Measure progress
Wolfe wasn’t just getting feedback in his first 100 days. He was
also gaining trust.
He says in any turnaround, trust is the single most important
thing. Before you even think about addressing any issue, you must
first show your constituents your devotion to the company and the
culture.
“You have to establish trust and integrity,” Wolfe says. “You can
have the best strategic plans and operational plans in the world,
but if people don’t believe the trust and the integrity, then nobody’s
going to follow.”
By setting aside time to meet with employees, Wolfe says you’ll
not only gain their trust, but you’ll have a much easier time setting
goals to address areas of concern. After all, the goals you set are in
direct response to the issues that stakeholders addressed during
your initial assessment.
But this process entails more than just getting buy-in. For a goal
to mean anything, Wolfe says you must have some way to measure
your progress toward it. Many companies resort to in-house surveys and metrics for evaluation. The management team at Indiana
Regional instead opted for a third-party consultant for two reasons.
First, outside companies are better suited to devote resources to
track every aspect of performance. In an abstract area like patient
care, for example, they can measure countless variables that give
employees a better picture of their performance.
“They actually give you a priority index,” Wolfe says. “The biggest
variables that are impacting the patients’ perceptions, for example,
may be communication by the nurse, explanation by the doctor,
etc.”
Secondly, third-party companies can often give you a better picture of how your performance matches against others in the same
industry.
“They benchmark you in a percentile ranking with peers,” he
says. “If I’m working on a nursing floor or a medical or surgical
floor or whatever, I get a score, and that’s translated into other
medical or surgical or nursing units across the country.”
Wolfe says you should share these scores regularly in meetings.
If you want employees to work to make your company a better
place, they need to know where they stand and what they have to
shoot for. When Indiana Regional’s constituents first saw how the
hospital stacked up against the competition, for example, it was a
rather eye-opening experience.
“When we first started doing that, our scores were not good,”
he says. “With 100 percent being the best you could do, some
of our scores were like 12th percentile, 17th percentile, 22nd
percentile. It was a real eye-opener. Until that point, I don’t think
people realized that so many other people were doing a better job.”
Wolfe didn’t let those numbers discourage him. Instead, he
set benchmarks atop every industry percentile they were
measuring.
“We were not going to stand for being in the bottom quartile of
some national database on any monitor,” he says. “There was a
real key decision point for everybody when we started picking
what our goal was going to be. We picked the top (10 percent).
There was a lot of pushback that, that was an unrealistic goal, and
we could really dishearten troops with an unrealistic goal. We
stood firm, and we said, ‘We could do just as well as anybody else
in the United States of America, and we’re going to shoot for the
top decile.’”
To combat resistance when setting benchmarks, Wolfe says to
continuously communicate your goal. There will be a lot of repetition at first, but as soon as you see signs of improvement, celebrate
those achievements to raise morale and boost confidence.
“It’s the old analogy of a rocket using most of its fuel to get the first
whatever feet off the ground. It can be slow in the beginning, and it
can be tough, and it can be frustrating, but once you break through
with a victory or two, it can get contagious,” he says.
After rough goings in the first few months, Wolfe continued to
push toward the goals until emergency room patient satisfaction
suddenly skyrocketed into the 90th percentile.
“It was just a total breakthrough,” he says. “That was the thing
that we could talk about. It was being able to have a win, and then
building on those successes.”
And build they did. After championing that first victory, Wolfe
and his staff continued to ride that momentum and have since
found themselves perched atop the 90th percentile of nearly every
area they set out to measure.
He says it’s easy to get complacent amid such success, so you
must constantly set new benchmarks.
“Without the benchmarks, it’s almost impossible to shoot for
peak performance,” he says. “You are always going to have the
argument or the pushback that we’re doing a good job already, or
you don’t know what you should be shooting for.”
To fight that pushback, Wolfe has now set an even higher
benchmark for his 1,200 employees: The Malcolm Baldrige
National Quality Award.
“There could be a temptation to think that you’ve done what you
needed to do and perhaps it was time to coast to rest,” he says. “I
think the Baldrige was the thing that we needed to keep focusing
on. It keeps calling you to a higher level.”
No matter the state of your company, be it on the verge of strike
or at the head of the industry, Wolfe says it’s important to aim
higher. If you’re willing to invest time to gain trust and identify
major shortcomings, improvement shouldn’t be far behind.
“Sometimes, people are in a situation where they don’t think it
could ever be dramatically different or better than what it was,” he
says. “We want to be an encouragement for people out there that
it can be better. It really does boil down to trust, identifying the
brutal facts, setting that target and then measuring yourself. Once
you’ve had the breakthroughs, then people then realize that they
can do it.”
HOW TO REACH: Indiana Regional Medical Center, (724) 357-7000 or www.indianahospital.org