Build accountability
A culture of accountability goes hand in hand with a culture of
communication. Along with offering employees the chance to
take an active leadership role in an organization, you have to
ensure that employees are willing to shoulder the responsibilities of a heightened role.
At Sharp Chula Vista, the primary form of accountability
measurement is patient satisfaction. Patients are the medical
industry’s equivalent of customers, and without satisfied customers who become repeat customers, no business can survive.
“One tactic we use is hourly rounding,” Boyd says. “We make
sure a nurse or health care professional will be in a patient’s
room every hour. We have a checklist of what they need to be
checking on — the comfort of the patient, are they positioned
correctly and so forth.
“That does two things: One, we’ve found over the years that
this kind of frequent contact promotes patient satisfaction.
The patients feel comfortable that they are being taken care of
and that we are concerned about the service and care we are
providing them. Two, the person performing the checkup can
ensure that we are maintaining high standards of service and
safety.”
From there, the process goes up the chain of command, as
nurse team leaders check in with patients and confer with the
nurses in their charge. Boyd and his leadership team then meet
with the nurse team leaders, who brief upper management,
sharing statistics that measure the medical staff’s successes
and areas in need of improvement.
“The nurse manager can harvest wins from the hospital
rooms — stories of patients who are happy with the service
and care they are receiving,” Boyd says. “When they meet with
me, they bring those stories back and give them to me, and I
can share those with the rest of the organization.
“It’s a nice system because we have the accountability built
in. Our accountability is always going to be measured in our
patient satisfaction scores. If we’re doing everything properly,
our patient satisfaction scores are going to be consistently
high.”
Boyd and his staff struggled for a while with how to build
accountability into their culture, deciding ultimately that it had
to start at the customer interface and work its way up.
“We recognized that we were doing everything we thought
was right, but we saw great volatility in our performance with
regard to patient satisfaction scores,” he says. “We’d see high
scores one month, then the next month we’d see a dip. We
went for a whole year where we had very high satisfaction
scores, then the next year we saw more volatility. So you need
to look at what is causing that. Some of it is turnover; some of
it is in the communication and orientation. There are always
things you can recognize and things you need to change.”
No matter how you make it happen, you must couple
accountability with responsibility if you want your employees
to take leadership roles in your company.
“Everybody wants to do the right thing, everybody is working
really hard, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have that system of accountability in place, you’re not sustaining it,” Boyd
says. “For us, we recognized that if we could achieve higher
employee satisfaction, it was going to help us achieve higher
patient satisfaction and physician satisfaction, but it only happens if you hold yourself and the rest of the organization
accountable through these methods I talked about.”
