2024 AXIS Awards Winners

Best of Show

Children’s Health – Learning & Development Design & Delivery Category

Learning & Development Design & Delivery

1^st Place – Children’s Health

In response to spiking levels in first-year turnover and market demand to hire more employees faster, Children’s Health redesigned its onboarding program and went from a 4-hour virtual session to a full-year journey with multiple touchpoints. Each experience is designed with fidelity to principles of active engagement, storytelling, and discovery, and the program is available with flexibility for weekly or bi-weekly start dates as needed:

Modified hybrid virtual and in-person sessions feature dedicated facilitation for each learning space and limited connections between the two for targeted programmatic learning.  This structure solved a common hybrid learning dilemma, so neither the remote nor the in-person audience feels neglected as a participant.

• With weekly start dates for the modified hybrid sessions, Children’s Health increased capacity and enabled the organization to onboard more than 2,600 new hires in 12 months. 
• With additional face-to-face cultural acclimation, guidance in professional development, networking events, and expanded online resources, the organization has achieved a 9.6% decrease in first-year employee turnover since 2021.  
• The program has also contributed to an increase in employee engagement and positive perceptions of the availability of growth and development opportunities. 

2^nd Place – Higginbotham

In 2022, Higginbotham acquired a Learning & Development team to release a Learning Management System and develop a learning culture within the company.  This two-person team took on this initiative with three goals: increase utilization of the company’s LMS by streamlining learning for all employees and developing a learning culture; create and release a company-wide Onboarding program; and implement a Technical Training Program for new employees, current employees, and newly acquired employees through Higginbotham’s M&A process.

This team accomplished all three goals and more! With approximately 2,500 employees in 2023, over 17,000 course enrollments were achieved with only Compliance courses being required, all other courses were voluntary. The Higginbotham Onboarding program was released in March 2023 and obtained over 4,000 enrollments in the nine months with a satisfaction rating of 92.5%. Additionally, during this time, the Higginbotham Learning & Development team released 13 in-house technical courses with almost 1,000 enrollments, curating over 100 vetted resources, and hosted 21 live Instructor Led Training classes to newly acquired team members with over a 90% satisfaction rating.

Since the development of the Learning & Development program, a learning culture is now engrained into not only employees but leadership as well.  Learning occurs not only via the LMS but within workflows and is now being applied to sales strategies. The team is thankful to help so many employees and make a difference at Higginbotham.

Talent Strategy and Management

1^st Place – Murata Electronics

The Buddy Program has shown a significant impact on Murata’s business and people strategy, with results improving their new employee retention rate from 73% to 97%. Prioritizing employee engagement, and retention, and fostering an inclusive work environment are high-level priorities for their company. They are delighted with the outcomes and are excited about the future growth potential of the Buddy Program, illustrating its benefits for other companies too. Following its success, their sister company plans to adopt this initiative due to its positive effects.

Enhanced employee retention leads to cost savings. By retaining more new employees, they can better focus on their development, providing support rather than sourcing new talent which is costly, ranging from 1.5-2x their salary if an employee leaves. The Buddy Program comes at almost no cost, but they suggest acknowledging participating Buddies with gestures like small gifts, thank-you notes, or recognition during team meetings, which incur little to no extra expenses for the company.

2^nd Place – Parkland

To resolve the problem of Parkland’s 2021 low, below hospital industry average, employee engagement results, a strategy, focusing on leadership, to address three key metrics of the engagement results was developed.  First, the overall engagement score. This is a combination of key questions that capture the employee’s satisfaction and effort put forth in their job and the organization.  Second, the Tier ranking distribution of individual departments and units. Tier 1 is highly engaged and competent units to address engagement, tier 2 being capable units, and tier 3 units requiring support to achieve better engagement development.  The third metric was the leader index.  This score, using a scale of 0 to 100, captures responses on the survey which identify positive leader behaviors.

This strategy was implemented through two major initiatives, Engagement Action Planning and Franklin Covey’s 6 Critical Practices for Leading a Team. The 6 Critical Practices training learning sessions provided leaders with identification and practice of the behaviors and mindset needed to effectively lead their teams to support employee engagement. 

