Advocate accountability
One way Penrose measures his employees’ performance is by asking the people whom those employees have serviced.
The organization regularly sends out patient satisfaction surveys and the management team reviews the results of those surveys on a monthly basis.
The number of questions on the survey depends on the type of service the patient received when he or she was at St. Jude. Once tallied, the scores for each particular area of questioning are posted to St. Jude’s Web-based system. Also, written comments from patients are published for all managers every other week.
Making all this information available serves a dual purpose. First, the organization’s department heads can use the survey response scores to analyze trends. From there, they can identify gaps in performance quality and take appropriate action. Penrose has his department heads and managers synthesize the relevant information from the surveys and distill it for their employees, as well, so they know which areas need work.
That leads to the second purpose — motivating employees to improve their performance.
Penrose says you can measure everything from how many patient visits a doctor makes in an hour to the number of medication errors to the percentage of patients who were happy with their stay at St. Jude — those numbers are useless if you don’t hold employees accountable for them. Each department has its own set of metrics for its employees’ daily work.
“We set the expectations and the most important part of setting expectations is following up by holding people accountable,” he says. “We’re doing that at all levels of the organization, from management in their job description, in their merit review, in their bonuses, their incentive plan, etc. For the staff-level employee, it is part of the expectations of how they do their job, and it reflects in their merit evaluation, as well.”
