How Clover Health's L&D team designs a robust training curriculum
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How Clover Health's L&D team designs a robust training curriculum

Clover Health is a HealthTech startup that seeks to improve the state of healthcare in America. Their technology reduces friction between physicians, insurers, and patients, to ultimately create a system where doctors can focus on the people–not the paperwork.

Emily Katz leads Learning and Organizational Development at Clover Health, a team of eight that focuses on two core workstreams: employee training and organizational development.

While the two invariably go hand in hand, the first primarily focuses on skills training and professional development, while the latter focuses on the business structures and tools that support career architectures. All of this means development and delivery of hours of curriculum and classroom learning across a variety of topics. And as far as the creation and roll out of the materials supporting the curriculum? Katz's team has built a system that can navigate the multitude of stakeholders and teams.

Learning content at Clover spans software training to regulatory training.

Building a knowledge base

Clover draws talented professionals from across many industries, including tech and traditional healthcare. Many of them take on new responsibilities when they start their roles at Clover, such as advancing into new leadership positions, taking on new regulatory responsibilities, and more. Depending on their level of technical adoption, employees need to be trained on the tools and systems Clover uses, as well as on Clover's own products and technology. There's also a focus on developing different skills around leadership, communication, and diversity and inclusion. With almost 600 professionals employed at Clover, it's essential that Emily's team accomplish their work efficiently.

“We use our content in many different formats,” explains Katz. “A single sentence is used in an e-learning module, informational text, and within the platform. Each topic and channel has its own attributes of ownership and responsibility, and we're responsible for tracking everything to ensure updates get made.”

It became very clear that the team needed a method to keep track of all of the information and updates–one that wasn't just in their heads.

Content is created to be used across various formats, often necessitating collaboration between multiple departments.

“A couple of years ago, our work depended on all of us being in constant communication, all day every day, just to keep everything in motion," said Katz.

To streamline the process, the team built a knowledge base with Airtable that logged attributes such as ownership, expertise, and responsibility. It serves as their central tool for creating and tracking content that spans multiple disciplines, owners and subject matter experts within the company. With stakeholders, experts, outstanding tasks and different versions clearly associated with each piece, wrangling information and updates is a scaleable effort.

Diversity and Inclusion Trainings

Another powerful application arose with their diversity and inclusion trainings. About a quarter of Clover's employees work outside of their main offices, and it's essential that such trainings set the standard for what it means to be inclusive. Video conferencing tools allow employees to dial in and engage with each other, but making a training truly interactive over video posed a challenge.

Airtable really helped us refine our workflows so that we could collaborate with all our subject matter experts efficiently.

“We found ourselves wondering if the way we delivered the training itself might not be inclusive, and started to look for another way. Airtable gives us the flexibility to try fundamentally new things without investing in new infrastructure or software.”

Katz continued, “How do you ask if Sally has something to add on a video call without saying 'Sally, do you have anything to add'? Maybe Sally's not in a position to speak up at that moment and you've created a situation where she feels called out in trying to help.”

The team encounters unique challenges in training sessions–especially as a company with employees located all over the country.

For D&I sessions that involved roundtable discussion, Katz employed the use of Airtable forms. Meeting attendees could submit answers, in real time, to questions such as “How can each person solve the meeting culture?” and decide whether or not they wanted to be called on to elaborate for the group. The submissions populate a base that the moderator can look at, facilitating live conversations without singling individuals out. She was ultimately able to take a traditional worksheet and use an Airtable form to turn it into an interactive exercise.

They share Airtable forms for feedback as well, after classroom trainings, in order to assess whether attendees learned something new, thought the session was a good use of their time, etc. In Katz' opinion, trainings such as these don't create overnight shifts, but they do build awareness and facilitate effective and lasting change where needed.

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