Empower employees
MacKenzie says the 30-minute wait proposal prompted alot of interesting discussion between the departments. Forexample, lab people were accustomed to working in silosand, like many departments in organizations, they were intheir own little world.
The lab people said it took 20 minutes from the time theygot the sample to the time they sent the result back. The labhad no control over what happened before or after those 20minutes.
“People want to segment only into their own little world,”MacKenzie says.
That was until MacKenzie allowed the lab employees to ownthe whole process.
“We gave them the power over the process,” she says. “Andthe lab people came back the next week and said, ‘We understand that. Now, we need to add nine more people.’ We said,‘No, we probably have the right number of resources, but, ifwe don’t, we’ll add them. But now is not the time to addthem, it’s really to look at how you do things.’ Then, theycame back the next week and said, ‘Well, now we get it. Now,when the lab tests come to us, they are going to come in redtubes so we know that it’s the ER, and that we have this commitment to turn it around in this period of time.’”
The key is to explain to the people involved the objective andlet them figure out the solutions.
“If you make the commitment and then you give people theflexibility to problem solve — because I wouldn’t know how todo it in the lab, I’m not a lab person — they eventually cameback with the right approach,” MacKenzie says. “They knewthat they’d be sitting in a meeting every week and everyoneelse would be looking at their results, in addition to them. So,it’s also a sense of pride. You don’t want to be the one thatstands out.”
But, like any change of process, not everyone is going toagree. In fact, some people were so against the change, theyleft the organization after Mackenzie brought the idea up.
She says people usually select themselves out if they don’twant to get on board with the change. However, most peoplewill give the change a chance, as long as you stay true to it.The hospital’s emergency room director later told MacKenziewhen she first brought up the idea of the new policy thedirector updated her resume. But, she stuck with it and nowshows other hospitals how to implement the emergency roomprocess.
“That’s the discipline part,” she says. “What confuses peopleis if you keep changing direction or you don’t use the same simple objective over and over. If you’ve got too many of them,then it’s just initiative fatigue.”