The impact of the initiative drove the 2023 engagement score up from 3.93 to 4.04 which is also .05 higher than the industry average. The Leader index increased 6.1% from 81 to 86.  The number of units in tiers 1 &2 increased from 54% to 69%.

Evaluating Learning Impact through Data and Analytics

1^st Place – Sendero Consulting

In 2022 the Sendero L&D team identified they lacked a formal process to track and analyze employee growth, specifically growth in their skills. Calls from leadership for greater insight into ROI for learning programs paired with the L&D team’s goal to be more data-driven and sparked a series of initiatives over the last two years to build a strategy for collecting, analyzing, and reporting skill data. Whereas in the past the team had used reactive methods of feedback like project feedback or anecdotes from company leaders, they sought to build a process to enable data-driven, proactive L&D interventions fueled by skill data.

The L&D team identified three major areas of improvement for skill data in the organization: collection, reporting, and analysis. Taking a multi-phased approach, the team launched initiatives to refine skill data collection, increase visibility of skill data, better analyze and report the data to stakeholders, and identify learner gaps for the growing organization. Since the launch of this initiative, Sendero has increased the validity and amount of skill data collected, improved reporting of skill data across the organization, and launched an annual learner gaps analysis project to upskill its consultants.

Cultural Awareness and Inclusion

1^st Place – Children’s Health

Diverse families from across the cultural spectrum expect - high levels of care, service, and empathy as they enter our health system. In reviewing customer satisfaction feedback, Children’s Health noticed an underlying pattern of grievances that implied a need for more employee sensitivity and empathy.  With representation from our multicultural customer base and team members across the organization, they set a goal to fully understand the need, and ultimately, adapted a service recovery model that is easily understood, remembered, and applied.  The training program included a 60-minute, completely interactive Virtual Instructor-led Training (VILT) session with between 45-90 participants. The target audience included 100% of team members and third-party affiliated learners, equaling approximately 13,000 learners.

The training provided learners with background information on why the patient experience is paramount to our Children’s Way values. Then taught the relationship restoration model and discussed the difference between sympathy and empathy. Trainings included highly interactive and diverse short scenario videos that required learners to choose what staff members should say to customers and guided them along the journey of using the relationship restoration model.

As training continues for staff on important patient experience initiatives they are helping to provide the necessary tools needed to perform our roles successfully. Positive and clear communication is vital; this training will continue to create a more inclusive, healing environment, and help many, many members of our ever-changing and diverse community.

Career and Leadership Development and Coaching

1^st Place – Prime Lending

In response to employee feedback indicating a strong desire for growth, this mortgage company introduced the RISE professional development program. Crafted without additional budget allocation, RISE demonstrates their team's ability to innovate and maximize existing resources. With a resounding 99% of participants recommending the program and 100% achieving their learning objectives, RISE has proven its effectiveness. Moreover, it has boosted participant confidence by 99%, leading to enhanced performance across the board. This initiative underscores our commitment to employee development and organizational excellence.

2^nd Place – Toyota

Toyota’s consistent commitment to the development of their people is critical to their success as they transform into a mobility company. The Sponsorship Program is a year-long program designed to enable leaders to connect across lines while providing opportunities around the 3E's of development - Experience, Exposure, and Education, with multiple opportunities to connect, network, learn, and share experiences. It fosters a proactive, reciprocal, and sustained relationship between an Executive and High Potential talent which through advocacy, leads to career advancement, increased satisfaction, and engagement. Both, the experienced Executives, Sponsor, and the High Potential Senior Managers, Sponsees, benefit from the Sponsorship relationship.

Before the Sponsorship program, there was no clear understanding of the differences between feedback, coaching, mentorship, and sponsorship. This program helped clarify those differences and helped our leaders be more intentional with the different roles and expectations they must have to develop and grow our future leaders.

Through Sponsorship, they now have talent from across the organization that are both, ready and confident in leading their strategy of transforming into a mobility company. Most importantly, this program runs with the support of our most Senior Executives who serve as Ambassadors of Sponsorship and assist with planning, support, and guidance throughout the program.

Technology Application

1^st Place – Highland Homes

Highland Homes had an LMS in place that was outdated, underutilized, and lacking in administrative functionality. The L&D team took on the initiative to create and maintain a centralized and scalable learning platform to provide tailored training to all employees during each stage of their career journeys. 

