Tag Archives: performance improvement

Sticky Notes & Pairs: Dial Up Staff Collaboration and Improved Solutions in your Performance Improvement Work!

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Posted by Paloma Medina

Situation: You have an organizational issue that would benefit from the use a team approach. Perhaps you need to update a work flow or improve organizational performance on a specific measure. However, during staff meetings you find that engagement is low, brainstorming lacks innovation, specific people dominate the meeting, and/or inter-departmental tensions impede collaboration.

Solution: Change your meeting structure! The following “Meeting Recipe” will dial up staff energy and lead to better performance improvement solutions!

What you’ll need:

Meeting time of 1 – 2 hours (epending on the depth of the problem or area you’re focusing on)

20 or more sticky notes and one pen per attendee

Dry erase board or flip charts

A volunteer to act as a high-energy facilitator & time keeper

Instructions:

  1. Assign attendees into random or strategic pairs
    Have them sit together in their pairs
    I highly recommend being strategic — think about how pairs might increase collaboration among departments or individuals. You could pair up nurses with providers, administrators with front-line workers, etc.
  2. Pass out sticky notes and pens to each attendee
  3. State the challenge and the goal. Be clear and concise
    For example, “We want to increase provider productivity by 20% in three months” or “We want to improve our patient check-in process to decrease patient and staff stress”
  4. Give individuals 5 minutes to brainstorm on their own ideas for how this could be done
    Rules:
    1. One idea per sticky note
    2. Each attendee must write down  4 – 10 ideas (yes – this is doable!)
    3. At least one idea must be crazy, really fun, or pie-in-the-sky big (I often award candy to craziest ideas — this greatly energizes and revs up divergent thinking)
  5. Have individuals now share ideas in their pairs
    Give them 2-3 minutes per person to share their ideas, call “time” when it’s time to switch and have the other person share
  6. Have pairs generate ideas
    Give them 10 minutes to come up with 10 more ideas with their partners. Ideas can be  completely new or building on each others. Again, one idea per sticky, at least 2 new crazy ideas.
  7. Call everyone back together and round-robin to report back ideas
    Rules:
    1. Have pairs come up and post their sticky notes as they explain their idea onto the dry erase board or flip charts
    2. Hold off on judgement – responses to ideas can only be praise or clarification questions
    3. Limit reporting to 60 seconds per idea – make it a fun but strict cut-off to assure pairs report concisely and energy stays high in the room
    4. If an idea was already presented, just have pairs say “ditto on ___ idea” rather than repeat it
    5. Spread out the area where you’re posting the stickies, the more spread out, the better
    6. Anyone at any point can “build” on an idea that is being presented and write down a new sticky note for it
  8. Everyone vote for their 5 favorite ideas
    Have everyone walk up at once and move around to review the ideas, then “vote” by marking the chosen sticky notes with a star. Give this just 5 minutes for this to assure people move fast and energy doesn’t drop – you’re almost there!
  9. Now re-vote to narrow it down
    Take down all but the top 10  voted-on ideas. Have everyone vote again but this time everyone gets one vote – this will lead you to your top 2-3 ideas to test out.
  10. Decide on next steps
    As a group decide what are the next steps to test out the chosen ideas, include time frames. Have pairs volunteer to take on the tasks. Pairs can them meet outside the meeting to plan how they’ll carry out their tasks. Have everyone report back in a meeting within a week.

After the meeting: Have someone transcribe all the ideas and note which were the highest rated. Refer back to these when you’re ready to try out a new test.

Real-life example:

A New York community health center faced this exact challenge — front-line staff were tasked with improving their productivity numbers but felt frustrated by leadership’s lack of support for their ideas. Months of meetings went by with little improvement in the situation and their numbers remained low.  The front-line workers requested to have a potluck lunch meeting with leadership to re-energize the group and used this “recipe”. They paired up management team members with frontline staff members to break down hierarchy walls. After the meeting both leadership and front line workers reported loving the voting structure and noted the high energy among everyone- a significant change from prior meetings! They now plan on using “pairs” for all of their performance improvement work.

Paloma Medina is an MPA HPAM 2012 candidate with a specialization in organizational coaching and development. Her background is in homeless health care, community development and design. In her spare time Paloma can be found tailoring her clothing, re-organizing her craft supplies or coming up with new toppings for hot dogs.


Who I Am and What I Hope to Achieve

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Posted by Jacob Victory

While inaugural game-day outings, presidential swear-ins, or grand openings of the local laundromat tend to have a lot of noise, glamour and “a 15 percent discount on your first five pounds of laundry,” my premier blog post comes with a large dose of humility, a little about who I am and what I hope to achieve with this blog.

 About Me: As a kid, I was the one who batted a home-run but couldn’t catch the ball (the mitt was too tight remains my excuse). As an artist, I paint my portraits to zoom-in on what I think is going on behind the mask of someone’s face. As a person, I believe in merit and in understanding that the ego doesn’t matter. As a professional, I seek to make an impact in serving those who are vulnerable—in other words, those who are rich, poor or like spicy foods, anyone who needs health care, healthy or otherwise, is always in a vulnerable spot. Why am I sharing my thoughts? Well, I want to give you my angle and I remember what is was like to be a student or what it was like early in my career and I’d like to share my thoughts because I’ve learned a thing or two from my experiences that others could benefit from. I also want to open up a discussion so we all can learn more, too.

My Blogging Roadmap: My blog will primarily focus on two areas. First, I write as an NYU-Wagner alum whose goal is to encourage current students and fellow alums to focus on what is relevant, what I consider smart things to do and not do, and how to work with others to chip away at making an impact. I’d like to address the need for mentorship, for reflection, and for relationship building. Also, I think students and alums always need strategies for job hunting or an understanding of how to network and find who may seem to be an elusive mentor.

Second, as a quiet observer of, but an active participant in, the theatrics of health care delivery, outcomes and, these days, reform, I wish to offer the practical viewpoint of what matters, what gets in the way, and what, in my self-exalted viewpoint, we should focus on. I’ll zero in on the need to maintain the viewpoint that “patient care is the only reason we are here” and what is needed to support this view; the need for collaboration between clinicians and “those business folks;” how performance improvement and succession planning must be priorities; as well as what I think the federal, state and local levels need to tackle in order to help health care organizations, clinicians, and administrators make this health care reform work..

Perhaps most importantly, I’m looking for a dialogue with you. If I can stretch your thinking (or make you chuckle), I’ll consider this blog successful. I’m flattered to write and excited to share.

Jacob Victory, an NYU-Wagner alum, is the Vice President of Performance Management Projects at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. Jacob spends his days getting excited about initiatives that aim to reform and restructure health care.  He’s held strategic planning, clinical operations and performance improvement roles at academic medical centers, in home health care and at medical schools. Jacob also exercises the right side of his brain. Besides drawing flow charts and crunching numbers all day, he makes a mean pot of stew and does abstract paintings, often interpreting faces he finds intriguing.