Keep the mission simple
Bethesda’s mission statement was anything but simple when Hill arrived at the hospital.
“It was a long gobbledygook of two or three pages of everything we are supposed to do to solve world hunger,” Hill says. “I wanted to boil it down to what I thought the core basic mission of any health care organization is.”
Hill knew his ability to do so would be crucial to garnering the support of his employees. How could they help him if they were unclear about how to do it?
“You have to come up with a memorable statement that describes what you are all about,” Hill says. “Any business needs to get it down to something that simple.”
Hill referenced Ford Motor Co., which is famous for the slogan, “Quality is job one.”
“That’s something those Ford employees took a lot of pride in,” Hill says. “It’s something that Ford could put in front of them at all times, and they could focus on getting a quality car or truck on the assembly line.”
Hill needed to bring his employees together under a similar premise. He needed each of them to understand his or her importance to the organization’s success, whether the employee was a cardiac surgeon or the person who mopped the hallways every night at 3 a.m.
“You can have all the policies and procedures you want to in any organization,” Hill says. “But unless you can get it ingrained into the daily activities of every employee, it just won’t become something that’s totally effective. I wanted to get a mission statement down to something that every employee could memorize and understand.”
Hill relied on the fact that most people who enter the health care field do so with the idea to help people.
“You’ve got to sit down and basically determine what your business is all about,” Hill says. “Then you have to figure out how you want that to relate to your customer. Most people that get into health care, no matter what job they are in, have the basic belief that they are here to try to help people in their time of need.”
The statement Hill came up with was to “provide quality health services in a caring manner.”
“I figured if I could memorize those six or seven words, anybody could,” Hill says. “It’s something that I think really states what we’re all about and something that people could remember.”
The message was carved out on decorative wooden signs that were posted at each entrance to the building. More importantly, it was reinforced at employee orientations, at meetings and in communication that took place at all levels of the organization.
“We continue to try to communicate that it’s a team effort that gets this done,” Hill says. “It’s not just the doctors and nurses but all the people in environmental services, our engineering people, our people that do billing and admitting. … That’s the total team approach. You have to communicate that they are all part of the team and no one is more important than the other.”