It was a six-month process to research, select, and implement a more robust Learning Management System and content library that would better support the company’s core value to “Develop our Employee Owners.” The solution selected achieved the automation of data imports, improved manager functionality, offered event sign up and management, and provided flexibility in how content is displayed, offered, tracked, and reported.

Highland Academy officially launched at the start of January 2023.  To support the launch the L&D team created demonstration videos, provided tip sheets, conducted virtual training events, offered “office hours,” and provided overviews during division meetings.

The team partnered with department leaders to launch four company-wide training initiatives and manage them much more effectively than previously used methods. 

Along the way, the L&D team collected quantitative and qualitative data to ensure adoption was happening and that all employee owners had the type of content they needed.  By year end, 99% of the company had logged in and completed training to impact their professional development.

 

2^nd Place – Children’s Health

To enhance patient satisfaction and improve communication between patients and their care teams, Children's implemented an application for patients and families to use via bedside tablets or mobile devices. This empowers patients and families by providing real-time updates on their hospital schedule, care team, and medical results. This also helps alleviate the burden on the care team, who are often pulled away from direct patient care for customer service tasks. Additionally, the tablet serves as a valuable educational tool, providing information about their diagnosis and treatment through multimedia resources. 

Recognizing the complexity of the new technology, it was apparent that a robust blended training program was essential to train thousands of staff of various roles within a limited time. They implemented a comprehensive plan grounded in adult learning theories using a diverse array of learning methods. They empowered staff to have a sense of ownership in their learning by allowing them to select from classroom-style sessions, roadshows, or peer-assisted training. The combination of asynchronous resources with hands-on practice provided a comprehensive understanding of the new technology.

In summary, the holistic training approach, leveraging a blend of instructional modalities, proved instrumental in equipping the staff with the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively integrate new technology into patient care workflows.

Performance Improvement and Change Management

1st Place – Children’s Health

Prior to the implementation of the Single Point of Contact program, Children’s Health faced many challenges whenever the electronic medical record underwent required system upgrades. End users relied on lengthy training guides to troubleshoot issues in real time or were forced to call the Service Desk for assistance, often facing long hold times. The go-lives simply became chaotic for the nearly 6,000 end users. This caused disruption with patient care duties leading to elevated levels of dissatisfaction with the system upgrades and trepidation for future system upgrades.

The Single Point of Contact program – or simply known as the SPOC program – was created in 2018 to help mitigate issues during system upgrade go-lives by providing end users a support system for instant assistance. The program is designed to provide a systematic enterprise-wide framework to leverage clinical and non-clinical end users to support the go-lives.

Since implementation, end users can now obtain assistance during system upgrade go-lives through their unit, department, or clinic SPOC representative. Results show favorable go-live experiences from end users and a record low regarding service-related incidents during go live, thus leading to a positive system upgrade experience across the enterprise.

In late 2021, the program underwent a redesign, retooling the framework as a result of identified continuous process improvement opportunities, allowing Children’s Health end users to focus on their number one priority – the delivery of patient care. They are at 94% of the target for DEIs performed digitally, leading to improved operator safety, and reducing more than eight thousand sheets of paper annually.

2nd Place – WM

WM is dedicated to putting people first and achieving success with integrity while upholding safety as the focus of operations. The DOTT or Disposal Operator Technician Tablet program was designed to bring a digitally-enabled approach for the safety of heavy equipment operators. The operators perform Daily Equipment Inspections or DEIs before and after operating any equipment. Previously, these were done on paper.

The goal was to make learners comfortable with using tablets to submit DEIs. This was a big change for the average operator who had been on the job 10-20 years, with limited English skills and little or no exposure to technology. The team followed a human-centered approach, leveraged champions, engaged with stakeholders at all levels, created clear and actionable training materials and methodologies, and provided reinforcement to ensure broad adoption. 

The team collaborated with leaders to develop SMART goals (80% of DEI’s performed digitally). Design thinking and agile approaches were used throughout, including in the development of a dashboard to track success and provide data for coaching opportunities.

They are at 94% of the target for DEIs performed digitally, leading to improved operator safety, and reducing more than eight thousand sheets of paper annually.