Step Three – Upskilling the team
You’re clear on the return on investment for purchasing Mesma but with so much going on, it’s difficult to see how you’ll find the headspace to implement it successfully.
Sound familiar?
Juggling the day job and implementing changes to the way we do things can feel tough. There’ll always be day to day pressures that keep us rooted in the status quo.
So, combining our years of change management consultancy with the experiences of our clients, here are a series of short blogs covering the four steps to help you to plan for success and make that return on investment a reality.
So far, we’ve covered:
Step 2: Motivating people to making the change
This week we’ll focus on Step 3: Upskilling to achieve the change
Upskilling to achieve a return on investment
Mesma is designed to be simple and straightforward to use. It has onscreen help, online events and access to the team via Chat. Feedback tells us that our users find it easy to get up and running.
You know your team best so you’ll have a good idea of what is needed to implement a new quality assurance system. Here are some ideas to consider.
Hands-on training
Training is helpful in ways that are broader than just the use of the Mesma. It’s an opportunity to reinforce your key messages, linking the reason for change to the ‘what’s in it for me?’ to the practicalities of using the software. It can also be a chance to reiterate some important messages about your quality improvement approach.
“We used the roll-out of Mesma to provide additional CPD to our staff on how to focus self assessment reporting on the impact on the learner and customer.”
“When we implemented Mesma’s observation product, it was exactly the right time to remove individual lesson grades from our process. It helped with the buy-in.”
The ‘hands-on’ bit of any software roll-out is important. You may decide to deliver this internally, giving your peers the chance to use the software or ask our team to cost in doing it for you. Either is fine with us.
Manager involvement
Line managers play a crucial role in ensuring use of Mesma is sustained and your ROI achieved. Too often in change efforts, we see the users being trained and the managers not involved in the process. This will cause you issues further down the line. Team members can easily fall back into the way of working they’ve been used to. Line managers can help you to reinforce the need for the change and regularly share success stories aligned with the implementation goals.
“I was able to show my team how I used the reports and analytics to identify trends arising from observations, deep dive enquiries and lesson visits. Reminding them how this linked to the QIP has really helped us to stay focused on doing things that have the most impact.”
Access to Subject Matter Experts
The purpose of the SME is to provide support for users throughout the upskilling process and beyond. Manager involvement is important, but it can be unrealistic to ask them to be an expert in using new software; particularly if their day to day use of it differs from that of their team. Most importantly, it creates a community of self-sufficient people who can grow their knowledge and skill together. Ensure that everyone is clear on the SMEs remit and how to access them. Create the right channels of communication to maximise the benefit for everyone involved, building on the user champions you identified in Step Two.
Step Three Simple Checklist
We know:
- Who needs to be trained and how best do we know they learn. We have ensured there are opportunities for hands-on learning.
- Whether training support is needed from the team at Mesma and reflected this in the business case.
- How the in-application CPD available to end users in Mesma works in practice.
- The key messages from step one and step two we want to reinforce to ensure consistency and commitment to achieving our end goal.
- How we can use the implementation of a new quality assurance system to bring about broader changes in practice and factored this in to training.
- Who will deliver any internal training now and in the future.
- Who will make the changes to embed training into the ‘way we do things round here’, making it part of future inductions for new recruits for example.
- How we can use existing processes to capture any future training needs related to the software.
In the next blog covering Step Four, we’ll focus on Embedding the Change.
To talk to the team about how Mesma helps you to create a world class quality assurance approach drop us a note on the contact page here.
The steps we’ll cover in this series are:
Step 3: Upskilling the Team
