Re-engage employees
One of the first three things Laret had to attack was rebuilding confidence with his employees.
“First, and I think most important, was to re-engage the work force here and get them focused on what we could do together to develop a positive attitude about the future, to have confidence in a vision of the future,” Laret says.
He started by writing weekly e-mails to the whole staff, telling stories about patients and the great things done at the hospital.
“The first thing I needed to do was remind them of what kind of organization we are,” he says. “We had gone through a trauma, but fundamentally, we were still one of the great medical centers in this country. We needed to get back and focus on those issues related to what we’re really about as an academic medical center and spend less time talking about the trauma.”
He also spent between one-third and one-half of his time talking with employees at brown-bag lunch sessions and departmental meetings and listening to their complaints and problems.
“As much as anything, giving them a sense that management was listening to them probably did more to re-establish confidence,” he says. “ … That is a key ingredient. People need to feel that management is there and is accessible and is respectful.”
He heard many problems, such as the hospital didn’t have linens and that the gases used to power their lasers were no longer being delivered.
“We needed to go back through and sort out where we were on our accounts payable — how do we manage this?” Laret says. “It was dealing with issues one at a time, from the bottom up, but with the idea that you ultimately get there.”
He also had to prioritize these problems, so he first dealt with anything related to patient care.
“That’s more important than the budget and more important than any of the other things we need to deal with,” he says. “That actually provided some clarity to the organization — ‘OK, we’ll take care of patients first and foremost.’”
After patient care, anything that could cripple the business if not solved got precedence, so he cleaned up some audit and other issues. Everything else could wait.
Next, he revisited the hospitals mission and values.
“Historically, they had these statements, but they were in a book, and nobody knew what they were,” he says. “They weren’t really guidelines for daily decision-making or strategic planning or anything else.”
So Laret started rethinking these things. He asked his management team to talk about concepts for a mission. Then he talked to different leaders and department chairs. Out of that came something short and easy to remember — caring, healing, teaching, discovering.
Through that process, he also developed values to lead people in their daily activity — professionalism, respect, integrity, diversity and excellence, or PRIDE. To get people embracing these values, he started by communicating them in every new employee session. He asked employees to give examples of behavior that both exemplified and didn’t exemplify each value. He put it on internal materials to hammer it home and would ask employees about them during luncheons, round-table meetings and any other opportunity he got.
“They all knew I was going to ask about this, so everybody kind of learned it,” he says.
He also started giving out five PRIDE awards a month to employees nominated by their peers as best exemplifying the values. Emphasizing UCSF’s new mission and values helped heal the employees.
“You need to turn all those employees into advocates, allies, supporters, believers, if you will, in the new vision,” Laret says. “ … Get them on board with it, and if you can do that, then I think all these other things, it’s easier to solve them. If you have an employee work force that is not on board with management, it’s going to be very tough.”