Make it happen
After you’ve set goals at the intersection of aggressive and achievable, your employees need to accomplish them. You’ll get their buy-in — and their effort — when you keep them involved.
St. Joseph employees participated from the start by giving their input. They stay involved now through lean processes, referred to as the St. Joseph Way. Basically, they’re empowered to solve problems in their own work areas to improve performance in pursuit of the strategic goals.
“It’s a culture of continuous improvement (where) you’re equipping front-line employees to constantly identify gaps in performance, to identify ways to improve the organization, ways to eliminate waste, ways to save time, ways to improve our processes,” Proctor says. “It’s not management doing the work; it’s front-line employees doing the work of improving whatever the gap is that they’ve identified in their particular area.”
Employees go through training to learn specific tools and methods that can streamline their workflow.
“In that kind of thinking, you get a full understanding of your current situation and then you identify your target state,” Proctor says.
St. Joseph has internalized and customized the lean process, not only in name but in the process itself. When local hospitals take a lean look at a certain area, questions about the mission outcomes are built into the improvement effort. That way, the overarching goals stay collectively clear as employees drive improvement at the local level.
“The biggest thing is translating the strategy all the way down into every single department to where every department understands what they contribute to that particular strategy and how they play a role in it,” Proctor says.
In an organization as large as St. Joseph, her role as CEO is to communicate goals and strategies to local leaders, and then help them deliver the message to their areas of the company.
“The best you can do is create support systems that try to eliminate variation,” she says. “So if it’s a message that needs to be consistent across our entire health system, then we put together a message statement, we put together frequently asked questions statements and we provide that to the leadership across the system.
“We allow the individual leaders to determine the best way to communicate in their organization. They know their employees best. … The most important thing is trying to create a line of sight between the front-line employees’ work and whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.”
To bolster that alignment, St. Joseph is piloting a lean tool called strategic deployment, in which one level of the organization identifies what it can contribute to achieve the strategy, then it passes the ball to the next level, and so on, all the way to front-line employees.
Proctor keeps employees motivated in this process by recognizing improvement along the way.
“When you’re trying to drive improved performance or improved outcomes in an organization, the easiest mistake could be to not recognize improvement as it happens in such a way that you demotivate employees,” she says. “You have to pay close attention to recognizing improvement and to encouraging the growth and learning.”
But when you adopt a culture of continuous improvement, you’re never done improving. The company, which grew revenue from $3.9 billion in fiscal 2008 to $4.1 billion in fiscal 2009, is still going strong. Accomplishing one initiative — like the several hospitals in the system that have gone more than two years without a case of ventilator-associated pneumonia — just frees up the company to reach toward its next goal.
“I just think that there’s too much in what we do, that we can always learn how to do it one step better,” Proctor says. “Yeah, maybe we can eliminate [certain things] altogether, once and for all from ever happening again in our hospitals, but there will be something else that has come along in the meantime.”
How to reach: St. Joseph Health System, (714) 347-7500 or www.stjhs.org
