Merging Organizational Pillars for Overall Success: One Great Experience – One Great Team

By Kevin K. Stranberg, Owner of Stranberg & Associates

 People choose healthcare as a career because it fulfills their individual sense of purpose. It is passion driven.  Consumers select their healthcare provider because they feel a real sense of concern and dedication from those professional providing the care. It is the combination of these feelings and desires that creates the basis of a great culture within an organization. In a practical sense, it is the coming together of two major strategic approaches into organizational goals: one great experience - one great team. 

 Service Goal: One Great Experience

As healthcare staff, we often divide up the patient experience into segments – a parking experience, a registration experience, a testing experience, a clinical staff experience, a discharge experience.  We look at our job responsibilities as just one piece of the overall healthcare encounter that our patients have when they come to us for care.  Interestingly enough, that is not how our patients look at the work done in healthcare.  They look at it as the collective whole experience from beginning to end.

When asking staff about when they think the experience begins for our customers, they often say “when a patient shows up for an appointment.”  In reality, the patient is forming lots of opinions about the organization long before they arrive at the front door.  They get those impressions from marketing efforts (billboards, advertisements, newspaper articles), initial phone calls to the facility, clear directions, parking options, and facility appearance to name a few.  And that is all before they get to the front door and have any face-to-face encounters with staff.  At each of those touchpoints, customers are determining the legitimacy of the organization and its staff. 

Ultimately, all of those concepts, as well as every encounter with staff, will formulate the overall impression of “one great experience.”  Not hundreds of minor impressions, but one overall feeling of comfort and trust in the organization.

It is those specific impressions that are reflected in patient satisfaction feedback.  When reviewing satisfaction reports, it is often evident that it only takes one or two negative encounters for the customer to rate the overall experience as very low.  For example, upon reviewing patient satisfaction comments, one patient gave the facility an overall rating of 7 out of ten.  In the comments section, that same patient noted “everything was amazing except for the one crabby nurse.  She needs a new job.”  That is the critical value of every person’s contribution to overall satisfaction or dissatisfaction for every patient.  It is centered in the essential cultural concept of “every encounter, every patient, every time.”

The ultimate importance of trust is the reason why service is such a vital part of the strategic approach for organizational excellence. And why it is one of the key Pillars of Success in evaluating if the organization is moving forward. If people who come to the organization do not trust the providers or the organization, they may seek healthcare from an organization that really does provide that overall great experience from start to finish.

People Pillar: One Great Team

Staff are the heart and soul of our healthcare system.  They strive for excellence in their area of expertise and in making the encounter comfortable for their patients.  We literally could not do it without them.  Thanks to each of them who show up every day with a willingness to assist people at the most scared and vulnerable times in their lives.  Staff comfort them, reassure them, and provide them with essential information. 

Patient satisfaction surveys often include a question on “staff work together to care for you.”  According to the companies that analyze the data, there is a high correlation between this question and overall satisfaction of the patient. 

Staff working together may seem like a disconnect on the surface, however it is clear in digging deeper into the situation.  Staff often ask “do they really know whether we are working together or not?”  The answer is absolutely yes.  Patients and loved ones can sense a connection in the communication, in the willingness to help out, in the lack of tension in the air.  When staff are working together, patients also feel like they are a part of the team as well.  Staff listen to their requests and work with other staff to meet them. 

In a culture that promotes team work, staff feel more connected to their job, their department and the organization as a whole. It is reflected in employee engagement surveys and can will be mirrored in the overall culture.  Staff feel listened to, valued and important to the organization’s success.  The People Pillar of Success can only meet high levels of performance with a culture that promotes team work as one of its core values.

Putting it all together

Leaders in healthcare are expected to juggle a number of priorities at the same time: scheduling, staffing, performance reviews, clinical competencies, training, just to name just a few.  That is why direct involvement in strategic goal setting can be looked at as “extra work.” 

How can that burden be lessened a bit and incorporated into the natural flow of work?  One way is to find the synergy between the People Pillar and the Service Pillar.  By focusing on those two strategic priorities with one overarching approach, the organization can see improvement in both patient satisfaction and employee engagement.  Engaged staff promote satisfied patients.  Satisfied patients foster engaged staff.  It can and should be seen as one initiative – not two. 

Goals and measurement for improvement for this shared approach can be found in patient satisfaction (“staff work together to care for you”) and employee engagement (“in my department we work effectively as a team”).

Connecting these goal areas and building action plans that incorporate them together allows staff to look at their work differently.  It reinforces why staff got into healthcare in the first place – to put their passion into practice to help others in their time of need.