In Search of Hope

In the five years we’ve worked with medical practices, we’ve surveyed thousands of team members and debriefed hundreds of the leaders. With time, we picked up on a series of issues common to every event and the associated debriefs.

People in Leadership Positions:

• Work hard and are under-appreciated.
• Deal with difficult employees and, on occasion, difficult owners.
• Sacrifice their family, balance and health.
• Could work smarter, use a bit of process combined with science, and have better lives all while finding greater success at work.
• Tend to not implement change rapidly because of the enormity of responsibility.

Better perspective is important for personal well-being, the team, providers and customers. Maintaining a personal balance while keeping an eye on the bigger picture provides an all around benefit.So what are you doing during your work day? Are you “Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic?” My guess is you spend too much time in what Stephen Covey calls the realm of the urgent/unimportant. You’d be best served finding time for the non-urgent/important.

This is doable and not rocket science! In fact, there is a process, backed with real experience, that we’ve run with organizations for several years now. Let me share one example.

A medical organization was seeing issues with decreasing patient satisfaction, employee satisfaction and financial health. Three simple steps led to resolution:

1. Ask your patients for input.
a. Ask and listen (Customer/Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire–‘PSQ’)
b. Derive action items
c. Communicate with the customers/patients about what you are doing and let them know you listen
2. Ask your team for input.
a. Ask and listen (Employee Satisfaction Questionnaire–‘ESQ’)
b. Empower the team to come up with action items
c. Communicate, support and recognize them for their brilliance!
3. Rinse and Repeat
a. Whether you act on the aforementioned items as independent tasks, or…
b. Host an annual reinvention event
i. Analyze the results/suggestions from the patient satisfaction questionnaires
ii. Analyze the results /suggestions from the employee satisfaction questionnaires
iii. Identify a few action items from each (S.M.A.R.T. goals) and
iv. Rapidly implement

The results for this organization continue to get rave reviews:
Patient satisfaction, via the PSQ, improved. It moved from the 55th to the 85th percentile compared to the national average.
Participation in the voluntary ESQ improved. The team realized their opinions counted and participation rose 87.8%!