Historically, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center functioned solely as a university, with education and research at the forefront. From a cost perspective and with tremendous pressures on both research grant and educational funding, we had to shift our organizational strategy to place more emphasis on our clinical enterprise to bridge the financial gap.
This transformational shift meant that our campus population had to quickly learn how to lead and operationally run hospitals and clinics, build robust business plans, navigate complex policies and regulations, influence individuals in matrix environments without authority, and work collaboratively in multi-disciplined teams. Considering that we did not have a large, state-of-the-art hospital to consolidate the three components of our mission statement together under one roof, grand-scale planning activities resulted in the design and subsequent opening of the William P. Clements, Jr. University Hospital. To make the situation even more challenging, the opening of Clements hospital and the need to formally and effectively train individuals on the now-requisite leadership skills went live during the most tumultuous and ambiguous time in our nation’s healthcare history.
This tremendous opportunity and strategic business focus area highlighted critical needs that the learning function was faced with meeting in the areas of organizational design, workforce creation, planning, selection and training, development assessment, change and stress management, and cross-campus onboarding. A Learning Council was formed to more closely align learning and development efforts to this business strategy. Comprised of key senior stakeholders over training and development across the institution, the multi-disciplinary Council was charged with breaking down silos, sharing best practices, creating a comprehensive learning calendar, developing style and process documents and helping to promote leadership development at all levels.
Developing a Framework
The embodiment of its vision, the Academy for Career Enrichment (ACE), was chartered and launched as a one-stop shop infrastructure with targeted development tracks for physicians, nurses and other campus professionals, scaled by level. ACE is an online destination that consolidates and simplifies access to all available instructor-led and online courses, certification preps, assessments, books, training videos and other reference materials.
Our over-arching learning program and competency framework took an outside-in approach that put learners at the center by providing personalized, segmented and technology-enabled solutions.
• Personalized: Our ongoing marketing campaign “DevelopMEnt, EngageMEnt, EnhanceMEnt” visually and literally places the employee at the center of his/her commitment to providing quality service. It highlights that the most impactful development is individually relevant and motivating to achieve. We provide personalized onboarding plans, executive coaching for new leaders, and customizable development options for everyone. Our internal coaches are masters/doctoral prepared professionals who encourage self-awareness regarding career ambitions, strengths enhancement and potential derailers awareness. Due to explosive demand, we expanded our practice by implementing an internal coaching certification.
• Segmented: We have re-packaged existing open enrollment offerings and created new business-specific content and blended e-learning resources into audience-specific programs by role and leadership level. We employ a cohort approach that allows for robust discussion, relevant case studies and opportunities for tangible outcomes via capstone learning projects. We also added six targeted leadership programs/academies in the past 12 months.
• Technology-enabled: The vast majority of our formal learning and development options were classroom-based and the time-lag between identified need and attendance was measured in months, not days. To expand our on-demand reach, we collaborated with Skillsoft, allowing us to offer online courses, books and resources to fill curriculum gaps. We heavily utilized job function data to send customized marketing emails to individuals based upon their title, function, sub-function, and role responsibilities. Deep-linked to the resources themselves, these targeted communications became springboards for our 15,000 employees to feel connected to the organization, yet in a way that spoke to them personally. We offer scalable leadership competencies (and expected behaviors) with carefully selected resources to save searching and vetting time and energy.
Measuring Outcomes
Since the launch of ACE, we have witnessed a 315 percent increase in the number of learning and development activities, and over 28,000 hours of learning delivered. This is impressive considering that all of these activities are voluntary and do not include mandatory compliance training. Our average quarterly run rate pre-ACE was 660 instructor-led, e-learning or other learning activities per quarter, yet in the fiscal year post-ACE, we averaged 4,348 learning and development activities per quarter. Further, in the year prior to ACE, organizational development and training delivered 2,486 learner activities, and in the immediate-past fiscal year, we saw a dramatic 600 percent increase to 17,395 learner activities. Hours spent in customized sessions (workshops, retreats, team-building sessions, etc.) increased 90 percent. Our ACE webpages have collectively received over 65,000 voluntary hits since going live.
Soliciting and securing the support of our executive leaders was paramount in linking to the business strategy. Their buy-in and endorsement remains visible in their willingness to serve as champions for programs as well as desire and availability to facilitate classroom sessions. They generously gift their time by serving as mentors for our executive new hires, helping to orient, onboard and acclimate them to our organization.
Our bi-annual employee engagement surveys also serve as a great indicator of our efforts. ACE went live nine months after the 2012 survey closed and one year before we surveyed our employees again in 2014. In the later survey, we saw a 22 percent overall increase in participation and an 11 percent increase in overall satisfaction with engagement workplace factors. Learning and development responses witnessed a 14 percent increase in individuals feeling they received the formal training they wanted, a 14 percent increase in individuals feeling their managers personally helped them learn and grow, a 14 percent increase in managers caring about their employees’ concerns, an 11 percent increase in those who wanted to stay at UT Southwestern for more than one year, and a 9 percent increase in individuals who highly recommended working here.
Additional outcome measures can also be attributed to the effects of better training of our staff. Our patient satisfaction surveys have steadily increased from the 70th percentile to above the 90th percentile in overall satisfaction and our two hospitals comfortably sit between the 80th and 99th percentiles, winning prestigious awards two years in a row. Promotion data reveals that nearly 50 percent of graduates in our accredited master’s degree, aspiring leaders and junior faculty development programs are promoted into leadership roles within a year of their completion.
Moving Forward
Regardless of any success we have achieved to develop our workforce in both effective and fiscally-prudent ways, we remain keenly focused on advancing our development strategy even further. We continually research and seek ways to better understand how to apply learning principles and employ even more sophisticated, technology-enhanced and personalized approaches to leadership development. We are enhancing efforts even more on our emerging physicians, researchers and nurse leaders, and our next generation of medical and graduate students, residents and fellows. We are also strengthening ties with our Office of Global Health to implement year-long professional development curricula for students and/or identify opportunities for students to impact others on a global scale through partnerships with medical institutions in developing countries.
Our efforts have proven that by aligning to the business strategy and scaling and personalizing our efforts to our entire population, we can increase employee engagement, drive organizational success, and ultimately benefit our patients/customers.