Six Steps to Creating an
Excellent Culture in Your Healthcare Business
By Thomas Jacobs, CEO of
MedHQ
You know a great culture company when you see
it. With such a company, the customer service experience is consistent and
appropriate for the service being provided. We think of such companies as
Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods, DoubleTree Hotels and Jet Blue to name a
few. Great culture companies employ people that share the same set of
values. That's not to say that every great company is identical, but the
people in strong culture companies can each embrace the particular set of
values that enlivens the company's mission and describes "how" the people
in the organization will generally behave while implementing the company's
strategy.
Using lessons learned from Ann Rhoades and Delise
Crimmins of People Ink, a company that specializes in helping companies to
create great cultures, we brought some of these concepts over to the
healthcare field and with the help of CEO Tom Mallon, tried them out at
Regent Surgical Health in Westchester, Ill.
There are six things to
do that, if done well, will move you far ahead in your quest to create a
great culture in your company, as we discover through this experience.
These steps will lead to consistent hiring practices and give you the best
opportunity to create a great culture, and you will be on your way to
becoming one of the best places to work in healthcare.
Step 1: Define
your company's values. There are many different exercises
you can do to define your company's values. There are, however, three
important rules to follow: 1) values must be defined and held by the top
people in the organization (i.e., the CEO, the board of directors, etc.);
2) the leadership team, however that is defined (e.g., CEO together with
direct reports, top administrative staff, etc.), must buy-in to the
values; and 3) the values must be described in terms of the behaviors that
demonstrate each of the values.
One of the best ways to develop
your company's values statement, if you can arrange to do so logistically,
is to have the entire leadership team spend a half or full day together
working through a set of exercises that will flesh out the values
statement. The key to this session is to capture the behaviors associated
with the values, and by doing this step as a team rather than in the CEO's
office, organizational buy-in can be assured.
Behaviors and values
are inextricably linked. One way to show that your company truly adheres
to its stated values is by identifying its actions that support the values
- how your company prioritizes its time and resources should line up with
the stated values. On the individual level, we recommend that each job
duty listed in a job description be linked to one or more of the specific
company values. These choices (or behaviors) are clear markers of what we
truly value. How the organization promotes and manages these behaviors
that support the organization's values is where the "rubber meets the
road," or maybe more appropriately, where the "scalpel meets the skin,"
with respect to creating a great culture.
Because everyone in the
corporation needs to be on board, this process will take a significant
amount of time - as much as six to nine months before a company is ready
to move to the next step. Leadership must take the time to communicate the
meaning of the values to the other members of the company's staff so that
the values can really become engrained in the fabric of the
culture.
Step 2: Hire "A"
players. We have experienced hiring someone that has a
great resume only to find out, after they are hired, that the person is
just not a good fit for the organization in spite of a seemingly perfect
background and set of experiences for the job we wanted to fill. This
scenario, which has played out thousands of times in good and bad
organizations alike, is likely due to a mismatch in values. With a
well-defined set of company values, what constitutes an A player can be
clearly defined, and we have a much better chance of avoiding the above
scenario.
Another important step is to properly teach staff members
how to hire A players with respect to the values (and behaviors) now
inherent to your company. This entails more than just a standard
single-interviewer process; interviewers should try to steer potential
team members to provide concrete examples of what they have done in the
past to ensure that the values of the potential hire are in line with the
entire company. We want candidates to talk about actual past experiences
during the interview, rather than discuss platitudes and what they would
do in the next position. Past performance is the best indicator of future
performance.
Step 3:
Exceed the expectations of A players. While hiring A
players is critical, what is more critical is to take care of the A
players currently in your organization. This does not mean to
inappropriately discriminate and show favoritism. What it means is that
your A players will, by definition, be the people in your organization who
consistently behave in a manner consistent with your company's values.
And, of course, we want to reward good behavior!
When we see
behavior that is supportive of the values we want to reward and recognize
the people that exhibited such outstanding behavior: public rewards and
recognition of outstanding behavior will send a clear message to the rest
of the organization what is meant in the values statement. This should not
be arbitrary or inappropriate or limited to one select group of staff
members. Anyone can exhibit behaviors that are observably supportive or in
conflict with your company's values and should be rewarded.
Recognition programs should not be too gimmicky and should serve
to highlight those who exemplify your company's core values. For example,
companies can award pins to team members who have been identified by their
peers for performing behaviors that are representative of one of the core
values. These achievements can then be recognized at monthly staff
meetings.
With the leadership publicly highlighting outstanding
examples of supportive behavior, the organization will develop a tribal
knowledge of "how things are done here." This is the essence of a great
culture.
Step 4: Be
excessive about customer service. Great organizations
strive for great customer service, high patient satisfaction, and high
physician satisfaction. Leaders in the organization must become experts at
spotting behaviors that support the organization's values. The values have
their greatest real meaning within the context of defining how the
organization delivers the products and services promised to its customers.
A players, then, will naturally be those that excel at customer service.
And great leaders in the organization will be those that find ways to be
most supportive of A players' efforts. How the front lines of the
organization treat your customers is critically important, and supporting
your front line personnel starts by supporting them in their daily
routines and then goes deeply into the inner workings of the organization,
as it pertains to investment decisions, organizational prioritization,
assignment of job duties, etc. The companies with great culture will make
great customer service the focal point of their
efforts.
Step 5: Create a
disciplined culture of excellence. Companies with a great
culture practice excellence every day. They continually improve their
operations. They rigorously follow their processes and make a habit of
completing work and closing up all loose ends. To be a company that
practices excellence does not mean it never makes mistakes, but it does
mean that they learn from their mistakes. One of my favorite
sayings, I'll attribute to Tom Mallon CEO of Regent Surgical
Health, is that "it's OK to make mistakes; just make sure
today's mistakes are different that yesterday's!" In other words, great
companies learn from their mistakes and improve their organizations
through these experiences.
Step 6: Repeat steps 1-5. The
last step to establishing a great culture is to do all five of the
previous steps all of the time. Perhaps you can consider this sixth step
part of practicing discipline and excellence, but I prefer to think of it
all by itself. This is because it is so important to remember that
creating an excellent culture cannot be accomplished by any single one of
the other five steps alone. It is an integrative effort of all of the
other five steps.
|
