Tag Archives: Productivity

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.


“My Boss, Ms. Healthcare: Leadership in Action”

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Posted by Jacob Victory

I embrace the theory that leadership is an action-step. And I also think that bosses are an interesting species. It is sometimes hard not to notice themes when colleagues and friends who work in pharmaceutical firms, nursing homes, home health care agencies, hospitals, health care law or managed care organizations describe their bosses. “I need a leader, not a boss!” proclaims one close friend. “She’s a busy regulatory expert who can’t operationalize anything,” says one colleague. Another quips, “I can’t find him. He’s always focused on preparing board documents and is not interested in the day-to-day details.” Yet another smirks, “My boss is so overwhelmed putting out fires and worrying about reimbursement cuts that she rarely provides any direction—so I make the decisions that she needs to make for me!”

One synthesized it succinctly: “Healthcare has too many busy leaders who are focused on changing regulations or survival.” Indeed, healthcare insurance coverage, utilization, care delivery and reimbursement structures are evolving (I won’t use the word “changing”). As a service industry, healthcare is solely about people helping people. What help do our leaders need to manage their people, who can then help others to make this industry churn?

Since most of us work in the health care industry, let’s for a moment assume that we all share the same boss. We’ll call her “Ms. Healthcare” (I say “Ms” strictly based on personal experience, as I’ve had 11 bosses in my career thus far and nine have been women). Ms. Healthcare walks into her office every morning and faces: 1) Clinical staff shortages; 2) Changing regulations; 3) Chronically ill patients who need more coordinated care; 4) Reimbursement that increasingly does not cover expenditures; 5) An inquisitive board who seeks solutions; and 6) Management staff who fear self-implosion if they receive another project to manage—without resources. Let’s also assume that Ms. Healthcare has developed a short-attention span, is anxious, doesn’t espouse project management, and is continually faced with the same six issues I list above.  And with phone calls and meetings that clog her calendar all day, it can seem like it’s an endless cycle. (Luckily, patients continue to be served.)

Ms. Healthcare, being of awesome power and might, feels she can conquer everything. She is bright, hard-working and dedicated. Indeed, Ms. Healthcare has a lot to offer. She is continually chipping away at ensuring efficiencies, new care models, staff development and patient care. I’ve learned a lot from Ms. Healthcare, too. She’s taught me to think at a high-level, that building relationships are key and to have high expectations of myself and others. But let’s consider some easy leadership tips I’ve learned in my own experiences leading people, programs and projects and what I’ve observed in the experiences of others that she can follow to make her day even more productive. If I was her coach, I’d advise her to:

1.  Go to your computer. Find the delete key. Cancel 50% of your meetings. You don’t need them.

2.  Get a pen. Make a list. Prioritize your objectives. Do we really need all those projects completed simultaneously?

3.  Grab the phone. Call your direct reports. Check-in. Do you know how much a “How’s it going?” can re-energize your staff? And how much thinking has been done on staff development and succession planning?

4.  Find a clinician. Ask him what he needs. Are you prepared for what he might say?

5. Call a politician. Invite them to take a tango lesson with you. Could you dare your government to seek your input?

Now, you may think that the five points above are droll or too simplistic. My next five blog postings will address each respective tip in a bit more detail.  Blog postings thereafter will address the other healthcare issues that Ms. Healthcare faces. Leadership is indeed a verb, an action-step. I firmly believe that it can be easy only if its simplest tasks are mastered.

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.