again to validate their participation in that training.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

And that's the point. The key point right there, Mary, is making sure that they validate their participation. So I like how you pointed out they could do a quiz or the program might be set to make sure that they are engaged. Or I know with our program that we use for online ed for the 2023 rollout, they can't get to the quiz until they complete the video. So they can't race ahead because we've seen a problem where they might not be engaged and then they can't pass the quiz. So all of the questions are in the video. And so it is challenging when we and it's and it's wonderful to do online education, but we want to make sure that it is effective and accomplishing those purposes. Uh, one year we decided for our on-site program that they would actually do participate in a quiz. I didn't care if they wrote their name down, they could just leave their name off of it. But I would gather up the responses to see, first of all, who got the entire form correct and give a little prize. But it was disheartening to see where they couldn't pass it. And that's where I realized that I need to do less speaking and more engaging, get them talking more, get them playing more so that they could walk away with the wisdom. I already knew the information, but did they know the information? Mary, what can you add to that?

SPEAKER_00 24:07

Well, you raise such a good point that they have to be engaged in what Linda and Leslie were sharing with us earlier about, you know, activities and games and things to keep it um memorable for them. There are a lot of people who rely on an online program that they watch the same program year after year after year, or they have someone come in their office and plug a DVD into a DVD player and they watch it, it's the same thing. That's not engaging. And it's also not an update training. If you go over the same information that you did the previous year, you have to acknowledge that there have been changes. There's new infectious diseases, there's new information about chemical hazards and so forth. So it can't be the same online program year after year after year that doesn't meet OSHA standards. I agree, Mary.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

And it's just quite simply stale. It's stale information, and they don't want to have to hear the same thing over and over again. So I think it's critical that the programs are fresh, current content. Leslie, what can you share with us?

SPEAKER_03 25:16

Well, I'd like to drive a point home. It actually was an event that occurred in a dental office that uh one of my clients. Um, when it comes to finding things in the office when you need them, Linda talked about sending the team out as a scavenger hunt, if you will, to get certain things and bring them back in and then talk about them. One doctor had uh taken his blood pressure cuff home because he was having some issues and wanted to monitor his blood pressure uh on a regular basis, and he forgot to bring the blood pressure cuff back to the practice. Well, he ended up having an event where his assistant noticed right away that there was something terribly wrong. And she went to race around and get the blood pressure cuff, called 911, the oxygen tank, but she couldn't find the blood pressure cuff. And as 911 was on the phone with her, understanding that this was a dentist in a dental practice, they expected her to be able to at least start the flow of oxygen and to monitor his blood pressure and like give them some information and feedback while they were waiting for the ambulance to come. Um, it if it's important that everybody knows where the emergency items are, how to start the flow of oxygen and how to use the blood pressure cuff if they're not already used to using it. We always rely so much on our doctor to be the hero and to be the person or heroine uh to be stepping up to the call when there's an accident or an emergency, but the doctor may be the person who is having the emergency. So the team members need to know where everything is. And and of course, they're not going to be able to crack open the first aid uh kit and you know, use any of the pharmaceuticals, but there may be certain things that they can do to save the doctor's life. And so I would drive the point home that doctors need to know that their team is sufficient and can respond appropriately within their qualifications to an emergency and to know where things are. So the scavenger hunt is a great idea. And I actually got an idea when I attended the OSAP symposium from someone who does the joint commissions audits. And she said that one thing that she did was she would laminate certain things on a little like index-sized card. And one of those things was a picture of a flame. And she would she would put that laminated card on the microwave and she would turn to the team member and say, What do you do now? You have a fire in your microwave. What's your next step? So there's a number of ways that you can make things memorable, repeatable, and engage your team members and also uh validate the the cost of time that you're spending on this kind of training for the employer or supervising doctor to show that that these aren't just games. We aren't just playing to play. We're we're playing to make this memorable, repeatable, and to drive people into action. They will have muscle memory, whether whether they've been trained recently or a long time ago on what to do.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Those are good points, Leslie. And I think I've I've learned a lot from you all. I think of myself as a consultant, I think of myself as a lawyer. Those are my day-to-day job duties. But most importantly, I think of myself as an educator and as an educator of our groups, whether they're practices or seminar attendees, we take it very seriously that we have these people for a certain amount of time and we want to accomplish those objectives. We want them to walk away feeling like they at least learned something new or they were motivated to performance. And that can be challenging. But I think with all of the ideas from the divas today, that we have great takeaways to make our training programs more effective. So thank you, divas, for participating in today's episode. As the compliance divas, we bring clarity and simplicity to compliance by navigating regulatory compliance to keep you on course. Please submit your questions to support at the compliancedeevas.com. We will post the resources that we mentioned, and especially the one that Linda talked about, the Mentimeter. So we will have that website available for you. Thanks again, and we'll see you soon.