Improve every day
Being a successful organization requires knowing where you stand, setting goals to get better and then holding people accountable.
“If you are in a company like mine, it’s how creative can you be for employers or government when they are seeking health benefits arrangements,” she says. “How high-quality is your service? How do you think about your customers? Then how do evaluate them? How do you benchmark? I think that benchmarking is very important and also your own willingness to kick your own tires really hard and put in place — it sounds trite — but put in place true continuous quality improvement across every variable that you know builds toward that product initiation.”
You need to have data that you can measure and compare to find out how you compare to others in your industry.
“We try to take all the functional components within our organization and then we try to benchmark against what would be considered a best practice in the industry,” she says.
For example, if UPMC was measuring how its call center stacked up, it would look at all the industry benchmarks and compare those to goals, like how satisfied customers are or how quickly they are answering calls.
“We’ve had basically a dashboard we’ve developed looking inside the company at all the different pieces that we think are very important for us in terms of meeting our goals and objectives,” she says. “So we do internal monitoring so that we know that we are hitting our metrics or hitting our benchmarks. We adjust those benchmarks when we think that we could be a best-in-class or we could be better than best-in-class.”
But developing a dashboard and using data can’t just be done on a whim. You have to believe in it and drive home the point that you want to be a data-driven organization.
“You have to have a value proposition inside your company that says you are about setting the culture and you’re about setting the practices against a best-in-class methodology,” she says. “So you have to actually believe there is a reason to do that and to very specifically say, ‘OK, these are the goals in my company.
“Part of that is really the leadership believing that they should be a data-driven organization. Then they have to say, ‘Where in the spectrum do I want to fall? Is everything I’m doing something I want to achieve a best-in-class in. If I am, who’s on my benchmarking list? What are the entities that I want to be like or I want to be better than and how do I know I am?’”
You then need to delegate and depend on your team to present that information to you as well as other team members.
“It’s really a question of what kind of dashboard do you set up for yourself,” she says. “Any company and industry can do that in terms of what is it you are trying to accomplish and achieve. Our methodologies are really to have people who are charged in those areas to really produce data reports that we can see and then we share that with the senior team, so everybody else can see everybody else’s metrics to see if they’re collectively, as a set of companies, are we meeting them?”
Without the data and metrics and passion to be the best, you won’t be able to fully know where you stand.
“It has to do with establishing a culture of excellence, establishing a data-driven set of methodologies, and then being very disciplined about how you set that vision. How do you set those goals and then how do you execute on the strategies that will allow you to improve your performance.”
