Track your progress
The enactment of organizational change is something that needs to be tracked. If you don’t know where you’ve been, it’s hard to tell if you’ve made any progress toward where you want to go.
In the case of Tenet, Powers’ employees needed to know what steps to take in order to better align the hospitals in the Tenet region and what needed to be done in order to create a true sense of team across
t
he 10 hospitals.
“You have to communicate it,” Powers says. “Let people know what their job is and why it’s important. If they’re making just one little part, why is that important to the whole business? Everybody is important. I can’t overemphasize how important the communication aspect is in any business.
“We need to constantly tell people what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and where we’re headed. It puts people at ease so they know what to expect.”
Tenet generated a written scorecard system that is available on a shared drive within the company.
“We have the same indicators for every hospital, and it’s on a shared drive so you can see everybody’s,” Powers says. “It’s not something that’s kept in a binder in my office. That wouldn’t do anyone any good.”
Powers says the scorecards are updated monthly on such things as patient satisfaction, patient outcomes and other key benchmarks that need to be met.
“Every business needs to establish what are the key levers for their business and then communicate that and measure it, then recommunicate it and remeasure it,” Powers says. “It has to be something that’s not just done once. It can’t be something that is just the flavor of the month. These are key things that are important to how we operate. They are important now, and they are important in the future.”
The key to making a benchmark system work is the ability to select things that both can be tracked and should be tracked.
“We look at what’s important to the overall business,” Powers says. “We look at quality, our people, service, cost and growth. We establish what the key results are that we need. We benchmark against our other hospitals, not just in Florida but we have quite a number of hospitals throughout the country.”
One of the things you have to be careful not to do is get too wrapped up in what a single metric might tell you.
“You can’t look at one metric and have an understanding of that organization,” Powers says. “Nothing is the end-all, be-all. But what it does is it gives you the indication to then get to the next step and focus further on that one area. If you have a 50 percent turnover rate, I would think that’s probably not too good. That in itself doesn’t tell you anything about the organization. It just tells you what the turnover is. Maybe I need to look further and see what the issues are. It’s just an indicator, and it gives you the opportunity or direction of where you need to start looking.”
Powers can see the fruits of her labor when she hears her direct reports talk about where Tenet still needs to go.
“Each of our hospitals and each of our leaders are able to very succinctly talk about what their plan is, where they stand and where we’re doing well and not well, and what the two or three things are that matter in each area,” Powers says.
“It’s just making sure that everyone is on the same page and establishing goals, not just for the hospital but overall. I think if you look at the overall vision, it’s to surround yourself with good people and set reasonable expectations and allow them to exceed expectations.”
How to reach: Tenet HealthSystem Medical Inc., (954) 509-3600 or www.tenethealth.com
