Find ideas
When it comes to implementing a major project, the more ideas you can get from all of the people involved, the better off you’ll be.
Moore-Hardy needed to talk to several different constituencies — doctors, staff members, patients, volunteers and community members — to find out what people wanted in a hospital, but in those discussions with hospital employees, her roots as a registered nurse helped her get to the heart of their needs quicker.
She began by catering to them and their schedules.
“When you’re working to engage the staff, in particular, one of the things that I find helpful is to present myself to them in their space in a nonthreatening way,” she says.
For example, sometimes she would walk around with a basket full of healthy treats, such as low-sodium pretzels, nuts or dark chocolate, during peak times, and if someone could tell her something interesting that they thought she might want or need to know, then he or she would get a treat.
It’s also important to go to your people and to go when they’re free instead of when you’re free.
“I meet them in their offices instead of in my office and talk to them when it’s convenient for them to find out what their needs, issues and concerns are,” she says.
She also spent time talking to people by using advisory groups based on different constituencies, such as one for physicians, one for women, one for seniors and one for patients, and so on. In addition to these talks and walk-arounds, Moore-Hardy also allows employees to submit ideas online through Lake Health’s Bright Ideas program.
She would also use any opportunity, such as if she was speaking at a senior citizens’ community center, to talk to people, as well. Any time she talked to people, she would ask a lot of questions to get to the heart of their needs and wants.
“An example would be, ‘What one thing could we change that would make your workday more efficient, or what piece of equipment do you need, or what key patient safety issue are you concerned about?’” she says. “Or I could ask them, ‘What are your patients telling you that, as an administrator, I need to know? What is it that they’re telling you that will make a difference in their stay in the hospital or their recovering after?’”
The key to these initiatives being successful is making sure that you’re a good listener.
“A good listener is someone who actually really wants to hear,” Moore-Hardy says. “They step back and allow the person or the people that they’re talking to to share their point of view and just to engage in a good communication style that’s two-way communication.”
It’s also important to show the other person that you’re engaged in the conversation and paying attention.
“Certainly, eye contact is important, looking them in the eye, making sure that you aren’t doing things while they’re talking, like using your BlackBerry or typing on your computer,” she says. “Certainly, there’s all sorts of things in the literature about body language and how that can be interpreted or misinterpreted when you’re engaged in dialogue that you need to pay attention to.”
Evaluate ideas and create a plan
Regardless of how ideas come in, once you have them, you also need to find a way to filter and evaluate them.
“Some ideas can be implemented right away, and other ideas, depending on what they might be, might take longer periods of time,” she says. “Some may involve construction; some may be a simple idea of something they could start doing or stop doing.”
To make those determinations, you need to have a team of people available to review them. For example, with the online idea submission program, there are two or three multidisciplinary teams established to evaluate those ideas. Members of those teams may represent human resources, another area of the organization, staff members involved with the idea and the manager of the area affected.
The team is charged with doing an analysis of the idea and researching to see if more information or clarification is needed. In the case of building TriPoint from the ground up, Moore-Hardy engaged every area for feedback, and she says people were pretty unified in what the facility needed to have, and knowing this made it easier to establish a vision for the new center.
“You have to work within the culture of your organization or the culture you’re trying to create within your organization,” Moore-Hardy says. “ … The biggest thing that translates would be it’s important to know what your employees, volunteers,
physicians are thinking, and have a mechanism that allows them to have input into decision-making.”
When she looked around at all the feedback she had received, Moore-Hardy could clearly see the types of facilities that TriPoint should have.
“It all starts with establishing a direction that you may want the organization to go,” she says. “That would include strategic planning that certainly involves reviewing data about the organization, data about the community you serve and soliciting input as you go along.”
Just like when you were soliciting input, your planning process should also involve others.
“For strategic planning, you would certainly engage a multidisciplinary team to help work through your strategic planning,” Moore-Hardy says.
Her strategic planning starts with engaging her board of directors, and it also involves her medical staff, administrative team, employees, volunteers and the community. To find the specific people throughout her system that should help on that team, she looked first to volunteers, as many areas already had people eager to assist. She also made sure that certain areas were on every team, such as nursing and medical staff.
With TriPoint, they could clearly agree that they wanted to create a facility that promoted healing and was nurturing and also welcomed patients and their loved ones. They wanted to have facilities that were different than other hospitals and would make a difference in the care of the patients. For example, one main initiative was offering private rooms so patients and loved ones could be alone. Another example was in the mammography department, having the rooms that women changed in connected to the rooms where their testing was done so that they didn’t have to walk down a public hallway in a thin gown. Things like this would set TriPoint apart and draw people to the new facility.
Once you know the direction you want to go, then it’s important to establish goals for getting there.
“Goals are established based on what you determine the findings to be, so once you’ve reviewed the data and determined what direction you’d like to take, you set goals and metrics over some period of time to accomplish those things,” she says.
It’s important to review these goals as well as your overall plan on a regular basis.
“Because a strategic plan shouldn’t be a static document that you review and write once and then put it on a shelf, as you set your goals and establish the metrics, some may require different frequencies,” Moore-Hardy says. “It could be that you look at it quarterly. Certainly, you should look at your strategic plan annually.”
It’s important to know if you’re being successful or not in achieving those goals and, ultimately, the strategic plan.
“For every goal, there’s an outcome, or the goal is set in such a way that you will know when you get there,” she says. “If you set goals that are just process-oriented, you may not know, but if you set outcome-oriented goals, you know when you get there. As you move through whatever period of time you said you would accomplish that goal, then you evaluate it at each step.”
Knowing the type of center that she and her people wanted to create, all of those attributes and that focus on patient and family care became known as the guiding principles, and it’s important you let whatever your principles are help you make your decisions.
She says, “Sit down and use them to test how you’re developing or moving forward in a project.”
