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EMQ FamiliesFirst Links Performance and Learning to Help Children and Families in Crisis
EMQ FamiliesFirst is California's largest and most comprehensive social service agency for children and families. With the deployment of Halogen Software's award-winning talent management suite, EMQ FamiliesFirst has become a more agile organization that is better able to respond to client needs.
EMQ FamiliesFirst is California’s largest and most comprehensive social service agency for children and families. The agency covers 17 counties in California, serves more than 18 000 children and families annually, and has more than 1 300 employees.
With the deployment of Halogen Software’s award-winning Halogen TalentSpace™, including Halogen Performance™ and Halogen Learning™, EMQ FamiliesFirst has become a more agile organization that is better able to respond to client needs. A few of the benefits EMQ FamiliesFirst has realized since implementing Halogen Software include:
- Increased feedback from new employees understanding their role in the organization. Increased employee engagement in the training and development process.
- Tighter integration of learning with performance — training now supports individual performance and development needs.
- Ability to provide on-demand training to support immediate learning needs.
- Time and cost savings from eliminating paper-based processes and costly in-person training.
- Faster onboarding and connections to work teams.
Training process distracts from core mission
While training is a top priority for EMQ FamiliesFirst to meet both regulatory and employee development requirements, the organization needed to improve the way they delivered training so employees reaped the benefits without sacrificing time from their primary mission - working with children and families in crisis.
Sheryl Dagang, Manager, Learning & Development for EMQ FamiliesFirst, remembers the agency’s former orientation practices. Orientation at the organization used to be one long day, learning human resources rules and signing forms. Dagang recalls: “I think a lot of us have experienced that kind of orientation, where you feel like you’re training to do something, but you’re not sure exactly what that is or where it fits into the bigger picture for your job.” After orientation, new EMQ FamiliesFirst employees then entered an on-boarding curriculum. A general disconnect from the rest of the workforce existed because employees were “away” for their first month, being inundated with compliance courses.
In formal surveys, employees and managers had consistently provided feedback that training and development activities were a distraction that took them away from the valuable work they do in the community.
In addition, with the organization’s previous structure, the training team operated as part of the administrative branch, completely separate from HR. The EMQ FamiliesFirst team recognized that to improve the quality of their learning and development initiatives and to better fulfill the organization’s mandate of supporting children and families in crisis, they needed to break down these silos and create a culture focused on performance-based learning and high levels of employee engagement.
“Our training team needed to deliver value-added learning opportunities for employees to help them meet the challenges they face working with children and families in the field,” explained Dagang.
To create a tighter connection between performance and learning, and to deliver course content in the most efficient manner, EMQ FamiliesFirst identified that they needed an online system, to both enable the new approach and ensure its success. With this in mind, the organization made the move to automate their paper-based performance and learning management processes using an online talent management solution.
“We knew that technology was a must to drive our transition to a new way of doing things,” said Dagang. “Our employees are busy and very focused on the families they serve. In the past, appraisals were seen as a chore by our employees, and training was difficult to deliver as we are spread across 14 counties, with seven different offices in the state of California. Using an online system, our goal was to increase employee engagement, bridge geographic differences, and ensure we’d be able to meet our healthcare reporting requirements for compliance.”
Cross-functional team seeks easy to use solution
With a cross-functional team representing the HR, training, administration and IT departments, EMQ FamiliesFirst created a list of requirements for an online solution. These requirements included: a full suite of products covering a range of talent management functions, ease of use, and features that put managers and employees in the driver’s seat.
“For us, ease of use was of the highest priority when it came to selecting a solution, as time spent with technology takes employees away from working with children and families,” stated Dagang. “While we have many highly experienced mental health workers on staff, they can be understandably resistant to new technology. We carefully examined multiple vendors, and Halogen Software was hands-down, the one best able to meet our needs.”
For all of the members of the selection team, the Halogen Software solution was the clear choice. “A big plus for Halogen was its proven track record and commitment to its customers. Everyone felt confident that we would succeed with Halogen, which was critical after our disappointing implementation with another vendor,” said Dagang.
