Joyce Anderson follows the
numbers religiously to gauge employee productivity
levels. And no, she doesn’t just
check the financials.
As CEO of Florida Orthopaedic
Institute, Anderson uses management by statistics to measure employee and company
performance. Combined with
effective and open employee
communication, her style is a
recipe for honesty, productivity,
growth and empowerment, she
says.
“People are a lot more productive if you put them on a
statistical system because they
know what’s expected of them,
and you know what should be
able to be done by that position,” Anderson says.
In an industry that involves
never-ending training of staff
and updating materials based
on new procedures and laws,
Anderson must continue to be
flexible and keep the lines of
communication open when it
comes to managing her 500
employees at the $62 million
company.
Smart Business spoke with
Anderson about how to identify
concrete goals and how to
communicate in a way that
motivates and empowers
employees.
Follow the numbers. I do management by statistics, which
means we staticize the different areas of the organization
from each individual staff
member to each department
to each of the executives.
Each of them has quality and
quantity types of statistics.
Then we monitor those on a
regular basis weekly.
When a statistic goes down,
we go in and find out why it
goes down to try to correct any
issues. Then if it goes up, we
find out why it goes up. Then
we bolster those things that
cause the statistics to improve.
It works. It takes out the
opinion, it takes out the politics. It removes those types of
things that make it unfair, and
you judge a person by their
performance. You can hear all
sorts of rumors, you can hear
people say things, but the statistics can actually have a
quantitative item of, ‘Is that
person doing their job; how do
they compare to their peers?’
The statistics allow you to
empower people. I let my
managers and directors run
with their stuff because I can
monitor it through statistics. If
the statistics dropped a little
bit, they can say, ‘Hey, this
dropped. This is how I’m going
to fix it.’
It’s a continuous process.
Any time we see a problem,
we can then take a look at the
statistics and see if we need to
refine it.
You have to define your statistic correctly, or you get
something inadvertently you
might not want. You have to
be able to specifically identify
the statistic very well and
manage those.
Start with the product. What
product do we want for this
department? How can we measure this? Where are we going to
get the information? You don’t
want the gathering of statistics
to be a painful process.
Set concrete goals to see real
growth and progress. Underlying
these statistics themselves is
the product. The statistic is
just a measure of are you producing the products you want
to produce.
Set your goal and then look
at where you are right now,
what the existing scene is.
Then, step by step, work out
how to realize what we would
call your ideal scene, what is
your ultimate goal. You have to
be realistic in what the existing scene is, and it has to be
something that is measured in
a concrete manner. So you can
see at the end of the process whether you actually achieved
it or not.
If you say, ‘Work on training
materials,’ you can’t judge that
at the end of the quarter. You
worked on training materials,
but what did you actually do?
Did you complete anything?
We like to do it in a concrete
format, so that at the end of the
time, you can say, ‘This is clearly
done.’ You have to really make
those things identifiable as
things that can be completed.
