BA450 Unit 10 Sustaining OBM Improvements Paper Example

What Was Still Running in September: A BA450 Unit 10 OBM Review Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA450: Organizational Behavior Management

Unit 10 OBM Review Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the agency, the homes, the staff and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles cited are real.

The Year in Brief

Last September, our agency could not say whether residents' teaching programs were being run in any of its four homes. Over the year, I pinpointed and measured program work, diagnosed the causes of low completion at our Cedar Street home, introduced weekly graphed feedback and spot-check feedback, replaced lecture training with behavioral skills training, piloted weekly team incentives, helped a house manager change her supervision habits, and wrote and evaluated a plan for medication documentation errors. This paper asks which of those changes were still running at the end of the year, and why.

What Lasted

Program completion at Cedar Street rose from 31 percent to the high 80s in the fall and stayed there through the summer, averaging 87 percent in the last quarter. The weekly graph is still posted every Monday, now by the senior evening staff member. Medication documentation errors across all four homes remained below 2 per 100 administrations for the six months after the plan, with feedback thinned to every two weeks. The new orientation, with behavioral skills training to criterion, has trained eleven new staff, and their first-month spot-check accuracy averages 89 percent.

What Faded

At our Prairie home, the house manager left in March. Her replacement, hired from outside the agency, was not told about the weekly graph. Within six weeks, the graph stopped, spot checks lapsed and program completion fell from 84 to 58 percent. When I noticed the decline in the monthly report, I trained the new manager on the graph routine and spot checks, and completion returned to 80 percent within a month.

The improvement at Prairie lived in one person's Monday routine, and it left when she did.

Why Some Changes Lasted

The changes that lasted shared three features. They were built into existing routines: the graph became part of the Monday staff meeting, and medication feedback became part of the house manager's weekly checklist. They were owned by more than one person: senior staff at each home could run the graph and train new hires. And they were measured continuously, so that a decline showed up in the monthly report.

Langeland et al. (1998) reported years of performance data from a community mental health setting in which job analysis, training, goal setting and feedback improved staff performance. A central lesson of their work was that gains held once measuring and feeding back results became ordinary operations rather than a special project. Our experience matched theirs: the routines that became ordinary lasted, and the one that depended on a single person did not.

The Maintenance Gap in Research

Gravina et al. (2018) examined human service studies of organizational behavior management published from 1990 to 2016. Many studies showed improved staff performance, but fewer reported maintenance data or long-term follow-up. That gap matters for practitioners: knowing that feedback improves performance for six weeks says little about whether it can be sustained for a year in an organization with high turnover. Our year of data is not a study, but it suggests that maintenance depends on organizational systems more than on the intervention itself.

Thinking in Systems

In the account by Wilder et al. (2009), organizational behavior management works at several levels, from individual performance to processes and whole organizations, and they note that interventions are more likely to last when the systems around them support the new behavior. At our agency, the Prairie fade showed a system gap: the onboarding process for house managers included no information about performance routines. The fix was not more feedback at Prairie; it was a change to how managers are hired and oriented.

Proposals

I have proposed four system changes to the director. First, the house manager job description and orientation now include the weekly graph, spot checks and feedback routines, with a checklist the regional director signs. Second, every home has at least two staff trained to run each routine, so no routine depends on one person. Third, the monthly report to the director includes a line for each home's routines, marked as running or lapsed, so a lapse is noticed within weeks. Fourth, performance data are reviewed quarterly at the leadership meeting, alongside budgets and incident reports, which signals that they matter at the top of the organization.

Costs Against Results

The director asked what the year had cost. The largest cost was time: roughly four hours a week of my time in the fall, falling to about one hour by spring, and about two hours a week of each house manager's time for graphs, spot checks and feedback. The cash costs were small by comparison, about seven thousand dollars for the incentive pilot and its extension, laminated cards, lanyards and replacement teaching materials. Against those costs, the agency gained something it could measure. Pharmacy citations for documentation fell to zero from January onward, and the state reviewer's annual visit noted the teaching program data as a strength for the first time. Turnover among evening staff fell from nearly half to about a third, though many factors affect turnover and the change cannot be credited to this work alone.

What I Would Change

I would have written the routines into the house manager job description in the first month, before anyone left, rather than after the Prairie fade showed the need.

Staff Perspective

At year's end, I asked staff at all four homes what had changed. Most said they knew what was expected and how they were doing, which they had not before. Several mentioned the director's recognition notes. Two said the spot checks still felt like being watched on busy nights. That comment, which I take seriously because it came from two of our most reliable staff members, will shape how often spot checks happen next year, especially at homes that have met their goals for several months.

Conclusion

A year of organizational behavior management at four group homes produced lasting gains in program completion, medication documentation and new staff training, and one fade when a house manager left. Langeland and colleagues' long-term data, the maintenance gap Gravina and colleagues identified and Wilder and colleagues' attention to systems all point to the same conclusion: improvements last when they are built into routines, shared among people and visible to leadership.

References

Gravina, N., Villacorta, J., Albert, K., Clark, R., Curry, S., & Wilder, D. (2018). A literature review of organizational behavior management interventions in human service settings from 1990 to 2016. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 38(2-3), 191-224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01608061.2018.1454872

Langeland, K. L., Johnson, C. M., & Mawhinney, T. C. (1998). Improving staff performance in a community mental health setting: Job analysis, training, goal setting, feedback, and years of data. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 18(1), 21-43. https://doi.org/10.1300/J075v18n01_03

Wilder, D. A., Austin, J., & Casella, S. (2009). Applying behavior analysis in organizations: Organizational behavior management. Psychological Services, 6(3), 202-211. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015393