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David
Lee
Consultant
Speaker
Author
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AR
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If
You Want to Be The Employer of Choice for Healthcare
Workers: EVERYTHING MATTERS |
| By
David Lee |
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| The
Employment Times, October 3, 2005 |
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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.
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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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