Empower employees to act
Besides just listening to ideas, empower employees to act on them. Berthelsen expects that once employees understand value creation and buy in by participating in discussions about it, they won’t go against that.
“We wouldn’t expect that any employees would intentionally do something that’s not consistent with that overall principle of raising value,” he says. “It’s not that they’ll always be successful, but that will always be the intent.”
Empowerment is, after all, the caveat when you provide visible metrics for making decisions. Keeping track of quality measurements, for example, doesn’t do much good if employees aren’t allowed to access and use the information.
“Information is always a powerful thing for change and for making adjustments to an organization’s effectiveness,” Berthelsen says. “Having information and having it available where and when it’s needed is a critical component to the advancement of the quality and value of medical care.”
Some employees at one Kelsey-Seybold clinic, for example, realized that test records weren’t available, and patients weren’t receiving necessary tests. So they developed a system of tracking and logging results to make sure patients receive the right tests at the right time.
“That’s an innovation that began just locally,” Berthelsen says. “It didn’t require any sanction from senior management. They saw a problem that existed at their clinic and they came up with a system to address the problem, and it turned out to be quite successful.”
Giving employees access to information won’t just spur ideas; it also gives them the tools to monitor whether their ideas are successful.
“As we see these quality measures, we’re constantly trying to improve against a benchmark, so we can see if we’re being successful or not,” Berthelsen says. “When success occurs in a localized area, it’s usually not hard to see the value of what they’re doing.
“Certainly not every variation that is proposed and practiced results in a benefit or an improvement in value. The ones that don’t, even the site that’s trying the variation in practice can see that it’s not working, and usually they move on to a different approach.”
Of course, you can step in if you don’t like the results you see. But Berthelsen’s employees have been successful at monitoring their own ideas.
In that case, your role is simply acknowledging their success. Berthelsen has done plenty of that, as Kelsey-Seybold’s revenue grew from $465 million in 2008 to $600 million in 2009. And that success is still spreading.
“We can think of organizational improvement kind of as an evolution, where you have innovation that occurs maybe on a small scale initially, which gets put together either as a pilot or an informal change in the way of doing things,” he says. “As success is experienced at the local level, then that can be leveraged across a larger organization.
“And so one of the roles of leaders is to identify when that success occurs. Give it the recognition and credit it deserves. Then do what you can to extend that success to other areas in other departments.”
How to reach: Kelsey-Seybold Clinic, (714) 442-0000 or www.kelsey-seybold.com