Driving user acceptance with hands-on training
Once the Halogen Software solution was selected, EMQ FamiliesFirst focused on integrating performance and learning from the get-go. Learning and performance functions at EMQ FamiliesFirst used to operate in isolation from one another. The move to a single, integrated system has resulted in multiple benefits, including ease of use. With the new system all performance and learning activities are centralized. Managers and employees can now easily select appropriate training and align it with performance and development plans.
To prepare employees and managers for implementation, HR and training staff provided sneak peeks of the solution in the months leading up to the rollout. Frontline managers were also engaged at leadership academies and given training on how the system would benefit them.
“Laying the groundwork with all of our internal stakeholders really eased the transition to this new approach to learning and performance,” said Dagang. “We made a point of training every employee in HR and corporate services so they could be ambassadors for other employees. Our local learning partners in each field office provided on-site training in their offices and helped employees on a one-on-one basis as needed. All of these phases built the groundwork for organization-wide acceptance of the solution.”
Tight integration between performance and learning drives organizational success
Since rolling out the solution, the EMQ FamiliesFirst team has successfully integrated performance and learning, and the program has been a high profile success within the organization.
“We were concerned about users adapting to this new way of doing things, but our team has fully embraced the technology and we consider this a resounding success,” says Dagang. When surveyed after the rollout, employees provided top scores for the system’s ease of use, and the ability to quickly find and identify appropriate training resources. Learning Partners across the organization have seen a major increase in the number of courses that employees are proactively taking, since they can now receive specialized training pertaining to issues as they arise in the field.
“As easy as the solution was to use, employees saw that it would help support their performance and work in the field instead of being an administrative headache. If they needed on-demand training for a client the following day to address a specific issue, they would be able to proactively take an appropriate course online” explains Dagang.
Another major benefit of the solution has been the evolution of the Learning Partners roles over the past 18 months. The former “training coordinators” in each field office are now able to focus on the content and benefit of the learning activities, and on ensuring employees are able to provide high quality services to the community.
“Employees are now completely engaged in learning and it is no longer seen as another ‘task’ but something that is valuable to the work they do and that benefits their career development,” explained Dagang. “With the addition of online courses, we are better equipped to be a partner in our employees’ development and are offering elective Continuing Education Units free of charge, which is a major differentiator for our organization. Employees see the value of this, and it's contributing to higher levels of employee engagement and helping to lower turnover organization-wide.”
Learning management system results in cost savings
The solution has not only improved service delivery to EMQ FamiliesFirst clients, but has provided a significant ROI for the organization. By eliminating paper-based processes, reducing administration and replacing in-class training with online training, the HR and training departments have achieved major savings.
“There has been a clear and measurable cost savings for our organization,” said Dagang. “A great example is with the annual compliance-related training required in our industry. With the new system we no longer need to have in-class sessions across the state for our more than 1300 employees. Previously these in-class training sessions involved significant resources to organize, as well as transportation costs. And the time they took detracted from employees’ time in the field with children and families. Now that we've moved these compliance training courses online, employees are responsible for ensuring they complete their training, which saves Learning Partners significant time and energy, and saves the training department significant money.”
EMQ FamiliesFirst sees this focus on addressing development needs, rather than on training administration, as a best practice for itself and for other organizations. “For many years, training has been bogged down by administrative tasks and this wasn’t always delivering value to employees,” explained Dagang. ”Training used to be seen as a necessary evil, and now it is seen as a valuable asset in achieving the organization’s mission, and in cultivating our employees’ development. With this new approach to learning, we are enabling our employees to provide services that are up-to-date with the most current practices in their fields of specialization, which greatly benefits the children and families we serve."
For EMQ FamiliesFirst the tight integration of learning with performance makes training relevant to employees; they now see how their learning activities support their performance and positively impact their clients. The end result is an organization that is better able to respond to client needs and help more children and families in crisis.
