Empowering Care: Transforming Learning and Development at Mater

In a patient-centric environment where employees are time-poor, Mater Creates a self-guided employee experience encompassing learning and career development with more than 7,000 courses.

Mater Misericordiae Limited is a Queensland-based Catholic faith and care-based organisation whose vision is focused on patient care in a hospital environment and the community.

When Director of Systems Transformation Sean Hunter joined the organisation as a contractor five years ago, his remit was to head up the Digital Education Division, build a new team, and move from face-to-face training to blended and online cloud-based learning.

Little did he realise that the organisation would grow from 7,500 employees to 10,000, and the team would find themselves migrating three LMS and implementing a new performance management module as the first pandemic in a century gripped the world.

What started as a predominantly technical transformation to migrate a single LMS, morphed into a complex change management process, migrating three different LMS’s to a single cloud-based LMS, and all at a time when the world needed to move away from on-premise and in situ learning and embrace online and virtual solutions because of COVID.

In 2018, Mater successfully implemented its new LMS, which was just the beginning of its enduring business partnership with Cornerstone. Sean explains: “We previously had an on-premise solution that was not cloud-based, not integrated internally, had a poor user experience, and didn’t have its own app. Its limitations were that people could only learn on hospital grounds, within the workplace, and only within hospital hours.”

Tracking success and progress was difficult and limited to online training. Sean explained: “One of the benefits of the new system was we were suddenly able to report on user activities and eliminate manual tracking completely.”

Mater successfully replaced its learning management system between 2018 and 2020, just as the pandemic hit. This left Mater’s staff in a good position to learn at a time and place that suits them.

In 2020, Mater underwent a consolidation process, bringing four more Central and North Queensland hospitals under the Mater Banner, increasing its workforce by 2,500 people, and necessitating a similar upgrade of learning management systems for the new hospitals under its control. Ultimately, it replaced three individual learning management systems with a new system from Cornerstone.

Sean explains: “The original remit was to migrate a single LMS, and then it became three, including implementing Cornerstone’s performance module. So, the scope significantly changed. Additionally, we had already planned a significant change management program, which we had to adapt for COVID and manage virtual drop-in sessions, a new concept for Mater.”

As a result of the lessons learned implementing the changes and managing change during COVID, Sean and the team realised they would need to create various support materials for the different user groups, which led to comprehensive support materials and videos to help users.

Towards the end of 2020, Mater also implemented a Performance module. Cornerstone Performance was selected without going to tender based on the success of the LMS transition; as Sean explained, “The initial project had been delivered under budget, and we already had a vendor we were happy with, and the Cornerstone Consultants had done a great job already. We had internal conversations, and I wrote a business paper, and then we powered straight into the performance module.”

Mater’s managers can have up to 100 direct reports, so the transition required more change communication. Again, the transition occurred against the backdrop of the pandemic’s additional stress on the health system. Mater allowed managers to transition gently into the new process, with any training issues gone now that Mater is into its third performance cycle (operating on financial years). According to Sean, Mater couldn’t be happier with the results.

Given that many of the staff are employed under an enterprise agreement, performance appraisals aren’t mandatory. Nevertheless, the results have been excellent, as Sean explained: “Under the old Success Factors appraisal system, we had about 30 percent completion of performance appraisals. We now have that up to around 60 percent, as we are working on the organisational culture to encourage greater uptake.”

In March 2023, Mater implemented Cornerstone’s Learning Content and changed its content strategy. Initially, it investigated a different company’s learning content. Still, after discovering that the integration with Cornerstone wouldn’t work, and realising that content would need to be manually curated and uploaded – a time consuming exercise – Mater concluded that the platform wouldn’t meet their needs, and instead investigated Cornerstone’s learning content.

Said Sean: “I realised we needed integrated content, and I knew there was internal demand for good quality and diverse content. In March, we implemented the professional skills package from Cornerstone – and we suddenly went from having 300-400 courses to having well over 7,000.”

In addition to custom-developing its own specialist health-based courseware, Mater was able to access specific professional skills courseware, and the team is discussing ways to create very custom playlists around leadership, management and upskilling its people.

“I can’t say enough how much support we had from Cornerstone. They were a great support to us and very knowledgeable about their product, which helped us have a successful implementation,” said Sean.

“It’s also very cost-effective per user, especially considering the size of our workforce with 10,000 plus users. We have also had feedback about how simple and easy it is to use,” said Sean.

The L&D team has measured success in multiple ways, including how quickly they can check mandatory compliance training.

“We can now slice and dice multiple data sets so the board and the executives can quickly see compliance statistics before it was manual and laborious. That is a major improvement,” said Sean.

The anecdotal evidence also points to a successful implementation, as Sean explained: “Even though it can be difficult for some staff to step away from their shifts and undertake learning, many employees have commented on how much they enjoy being able to take learning into their own hands.”

The team is also delighted with the single sign-on, alleviating the need to remember multiple passwords and the cost and time savings the platform has brought for healthcare accreditations.

Mater also discovered efficiencies along the way such as the benefits associated with the platform becoming a ‘single source of truth’.

“At first, some managers were surprised at who was in their team or discovered their team structure was quite different from their perception, which highlighted the data on the legacy system wasn’t as clean as Mater thought.

“So, there was an added advantage of identifying where data was not up to date and rectifying that,” said Sean.

From replacing a 12-year-old legacy LMS to completely metamorphosing learning, content and performance, the Mater L&D team has been on a transformational expedition.

In the five years since embarking on the journey, Mater has gone from a legacy system that wasn’t up-to-date and didn’t necessarily reflect the status of teams or the training to one where the HR system is a “single source of truth” and where the HR and L&D teams can quickly slice and dice data to identify potential needs and verify compliance.

Thanks to the new capabilities provided by Cornerstone, Learning, Performance and Content, Mater will continue to evolve and grow no matter what new challenges it’s presented.