Get everyone involved
The first thing Ainsworth did to drive the new goals
through his organization was to set up meetings to discuss
them with 30 groups of stakeholders, including physicians,
nurses, clinical staff, support staff, trustees and management from both the health system and the hospital.
Communicating those goals to his employees was only the
top-level reason for the meetings. The deeper reason he met
with so many small groups of employees was to get them all
involved in the strategic plan.
Ainsworth says there are several approaches an organization can use to improve customer satisfaction. One way is to
hire a consultant, who would generally arrive with a pre-planned program of guest relations or set interactions. But
Ainsworth didn’t like the top-down, consultant and management-driven approach, so he chose to look inside his organization instead of outside it and used the meetings to jump-start that approach.
During his meetings, he asked for input on how the hospital
can achieve those goals. He wanted to not only raise awareness of the big-picture goals but build employee interest on
the local level.
His plan worked. At every meeting, his management team
was getting inundated with ways to get closer to perfect care
and ways to make sure every patient has a sacred encounter.
“We basically put it in their hands,” he says. “And I think
when you put a major objective in the hands of the employees, you get a couple things. No. 1, you get a lot of creativity.
No. 2, you get a lot of buy-in, because the end result is really
theirs. They created it from the beginning. They conceptualized it all the way through implementation.”
The key to getting that input was as simple as the Socratic
Method. Ainsworth’s managers sat down with the employees
in small groups — no larger than seven or eight people — and
asked them to think through and answer several questions.
Many of the questions were focused on their experiences
dealing with patients. Ainsworth wanted to know what needed to happen for a patient to have a positive experience at the
hospital — he wanted to know the key to making every
patient interaction a sacred encounter.
So he asked questions like, “What is the typical patient
thinking and feeling when they come in to receive services in
our department?” and “What are the behaviors that would
actually yield a sacred encounter for that patient?” This
method creates true knowledge in the employee, not just rote
memorization of what to do in a certain situation.
“Instead of like the Ritz-Carlton where they have scripted
answers to requests or questions, the employees are agreeing
amongst themselves to standardized behaviors — not set by
management but set by themselves based on their own
knowledge of what patient need is,” Ainsworth says.
“It’s a wonderful approach because it tells the employee
that management trusts them and trusts their knowledge of
what the patient really needs and trusts them to design the
more consistent responses that are going to yield sacred
encounters.”
Ainsworth took all the ideas and tactics gathered from his
employees to the board of trustees. The board narrowed the
list down to the tactics it supported, and then included those
tactics in the hospital’s five-year strategic plan.
But Ainsworth says the process isn’t over when the board
votes on an idea. You need to close the circle of communication. After board approval, Ainsworth scheduled follow-up
meetings with each group he had asked for input. At these
meetings, he detailed which plans were chosen by the board
as well as the reasons why they were picked.
