Establish structure
Comte describes the structure of the AccentCare he first encountered as loose and scattered. People were getting work done but more out of habit than as progress toward any ultimate goal. There was no accountability and no metrics, which meant progress was tough to track.
“We needed to establish direction and goals and then hold them to those goals and make them accountable for what they did, reward them when they did it, and let them know when they didn’t do it,” he says.
If your company is going to do anything more than merely scrape by, you need to establish some structure that includes both abstract operating philosophies and concrete metrics.
For the first piece — creating a mission statement and guiding principles — Comte relied on his employees, who had the best insight into the company’s core.
“Management shouldn’t be developing these, in my opinion,” he says. “These are things the employees have to buy in to and have to agree to and have to live. I can’t tell people how do to that.”
So he asked each manager to round up a few willing volunteers — sans management, of course — to participate on a committee. He gave them a general direction and asked them to fill in gaps by defining what the company was all about.
“We don’t put a lot of structure in when and how they should do it,” Comte says. “We just put the emphasis on the results.”
The ultimate test of their proposed mission is to put it in front of everyone else. Now, for example, new employees get a printout of the mission and guiding philosophies and Comte encourages them to disagree or edit. Additionally, an employee committee gets together annually to ask the rest of the staff for revision suggestions. But for seven years, the mission has remained unchanged.
Once you have the outline of what the company is and how it acts, you can drill down into specific goals that will propel the company toward its mission. If you want to see progress, you need to be able to measure it.
“Make it look, feel and act like a business,” Comte says. “Bring in the appropriate metrics. Make sure they look at the financial information the right way.”
But, especially if you’re starting from scratch, what exactly are the appropriate metrics?
“There are certainly your financial goals. The first thing you want to do is get the company profitable,” Comte says. “And then we determined after we got profitable, what should our margins be? What should our bottom line look like? And then you drive for that.”
After you set the first goal of profitability, then you have to think ahead to what success will look like in the future.
“You just start putting together the picture using input from the field. You start mapping out what this company should look like,” Comte says. “Once you figure out what it should look like today, then you start working out what should it look
l
ike tomorrow, and then how do we get there. That’s an ongoing process.”
It will take several other metrics to build your future picture of success. Once you’re familiar with the company, it should be fairly obvious which statistics define the business in terms of productivity.
Basically, measure what your employees spend their time doing and what your clients expect, then try to reduce the gap. Comte, for example, looked at how many home visits caregivers conducted on various time scales and how many visits particular clients needed.
“You determine … what are the people, what are the metrics, what do we need to look at every day, every week, every month to make sure that we’re heading in the direction that we all laid out that we could get to,” he says.
Just as you should revisit your mission statement, determining metrics is similarly ongoing.
“Each business has its own set of metrics and they’re constantly evolving,” he says. “I don’t think there’s a month when we don’t say, ‘How about if we look at it like this, and chop up the data and see what it means if we do this?’ It’s never complete. You’re always looking at better ways of doing things.”