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ARTICLES & REPORTS

If You Want to Be The Employer of Choice for Healthcare Workers: EVERYTHING MATTERS

By David Lee

The Employment Times, October 3, 2005

If you want your healthcare facility to be an employer of choice, everyone on your management team would be wise to commit to memory what branding expert Scott Bedbury learned when he went from one powerful brand – Nike – to another – Starbucks. Upon joining Starbucks, Bedbury, author of “A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century,” wanted to learn as quickly as possible the secret of Starbuck’s branding success. He went to their Chief Coffee Buyer Dave Olsen, while shadowing him on a coffee buying expedition in java. Was it their unique blends, their unique ambience, their hip baristas? Or was it something else that was the critical ingredient to their dominant brand? “What mattered most?” he asked Mr. Olsen. After weighing the variables, Olsen reached his conclusion, a conclusion that your management team must “get” if you are going to have a standout brand in the labor market. His conclusion? “Everything matters.”

Everything Affects Your Brand in the Healthcare Marketplace, Which In Turn Affects Your Employer Brand

Because a brand is formed through the perceptions and emotions generated by experiences people have with a product, service, or company, every experience matters. Thus, every experience people have with your healthcare facility contributes to your reputation as a healthcare facility, which in turn will affect your employer brand. Since the best employees want to work at the best institutions, the better your brand in the marketplace, the stronger your Employer Brand. Thus, every interaction patients, their family members, job seekers, employees, and community members have with your facility helps shape – for better or for worse – your Employer Brand.

It matters whether your receptionist briskly barks out an answer to an anxious visitor or welcomes them warmly. It matters whether staff greet and offer assistance to people wandering down the corridor instead of striding by lost in their own world.

Every Employee or Potential Employee Moment of Truth Matters

It matters whether your HR department leaves a job applicant hanging or keeps them apprised of their status. It matters whether employees are asked for their input about a process or policy change or they’re notified the day before said change occurs.

Another major reason Everything Matters is because if you truly want to be an Employer of Choice, you have to “deliver the goods.” You have to actually be an excellent place to work, not just have an excellent recruiting message. Creating a great recruiting message without creating a great place to work is – to paraphrase advertising great David Ogilvy – the fastest way to ruin your reputation in the labor market.

Because Everything Matters, you never know what interaction will be the deciding factor when a job applicant is deciding between you or the competition. For instance, at Concord Hospital in Concord, NH, a radiology tech phoned in from the parking lot to accept the job offer because of her experience during her tour. Despite a job offer from Boston that included a much higher salary, she said that when she saw the friendliness and camaraderie among staff here, she knew this was the place she wanted to work.

Stop for a moment and reflect on what impression this applicant would have if they walked through your facility. Would they think, “This must be a great place to work!” or would they wonder “Am I on the set of of some horror movie?” Because every experience influences your marketplace brand and your Employer Brand, and because you never know what experience will be the deciding factor, you want to carefully examine and manage the experiences employees, potential employees, patients, family members, and vendors have with your institution. All affect your reputation as a healthcare provider and employer.

Examine Those All Important “Moments of Truth”

Use Experience Mapping™ to examine and manage critical employee experiences. Experience Mapping™ borrows from the customer service tool Service Mapping, which is used to analyze a sequence of customer interactions. Service Mapping enables an organization to examine each interaction, and the transaction as whole, in terms of customer-friendliness. For instance, if you were to Service Map “Patient Calling For An Appointment With Their Physician,” and the first interaction of the sequence typically involves a harried “Dr. Smith'sofficepleasehold,” followed by 3 minutes of dead air, this step in the process would rate a “not very customer-friendly.” To manage this process for optimal customer service, you would then rework each step until the whole process becomes customer-friendly.

Just as Service Mapping enables you to analyze a transaction from the customer’s point of view, Experience Mapping™ enables you to analyze the sequence of employee experiences from the employee’s point of view. It enables you to identify whether each interaction in any process is “employee-friendly,” so you can identify how that interaction affects your Employer Brand.

Although Everything Matters, you will want to start off by Experience Mapping some of the most critical processes, such as employee orientation. Why employee orientation? First of all, employee orientation is an employee’s first insider’s look into you organization. How you conduct orientation tells a lot about how you treat employees and how well you run your institution. As the old truism goes: “You never get a second chance at a first impression.” Second, every employee orientation should be Experience Mapped™ because most organizations do a mediocre job of this critical process.

Think of some of the dreadful employee orientations you’ve experienced. Were they of the “sink or swim” variety, where you were thrown into your job with minimal support and guidance? Were they of the “dull as watching paint dry” variety that consisted of hour after hour of logistics and policies, with little or nothing about why you should care about your new employer and how you contribute to the organization’s mission? Or, were they of the “drinking out of a firehouse” variety, where you were overloaded with information, finally emerging feeling dazed and confused?

Create a Great Brand By Doing Things Right

Compare these common orientation experiences with the experience new employees have at Concord, NH–based Northeast Delta Dental, recognized as the Fourth Best Small Company to Work for In America by the Great Places To Work Institute.

First, new employees get a handwritten welcome note from CEO Tom Raffio. Second, rather than being left dazed and confused by a whirlwind tour of the company, they receive their tour in two stages, separated by a month. Third, Connie Roy-Czyzowski, VP of Human Resources, meets back up with new employees after two months. “I want to find out if this is what they had expected when they came on board, if they have questions, and if there are any issues that need to be addressed,” says Ms. Roy-Czyzowski, “This allows us to both address their concerns and continually improve our orientation process.”

These Moments of Truth communicate to new employee: “We value and respect you,” “We care how we treat you,” and “We do things right here.”

By managing these and many other Moments of Truth so effectively, Northeast Delta Dental has created a Magnetic Employer Brand™.
Because happy employees are the best recruiters, Northeast Delta Dental has created a huge volunteer recruiting team – a tribe of headhunters, if you will – who proudly talk about what a great company Northeast Delta Dental is. That’s what happens when you become an Employer of Choice; that’s what happens when you recognize Everything Matters.


	About the Author: David Lee is an internationally recognized authority on organizational and managerial practices that optimize employee performance. He is the author of Managing Employee Stress and Safety, as well as dozens of articles on employee and organizational performance that have been published in trade journals and books in North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. For information on his programs and service, click here.

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