Encourage idea-sharing
Maybe underperformers are reluctant to lower their salaries or take on more shifts for the team. Or maybe top performers are frustrated because a low-performing teammate is keeping them from their incentives.
It’s one thing if you order those changes, but when employees are empowered to control their own — and, to a degree, each other’s — success, they might not be certain about the best way to achieve it. Empowerment is not just giving employees the opportunity to set their own path but also the tools to navigate in the right direction.
It might be easier for you to just tell them, but that doesn’t necessarily produce the best results.
“In some ways, I want them to be frustrated because that frustration leads to better performance. It leads to changes in what they’re doing, to figuring out how to excel, and how to be more productive and more effective,” Singer says. “I think it’s OK to allow some frustration to enter into your company. It can be very revealing and motivating.”
The best way to nudge employees in the right direction is to show them their progress. Singer calculates how much incentive each team member earns by looking at individual productivity through a lens of metrics — including encounters per day, week and month, revenue per encounter, length of stay, readmission rates and client satisfaction. In other words, monitor both quantity and quality of performance.
The key is that those metrics should always be visible to employees. You can’t hover over them to provide step-by-step directions on meeting their goals, so you need to give them tools to make those adjustments themselves. Singer publishes dashboards monthly for each employee, which are benchmarked against the practice, the region and the overall company.
“They can see how they stack up,” he says. “If you’re an outlier on any of these measures, you start figuring out strategies to not be an outlier.”
Singer recommends paying bonuses monthly, too, rather than annually, so employees see a more immediate reward to their productivity.
That transparency will foster self-correction. But it’s also important to have a forum for open communication so employees can share ideas and struggles — especially when team members may spar over the best corrections to make.
Thanks to technology, you have several options that can allow employees across the country to serve as each other’s immediate sounding boards. Singer uses Yammer, an “intranet of Twitter” that lets employees post questions for the entire company to ponder and respond to.
“If I’m having trouble with my team leader or my practice partner, I have the ability to say, ‘You know what, let’s find out what the other thousand doctors would do,’” he says. “Either I’m right or I’m wrong, but I’m going to hear about it from lots of people. It allows a massive jury to be put into place to help resolve my conflict.”
Singer also uses videoconferencing systems to allow entire practices to share their struggles and ideas.
“If you’re having some unique issue and not able to get consensus, we [find] a practice that’s either further along or equally struggling on a topic, and we videoconference them together. We have them brainstorm their issues,” Singer says. “As much as possible, you want your employees empowered to figure this stuff out themselves. What you don’t want is to come in and tell them what to do. That’s the least effective way to enhance your business.”
Besides allowing that open communication, Singer also provides plenty of data about other employees’ results. If you provide people with the financial performance and experiences of others who have faced the same issue before, they tend to make similar decisions without you dictating what to do.
And if they disregard that data to make a decision out on a limb, they’ll learn from it.
“A large part of that empowerment is let them take some risks; let them try something that maybe you wouldn’t agree with,” Singer says. “What that does is really engenders a better trust between you and your employee — one, that it’s OK to take risks, but also maybe next time, they want to listen a little bit more to our experience.”
How to reach: IPC The Hospitalist Co. Inc., (888) 447-2362 or www.hospitalist.com