our own system

Hospital customer service training is dreadfully dreary. Honestly, please let me know of any programs that are not. Look what hotels are doing:

Before two luxury hotels, the Andaz 5th Avenue in Manhattan and the Elysian Hotel in Chicago, opened their doors in recent months, both added something extra to their usual employee training practices: they hired improvisational comedy experts.

The Benjamin, an upscale business travel hotel also in New York, took a similar tack to help its staff better serve guests, offering them a series of life-coaching sessions this summer.

Other hotel brands — including Hilton Garden Inn, Aloft, Homewood Suites and SpringHill Suites — are using devices like iPods and the Sony PlayStation Portable to help with staff training.

These tools are not reserved for luxury hotel brands. We can do so much better.

(Source: The New York Times)

Ever since a friend recommended “Metaphors We Live By” I have been completely taken by them. We use metaphors constantly—most of the time unknowingly. When you start to think about the message metaphors can carry it becomes important to use them surreptitiously. 

Which is why I was excited after reading Seth’s post this morning:

If you worked on the line, we cared about your productivity, not your smile or approach to the work. You could walk in downcast, walk out defeated and get a raise if your productivity was good.

No longer.

Your attitude is now what’s on offer, it’s what you sell. When you pass by those big office buildings and watch the young junior executives sneaking into work with a grimace on their face, it’s tempting to tell them to save everyone time and just go home.

The emotional labor of engaging with the work and increasing the energy in the room is precisely what you sell. So sell it.

Because today’s healthcare delivery metaphor is very much manufacturing. Productivity. Efficiency. Cost cutting. Front-line staff. Turn around time.

When increasingly, as Seth writes, it’s about smiling.

The manufacturing metaphor has brought healthcare delivery a long way—business respectability in an industry that very much needed it. But I just wonder what might be possible if we re-metaphored to something like, say, conversations. Or relationships. Or something else?

What scares me about today’s healthcare push toward efficiency is that organizations can mistake cost cutting with efficiency gaining. Finding efficiencies takes people with workloads less than 120 percent. Efficiencies are not (always) attained through fewer employees.

Yes, coming off the hangover of cost-based reimbursement organizations had to “rightsize” their workforces. And, yes, the largest expense line item on the income statement is labor.

But I feel the efficiencies through workforce slimming have largely been attained. Today’s cost conscious organizations are often left with no choice but to stack duties on already overtaxed employees. There may be no other option, but I think it’s important to understand what the organization is potentially losing through the use of this method.

All that to highlight this article from the Wall Street Journal by JC Spender and Bruce Strong:

Most great ideas for enhancing corporate growth and profits aren’t discovered in the lab late at night, or in the isolation of the executive suite. They come from the people who daily fight the company’s battles, who serve the customers, explore new markets and fend off the competition.

In other words, the employees.

Slack is needed in order to get out of the to-do list mindset. When focused completely on task after task, there’s little time left to innovate, process improve, and creatively explore efficiency finding. Sure there’s some hyperbole here, but I think the issue of a task-obsessed workforce is real.

WSJ Health Blog:

More than a quarter of Americans who take prescription drugs have skipped doses, split pills or cut other corners to save money in the last year, according to a new study by Consumer Reports.

When a patient leaves a physician’s office or is discharged from a hospital, they leave with what is essentially a recommendation for the continuation of care. It might be a prescription, or behavior change, or therapy, or a follow-up appointment, among many other possibilities. But the important part here is that they leave with a recommendation, albeit a strong one.

For a variety of reasons (money being only one) patients choose to either follow those recommendations or not. Not following the doctor’s orders usually means adverse outcomes. A major failing of the healthcare system (and a giant opportunity) is the lack of assistance these systems’ provide in helping patients implement those recommendations.

There is certainly work being done in this arena. And there is certainly more that could be done.