TurningPoint Case Study

Hill-Rom

BACKGROUND

Hill-Rom is a medical device company that predominantly manufactures hospital beds. Headquartered in Batesville, Indiana, the company was founded in 1929 with the intention to "bring the home into the hospital." With a global staff of 6,500, training is a key component to Hill-Rom's philosophy of providing the best services, products and solutions to its customers.

As the Shared Services Process Improvement Manager for Hill-Rom, Jon Padfield is responsible for training associates worldwide in addition to leading projects and mentoring teams. His desire to teach others has allowed him to spend a majority of his time instructing, even at international locations such as Hill-Rom’s offices in Europe, Asia and Australia. Over the course of seven years of creating and delivering technical training, Padfield understands the importance of eliciting good audience participation during classes.

THE CHALLENGE

Padfield has always tried to incorporate as much attendee interaction as possible into his training sessions. However, asking questions of his audience often led to the same three or four people answering each time, even when he has 30 participants in his class. Padfield was looking for a way to engage all participants in a real discussion, even when the discussion touched on sensitive topics.

"I know there are questions sensitive enough that some people are going to be hesitant to raise their hand and respond - especially when you are inquiring about projects that have gone poorly in the past," said Padfield. "People sometimes don't want to speak up and voice their opinion, and that phenomenon gets even worse if you have members of management in the room."

While teaching a weekend masters class at a nearby university, Padfield was offered the ability to integrate audience response technology into his class. The idea of interactive lectures was extremely appealing, and Padfield explored the available system. Unfortunately, the system he came across was much more difficult to use than he had imagined.

"When I first started looking at the system, I thought it was a great idea. Then, I got a hold of the user manual. It wasn't very user-friendly to incorporate interactive slides into you presentation. After getting halfway through the manual, I thought I really don't have time for this as much as I would like to use it," said Padfield.

THE SOLUTION

When Padfield was asked to develop a global continuous improvement training program he decided to explore the possibility of using an audience response system that didn't require as much work. During his search, he discovered Turning Technologies' 100% PowerPoint native software TurningPoint. After he spoke to a representative and tried out the software, Padfield knew he had found the technology that he wanted to integrate into his training environment. The ease-of-use of the system was the biggest factor in his decision-making process.

"When I saw how easy it was to integrate into PowerPoint, I thought this is what I've been looking for - something that you don't need a degree in to use the technology. It was a perfect fit. I absolutely love using the devices. They are a whole lot easier than the competitor's devices I had initially looked at," said Padfield.

CONCLUSION

Hill-Rom's use of TurningPoint has increased since the initial purchase. Shortly after the devices arrived, a staff meeting was held that included a broad cross-section of company leaders. Representatives from IT, human resources, engineering and customer service were asked questions such as, "Which department is best known for reaching out to other parts of the organization to offer assistance?" and "Which department responds to customers most efficiently?"

"There were questions that you could have asked for a show of hands, but not many would like to admit that their department is not as good as other departments in this area or another," said Padfield. "By using the response devices, it was really interesting to get instant feedback and see how other departments in the company responded. It helped us to identify best practices and see how to implement those practices across the company."

Padfield continues to use TurningPoint in his training sessions and hopes to expand its uses throughout the organization. He always receives an overwhelmingly positive reaction from his attendees and can feel the anticipation in the room when waiting for the results graph to appear. As an "extremely satisfied customer" Padfield hopes to explore the additional features TurningPoint has to offer in the near future.

For more information about purchasing or renting Turning Technologies' audience response systems for your organization, contact us at 866-746-3015.