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What's most toxic about healthcare organizations? The germs lurking there? Not really -- it's the way people are.
Thanks to the constant press of managed care and the fact that most health workers feel chronically overworked and underappreciated, the number of people trying to leave the field has escalated tremendously in the past several years. Healthcare organizations may have the very worst case of corporate America's most infectious disease: Talent loss. Hospitals, HMOs and clinics alike are at risk for having their best people walk away.
For that reason, healthcare providers and managers should listen to what Timothy Butler and James Waldroop, directors of MBA career development at Harvard Business School, are saying: Find out what motivates your people, and let them have a voice in designing their work. If you're a manager or unit head, print this out and think about it. If you're one of the providers who's beginning to wonder why you ever let yourself get into this kind of taxing, out-of-control work, then print out this article and make a few copies to spread around your workplace.
Motivating Factors
According to Butler and Waldroop, workers generally are motivated by between one and three of eight "deeply embedded life interests." In my experience, working with healthcare organizations and the people who work there, four of the eight are particularly applicable. Nurses, residents, social workers, technicians, OTs, PTs and many other allied health specialists are often motivated by one or more of the following, even though it may not officially be the most salient part of their job description:
- Applying technology.
- Managing people.
- Managing projects.
- Counseling and mentoring.
What's the best way to find out if any of these roles might be important to your direct reports? Ask them. Find a time to meet with them individually (an impossibility, many will say, but that's a choice, not necessarily a reality). During your meetings, identify these life interests, and then ask your direct reports to think back over their careers for times when they felt best about their work.
Chances are high that the best times were when they had the greatest opportunity to apply and use some of those deeply embedded life interests.
Then ask them to analyze the work they're doing now, to check the fit between what their job descriptions call for and what they'd like to be doing. Now take it one step further. Ask each worker to tell you how the things he would like to do could in fact increase the productivity, efficiency or effectiveness of how your unit is doing its work. If no answers are immediately forthcoming, ask them to go home and think about it.
"Preposterous," you say. "How could my direct reports actually do a better job for our organization by including more of their favorite activities in their workweek?" It's not preposterous at all. Consider these possibilities:
- The OT who has a new idea for how to help her team members share information online and improve their ability to work with patients and cover for each other (the technology interest).
- The administrator who would like to lead a team retreat on communication skills for nurses and physicians in order to reduce the number of complaints from nurses and make patient care go more smoothly (the people management interest).
- The resident who has an idea for getting the surgical and pediatrics residents to work together on a new program to instruct parents in post-surgical care of their children, reducing the number of unnecessary visits to the emergency room (the project management interest).
- The busy nurse who has found that he can get much better results from the nursing students and actually saves himself time when he takes an extra few minutes with each of them, answering their questions and helping them to understand their patients' emotional state (the counseling/mentoring interest).
Open Up the Discussion
In many healthcare organizations, these folks would be told their ideas were too idealistic, costly or irrelevant. Those are the organizations that talented people are abandoning in droves.
Here's the bottom line: If you want to keep your best people and get the most out of them, it's time to invite them into the discussion about how the work is going to get done. Why? Because, according to Butler and Waldroop, the clearest path to top performance is letting people weave what they love to do most into the way they do their work.
Healthcare has become a business -- few would dispute that. Now it's time to borrow strategies from the human resources brain trust, as well as from finance, IT and marketing. It's clear that both the quality of care your organization gives and your profitability may depend on it.
To find out more about this kind of assessment, visit Butler and Waldroop's CareerLeader Web site.
