Healthcare organization to be the best place to work! 

Is Care lost in Healthcare?

Healthcare organizations from federal, state, local, profit, non-profit all have lofty vision, mission and goals. Providing healthcare for everyone and all! These goals are needed but is there organizational culture marked with CARE?

It’s surprising that “The best places to work list for 2019” doesn’t list or include a single healthcare organization. Why is this? Shouldn’t Healthcare organizations that provide health care for the masses be the organization that best cares for their employees? Its not that these organizations are not striving for customer satisfaction improving performances or better measures but is the employee performance reflecting employee satisfaction?  Article explores culture of care, 30-30-40 model of organizational structure and methodologies to build culture of care. Technology leaders who focus on customer service should reverse their approach like the movie “inside out”. They should reverse the usual way of aligning inside goals to outward facing vision, mission and goals. Approach to building care internally improves employee’s satisfaction resulting in customer satisfaction. Health care organizations should build and promote inside culture of care that results and aligns to external services of CARE.

Brief look into healthcare organization cultural models and approaches to transform and adopt Culture of Care.

For most technology leaders, days are swamped and filled with operations, strategy, vision, mission, goals, objectives, project deliveries, customer satisfaction, performance measures, budget constraints etc. Culture of the organization that leaders inherit and lead is somewhat of a lost and neglected area of management. Many leadership trainings, seminars, books focus on building best technology. Improved customer service and address employee development is the last “item” on the list. Turning the priorities around and focusing on the culture of the organization could be the answer. Focus should be reversed where it’s not “outside in” but “inside out”. Usually leaders start with improving customer satisfaction and require their staff to align and meet the organization objectives and goals. Middle management is charged with measuring performance on meeting the goals. Focus on customer satisfaction is important but how is it accomplished?

Understanding and developing organization culture, especially departmental culture is important. This is the core, the “inside” that needs to be developed. This is the “inside” that reflect “out”! Culture of Care with highly satisfied employees will reflect in best customer service. Organizations culture usually consists of 30-30-40 model. 30% of culture are aligned to the leader’s mission, vision and goals. This percentage of staff doesn’t drive their satisfaction from organization but from the internal drive to go above and beyond. Their work ethic is exceptional and organizations are fortunate to keep them. Technology leaders should focus to recognize this percentage. They need to make it a priority to invest in this group with goal to make their exceptional work ethic contagious. Second 30 are completely opposite to the first. If left unaddressed, they can become toxic to the organizational culture. Technology leaders and management have to address this 30% and not ignore. Leaders should give this staff opportunity to realign and energize through trainings, team building exercises and performance evaluations. If these efforts don’t work, it is in organizations and staff’s best interest to part ways. The bigger group, 40% staff that do their job but are not motivated to align with leadership is the opportunistic “gold” mine. Leaders should focus on this group to build employee satisfaction. Using culture of care to mature these employees to increased job satisfaction resulting in provide best customer service. Which technology leader wouldn’t like 70% of their staff experiencing job satisfaction resulting in high productivity and improved customer satisfaction. So how can the culture of care transformation take place? It starts with the Leader! Leader knowing his/her immediate staff, were the staff fit in the 30-30-40 model and to adopt methodologies to move the 40 to total of 70 and higher. Culture of care starts with leadership, followed up by policies, processes and procedures supporting the growth. Partnership with external divisions such as HR and Training should be part of the culture building approach. There is a misconception that money is the driver for employee satisfaction, this is not always the case. Many of the staff in the first 30 model do not see this as driver for employee satisfaction. This 30 group is critical to the organization culture and success. Leaders approach should focus on this group and increasing their impact to the rest of the 40-30 groups. Healthcare industry is different than another industry, there is inherent “good” that the roles provide. it is the industry of “care”. Health care organizations should build and promote inside culture of care that results and aligns to external services of CARE.