Don’t fix what isn’t broken
O’Toole thought VITAS was doing a lot of things right in the way that employees helped patients and went about doing their jobs. So he refrained from using the word “change” to describe his plans for the company.
“My own view is that change is a word that people are not comfortable with in many cases when they feel they are currently being successful,” O’Toole says. “Absent a particular issue that’s been identified that’s broken and needs to be fixed, I would prefer to use the words ‘continuous improvement’ as opposed to change. My style is to focus on every identifiable issue in the company as far as systems, products and procedures we use and brainstorm in a collaborative group about how they might be a little bit better.
“When you talk to people and you tell them, ‘What I am seeking is to analyze everything you do to constantly make it a little bit better,’ it’s better received than if you tell people, ‘We need to make a change.’”
So that’s the approach O’Toole took in presenting his plan to his management team, right from the moment it was introduced.
“We didn’t reinvent the wheel in a lot of cases,” O’Toole says. “We just did a lot of research about what best practices are and issues surrounding management and relationships between management and staff. We identified certain areas we learned from the survey and certain areas we learned from exit interviews that we do with every employee that leaves as far as where their concerns were. We tried to address those concerns and learn from other companies and build common-sense initiatives.”
When O’Toole was creating the tool kit, he wanted feedback from his managers about what they felt they needed to best work with their employees as well as to provide an opportunity for O’Toole to see what was missing.
“You need to have a culture where people feel comfortable speaking two ways in your company,” O’Toole says.
He found a way to put himself in each of his company’s locations, all at the same time, to encourage employees to speak with him.
“We put life-sized posters of me out in each office with cards where they could communicate with me about any questions they would have and we would respond to those,” O’Toole says of the program, which was dubbed “Talk to Tim.”
“You must respond to people when you get questions or it becomes a negative and not a positive. I put in my communication that this is an important initiative of mine and that I will be following up throughout the future of the organization to make sure this initiative is being complied with. It’s an important part of how we operate in the field with our caregivers.”
O’Toole constantly reiterated through the selling process that this project was about continuous improvement and not about a complete overhaul. He sought to create an air of collaboration by meshing what had made VITAS great before with the things that would make it even better in the future.
“I replaced the founder of the company, Hugh Westbrook, who was the founder in the early 1980s and a leader in the hospice industry,” O’Toole says. “I tried to build on the success that he had and I tried to build from what I learned about him [and] about the business. But I would also tell people to be your own person and reinforce the qualities you can bring to the job.”
