Case Study: Care Homes Game, Financial Awareness Programme
(Note: this game is also suitable for the Hotel industry)
Client requirements:
Our client wanted an interactive and engaging Financial Awareness Course to slot in to their ‘Journey2excellence’ training programme for care home managers and their deputies. The company had previously run traditional seminars for this audience of managers and they wanted to try a more innovative approach.
The delegates all received monthly management accounts and were expected to respond to queries relating to financial and non financial queries.
Course details:
The game our client chose was a two day event. The course programme consisted of a three hour formal financial awareness seminar followed by the reinforcing and extension of the learning through participating in the game. Throughout the two days our client’s own management accounts were used in the debriefs to ensure the delegates could use the learning to relate back to the real documents they were using at work.
Pre course questionnaire & exercises:
We developed a pre course questionnaire to help potential delegates assess whether the course was right for them. The assessment questionnaire consisted of a series of self assessment tests to help delegates assess their ability in dealing with financial information and terminology.
Game details:
The game was played by three or four teams of 3 to 5 players (9-18 delegates in total). So far approximately 90 delegates have attended the programme since the start of 2008. By the end of 2010 based on courses booked this will rise to 160. Each team was responsible for running two care homes and an administration office.
They had to make quality decisions, such as the number of staff to employ, food quality, housekeeping & repairs. They then tried to attract new residents from both the private patient and local authority sectors in competition with each other, bidding on price, quality and credit terms.
The teams also had the ability to manage their cash position to make the business more flexible and were faced with the problems of trying to manage receipts from customers, bad debts and payments to suppliers.
At the end of each round the teams produced a Profit & Loss Account to assess their progress.
Course coverage:
The following technical details were covered throughout the two days:
- Profit & Loss Accounts (Income Statements)
- Balance Sheets
- The Accruals Principle & Depreciation
- Basic interpretation of accounts including Gross & Operating Margins
- Basic contract tendering principles
- Cash management & its impact on the business
- The impact of competition in the market
- Budgeting & Budgetary Control
- Basic variance analysis
Return on Investment:
The initial course feedback from delegates gave a 100% satisfaction rating on the programme’s aims of improving the engagement with Financial Information. Following the course the managers felt that they were able to use their management accounts more effectively and were able to communicate with the finance team better. On most of the courses members of the finance team attended to help improve communications with the managers.