Reducing Response Effort to Improve Employee Preparedness in a Human Service Organization
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BRIEF PRACTICE
Reducing Response Effort to Improve Employee Preparedness in a Human Service Organization Ashley Felde 1 & Katherine Haggerty 1 & Andressa A. Sleiman 2 & Nicole Gravina 2 Accepted: 11 September 2020 # Association for Behavior Analysis International 2020
Abstract We examined the effectiveness of reducing response effort and an e-mail prompt for increasing preparedness of 17 therapists for a social skills group in a human services organization. We evaluated whether participants knew the correct lession and sport and whether they felt prepared for the session via a paper survey. The Performance Diagnostic Checklist-Human Services indicated deficiencies in all four domains. The most significant barriers were prompts and access to materials. Results showed that the reduced response effort to access materials and email prompt increased employee preparedness compared to the no e-mail condition. Keywords Antecedent . Employee preparedness . Human service setting . Prompt . Response effort
In human service organizations, staff are expected to run a variety of programs with clients, and those programs are updated as the clients gain new skills. Sometimes, the basic structure of programming remains consistent (e.g., social skills training) while elements of the program vary (e.g., type of group activity). Once staff are trained to mastery on the general program, they can often implement that program across a variety of activities and situations (Bolton & Mayer, 2008; Ducharme & Feldman, 1992). Even untrained staff can implement programs with high fidelity if the instructions are clear. For example, Graff and Karsten (2012) found that teachers who had no prior training on preference assessments were able to conduct them with 98%–100% fidelity when they Research Highlights • Asking responders to rank or rate the importance of each deficit identified in the Performance Diagnostic Checklist–Human Services can lead to effective interventions in human service organizations. • Simple, low-cost antecedent interventions can improve some staff performances. • Clinicians should consider reducing response effort and prompting before implementing more time- and resource-intensive consequence interventions. * Nicole Gravina [email protected] 1
Florida Institute of Technology and the Scott Center for Autism Treatment, Melbourne, FL, USA
2
School of Psychology, University of Florida, 945 Center Dr., Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
were provided diagrams and step-by-step instructions without jargon. Thus, effective initial training and access to clear instructions may allow staff to prepare for subsequent sessions and perform with high treatment integrity, even without direct training on specific elements of the program. This is an important finding because most human service organizations require efficient, low-cost, and effective interventions to improve and maintain staff performance. Despite the value of clear instructions for implementing programs, staff sometimes do not access them to prepare for sessions. Thus, an inter
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