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Newsletter

December 2007

Your CHG Newsletter has arrived! Here's what you will find in this issue:

No More Warm Bodies: Tips and Tools for Selecting the Right Employee
Get Off to the Right Start: Focusing on Orientation and Onboarding
Performance Outcomes Sustainability-Coaching©: How to Solidify Transformational Change in Healthcare
5 Training Strategies That Won’t Break the Bank
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Optimize your organization’s employee experience by recognizing these important customers. Contact the Corporate Health Group team. And visit us at www.corporatehealthgroup.com
In this issue, we will move more deeply into the employee-as-a-customer experience. We’ll discuss how to better select employees to fit your organization, bring them on board in a way that reinforces your culture, coach them for maximum performance, and build training into your everyday environment. Get valuable tools and techniques to use in your organization.

Selecting the Right Employee

No More Warm Bodies: Tips and Tools for Selecting the Right Employee

Think about the experience of hiring. Your team has a vacancy. Your employees clamor for you to fill that vacancy because they are stretched so thin. You then think about the justification process to fill that position and break out into a sweat. After all, there is a hiring freeze, but you can’t really tell your employees that, can you? 

Human Resources then reminds you that if you’d made better choices to begin with, you wouldn’t be in this mess of constantly filling positions. As you reflect, you begin to realize that your department has been a bit of a revolving door. People come, but don’t often stay for more than a year before moving on. Is HR putting blame on you—or maybe there’s a better way to better predict whether someone you hire will be successful.

If this pattern sounds familiar, it could be because you’ve fallen victim to one of the most common hiring faux pas: ”warm body syndrome.” You know how it goes: The position is vacant, the staff wants it filled, you jump through the hoops to get it approved, and finally you get to hire.

>> Read Full Article

Get Off to the Right Start: Focusing on Orientation and Onboarding

Once you’ve made the right hire, the next big step is to orient and onboard them correctly, or you stand the chance of losing them. Think back to your own orientation.  Were you inspired and excited to be a part of the organization that you just joined, or were you instead fighting to stay awake as you learned about infection control and where the bathrooms are?

Your orientation and on boarding process are part of the continuum of opportunity you have to reinforce the organization’s culture with the new employee and make sure they continue to feel that they’ve a smart decision in joining your organization. 

Make them feel good about their new job.

Orientation and onboarding actually begin before the first day of work. So it’s important to look at the entire employee experience. Each step is an opportunity to reinforce the office culture. Envision what the employee journey should look like, from the offer to the first day on the job, to the first year.  

>> Read Full Article

Get Off to the Right Start

Performace Outcomes Sustainable-Coaching

Performance Outcomes Sustainability-Coaching©: How to Solidify Transformational Change in Healthcare

Editor’s Note:
Coaching is an integral part of helping your customer have the best workplace experience and is the tool that will push cultural change and make it sustainable. In this piece, our guest authors take the customer experience training, demonstrating how management can make a deeper commitment to internal customers. Their perspective discusses the value of one particular tool.

By Katharine B. White & William T. White
CHG Guest Authors

Most transformational efforts in healthcare fail early in the change cycle, primarily due to three common factors:

  1. Project management planning deficits1
  2. Poorly executed change-management strategies/tactics2
  3. Half-hearted senior management sponsorship/follow-through3

What is perhaps healthcare’s greatest challenge however, is that even highly successful benchmark transformational change efforts (e.g., the Johns Hopkins ICU Collaborative) that achieve groundbreaking initial results, are strongly challenged to continuously sustain and improve performance outcomes excellence.4

>> Read Full Article

5 Training Strategies That Won’t Break the Bank

Too often considered a luxury, sales training is often the first budget item to get put on hold or cut when budgets get tight. But you can preserve this focus—even maximize it—without spending a dime.

Training opportunities are waiting for you in your organization. Whether you’re a large facility or small, small department or large, there are teachable moments that you can better maximize for the benefit of real-time training for your staff. 

  1. Be alert for opportunities. Perhaps you have witnessed a staff member doing a particularly good job with a customer issue. Make notes on what you saw, take the opportunity to recognize that employee, and then use the situation as a case study in your next staff meeting. 
  1. Brainstorm with your staff. Divide your staff into small groups to brainstorm how they might have handled a sales or customer service situation and then have large group discussion to come to consensus. You can then recognize the employee who actually handled the situation and will have accomplished two things…training and recognition!
  1. Pick a skill that you and your team most want to improve. Maybe it’s how to handle the angry customer. Check your internal organizational development resources (if you have them), or research online for tips and techniques. Bring in a local trainer to provide a program to your entire team—an option that’s usually less costly.  
  1. Review, practice and track real-life situations. As a team, review and practice the techniques and then keep track of situations where they had to use the techniques, as well as how well they felt that they did.  Use your findings as discussion and practice at your next staff meeting.
  2. Use your internal expertise. Utilize the particular skills of people on your team. Ask them to teach that skill to others. Perhaps an x-ray tech or a lab tech is terrific at performing a certain test; maybe a senior leader would share her expertise in strategic planning or goal setting. Leverage their expertise to share their know-how, and again, reward them by recognizing their skill.

>> Read Full Article

Training Strategies

In Our Next Issue
Coming up, our focus shifts to the patient experience as we discuss:

  • Understanding the patient as customer
  • Building a patient-centered culture
  • Creating a service attitude
  • Learning what patients really want
  • Plus more tools and tips—don’t miss it!

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