All Posts Tagged With: "workforce satisfaction"
A Patient First Culture
It’s likely that every medical center claims to put patients first. Those that actually put patients first can back up their claims with tangible results.
Schneck Medical Center, a 2011 Baldrige Award winner, is a 93-bed nonprofit hospital in southern Indiana. “At the forefront of Schneck’s commitment to excellence,” it states on its website, “is the Patient First Culture.” That culture has enabled Schneck to score 100% on 17 of 22 core measures reported for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Its patient satisfaction scores meet or exceed the top 10% or top 25% levels on nine of ten Press Ganey measures. Its hospital-acquired infection rate has been at or below 1% since 2008. It ranks second among 94 hospitals in its geographic region in value-based purchasing, which holds healthcare providers accountable for the quality and cost of their services.
An organization’s culture shapes its decisions. Schneck had limited treatment options for patients suffering myocardial infarctions, taking 120 minutes from the time a heart attack was diagnosed to the first intervention. To put these patients first, it collaborated with its largest competitor, located 25 miles away, to coordinate handing off patients who needed emergency cardiac catheterizations. The initiative has reduced…
5Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedKnow Your Employees
The numbers tell you that Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital (AGSH) in Downers Grove, Illinois, is a good place to work: associate, physician, and volunteer satisfaction were all near 100% in 2009. One of its core competencies is to “build loyal relationships,” which it does by using systematic processes to identify and meet workforce requirements.
A recipient of the 2010 Baldrige Award, AGSH has more than 2,700 associates (employees), nearly a thousand physicians, and 500 volunteers. In its award application summary, available here, AGSH describes the Workforce Satisfaction & Engagement Process that it uses to determine what matters most to its employees, physicians, and volunteers. As the diagram shows, regression analysis determines the most important factors, which are then validated through rounding and two-way communication.
Organizations can only achieve and sustain high levels of employee satisfaction and engagement through (a) profound knowledge of the factors that produce satisfaction and engagement and (b) an organization-wide commitment to improving performance on those factors. Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital’s results prove that its knowledge and commitment are world-class.
To read more about employee satisfaction and engagement, click on these articles:
- Understanding Employee Requirements
- A Culture That Values Employees
- How Does Your Workplace Measure Up?
- Employee Engagement Boosts Organizational Performance
- MEDRAD: Win with Your…
Employee Hierarchy of Needs
Money isn’t everything, especially when it comes to motivating employees—but it’s also not irrelevant.
Chip Conley’s Joie de Vivre hotel chain in the San Francisco Bay area struggled after 9/11. In an interview on FastCompany’s Web site (click here), Conley talks about turning to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid to understand how to connect to the higher needs of employees, customers, and investors. He developed an employee pyramid with three basic themes: “survival at the base, succeed at the middle, and transformation at the top. Applying that to employees, it’s money, recognition, and meaning.”
Conley and his leaders worked on building a culture of recognition and meaning:
- Senior leaders ended their meetings on a positive note.
- They created an environment of recognition throughout the organization.
- They made a rule that the person giving recognition needs to be from a different department than the person being recognized.
- They added questions to the twice-annual work climate surveys measuring performance on the top-of-the-pyramid attributes.
- They held offsite retreats with line level employees to promote recognition and instill meaning.
- They measured relationships to help evaluate manager effectiveness.
Joie de Vivre’s focus on the employee pyramid seems to have produced results: It was named one of the top ten “Best Places to Work in…
26Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWorkforce Well-Being
The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions that get at the well-being of your workforce, including questions about employee satisfaction and health and the support you provide through services and benefits. Scientists at Gallup have been studying workforce well-being for more than 50 years. Two of these scientists wrote a book about it called Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements.
According to Gallup’s research, there are universal elements of well-being that differentiate thriving from struggling. They have grouped them in five categories:
- Career Well-Being: How you occupy your time or how much you like what you do every day.
- Social Well-Being: Having strong relationships and love in your life.
- Financial Well-Being: Effectively managing your economic life.
- Physical Well-Being: Having good health and enough energy to get things done.
- Community Well-Being: A sense of engagement with your community.
According to the book’s authors, when these factors are fully realized, people thrive.
An article on the Gallup Management Journal (click here) explains why this matters. Most of us believe that happy and healthy people get sick less often than miserable people. According to Gallup’s data, workers with the lowest well-being scores cost their companies $28,800 a year in lost productivity from sick days. In contrast, workers with the highest well-being…
10Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Critical Questions: Results
The Baldrige model focuses on results: You don’t transform an organization without a very good reason, and for those organizations that transform themselves through Baldrige, the reason is because it delivers results. Check out some of the results achieved by Baldrige Award recipients in the following areas:
Better yet, read Category 7 in the award application summary of any winner you choose (click here) and you will find impressive results across all six of the areas measured.
The Results Category is the only Category in the Baldrige Criteria that examines your organization’s performance and improvement—but this one Category is worth 45% of the possible points when scoring a Baldrige application because the Baldrige model focuses on results. The best way to evaluate your results is through an assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your results, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
What are your current levels and trends in key measures of:
- Product performance OR student learning and improvement in student learning OR health care outcomes, health care process results, patient safety, and patients’ functional status?
- Customer/student/patient and stakeholder satisfaction,…
