The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

What was the situation prior to PHIG funding?

We had a lot of things that had some clogs. Our contracts were taking a really long time to be completed. We did a lot of hiring around COVID, and then we kept on quite a few people, but nobody really got trained efficiently because COVID was really a time when folks were kind of moving fast and furious and trying to get things done as best as we could. That’s what I walked into, and that was the motivation behind launching the Houston Health Department Academy, or HHD Academy.

What is the Houston Health Department Academy?

We looked at the subject matter experts and asked them to create some micro-learnings for an initial cohort of about 28 supervisors and managers, and a couple emerging leaders who worked in the spaces of supervisors and managers, to teach them how to properly submit their contracts so the contract process wouldn’t be clogged up. Our supervisor/manager training for HHD Academy is a 10-week course. It meets every Monday from 8:00 in the morning to 5:00 in the afternoon. And we offer a series of mini learnings for four hours at a time in the morning, and it’s four hours in the afternoon. So, in the morning, we might discuss how to properly discipline and manage your employees’ performance in the morning, then in the afternoon we’ll go over how to properly submit contracts and how to build a scope.

What other Managerial skills did you prioritize?

Some of the human resources expectations, from a manager’s perspective, including: how to properly manage some of your staff as it pertains to FMLA, or what to do as a manager when you are told that one of your staff members has to do a drug testing, what is appropriate for you if we have an active shooter? What is your job as a supervisor or manager for your staff? How do you treat them? What are you supposed to do? We go over your proper budget process, right? So maybe that’s how to read your budget, or maybe it’s a discussion of budget cycle – whatever will keep you in a really good space for your budget.

What’s been the impact?

I think that some of our supervisors and managers are becoming more confident and secure about being supervisors and managers, and they’re building a rapport amongst each other. They’re really operating like a cohort. They are adopting accountability buddies. They even chose to have a book club so that they can have more access to leadership practices. And they realize that they’re not alone. So, I think those elements in and of themselves are valuable, and they’re also speaking more freely about some of the concerns and some of the joys of their job. The academy has definitely built camaraderie already and, believe it or not, in some of their program meetings that folks have weekly or monthly, the managers are taking back some of the things that they’ve learned in the academy to their teams. So that’s nice as well.

Why is this so important?

If this supervisor and manager training helps you to fortify your technical skills as a supervisor and manager, you are more efficient, more effective, and you save time so you can focus more on the program. And when you can focus more on the program, then those are more services that you’re giving to our community. On another level, as far as employees are concerned, when you invest in your employees, they feel valuable. When they feel valuable, they perform better. And when they perform better, the community gets more.