Types of EAs
Methods and Resources for Root Cause Analysis and Designing EA Campaigns
Types of EAs
Outcomes: Assign tracking of observable results or outcomes
Tracking outcomes can be a morale booster if the outcomes chosen are ones that are regularly accomplished. Assigning the tracking of Success Heuristics, such as patient smiles or positive comments, engages personal problem solving. If it reveals a need for training, an individual can self-direct and self-support, discussing their progress with the EA campaign with teammates and asking for clarification or pointers. If an individual can’t pin down their need, their mentor can work with them to suggest one or more upstream EAs to help achieve the outcome called for in the original campaign EA.
Examples:
Tally every time a patient smiles
Tally every time you finish on time
Tasks: Assign tracking of tasks or actions, rather than a particular result
Whether it’s to rally to prop up an area of sagging performance, or to teach a new approach, standard, or best practice, assigning focused single-task EAs helps teams apply what they learn in demonstrations and training materials, formulate questions, uncover needs, and gain mastery over producing predictable outcomes.
When you assign Task EAs, you're directing the team to emphasize particular behaviors.
Examples:
Use a Montana Jack scaler to clean any excess material. Tally each use.
Make a positive comment about a teammate to a patient. Tally each comment.
Awareness Direction: Ask the team to look for something and track its occurrence or quality
Mindset prompts, awareness cues, empathy prompts for better connection with patients and fellow team members, issued either open or or attached to process or situational triggers.
These create teachable moments and shared memories that other training material can connect to. By prompting the same awareness in the whole team, the conversations around performance will begin to line up.
These can assist in teaching best practices by ensuring that team members have noticed key aspects involved in evaluating their performance. Many training attempts fail because the person teaching assumes that the person learning breaks down the skill or task the same way and so uses their own frames of reference to teach, while the person learning can't understand or follow the direction or instruction.
Methodically directing awareness ensures that learners are given the proper criteria with which to parse the task or skill, and demands that those teaching have processed their understanding into a coherent and transmissible form. They ensure that what the trainer is saying makes sense to the trainee. Because of these reasons, using multiple awareness-direction EAs is usually necessary to the process of teaching best practices effectively.
Examples:
Notice the movement of facial muscles when using the Cavitron. Write about your findings.
When a patient is nervous, notice their breathing. Take slow, deep, audible breaths. Does this affect how the patient breathes?