The Organizations Winning on Reputation and Retention Aren’t Spending More. They’re Building Better Cultures.
Think about how many people interact with your organization daily. Patients, staff, families, vendors. Each one is forming an opinion, and many are openly sharing that opinion. What if every employee left work each day, raving about where they work and saying they wouldn’t work anywhere else? How effective would that be in recruiting their peers? To retain them? To lower the turnover? To raise your quality, safety, and service?
What if patients and visitors all said they’d never go anywhere else?
If you could increase employee engagement and build patient loyalty you would improve your bottom line and reputation significantly.
But is your culture driving that kind of loyalty and positive word of mouth?
When you look at patient attrition, staff turnover, HCAHPS scores—all of those things share a common denominator in culture. Culture is “how you really do things around here.” It’s how you treat one another. It’s how you treat your patients. It’s what you practice every single day.
The Four Cash Leaks
On our website, we talk about helping healthcare organizations cure the most costly revenue leaks under their control:
- Lost healthcare consumers. When your culture doesn’t support patient-centered care, people don’t come back. They don’t refer.
- Low patient experience scores. Your culture dictates the patient experience. If your culture is one where staff are burned out and unsupported, that shows up in every interaction.
- Disengaged employees. When people don’t feel valued, productivity drops. Quality suffers. Mistakes happen.
- Unwanted turnover. The revolving door. Training someone just to watch them leave.
All of those create huge cash leaks. And sometimes people get so caught up in other strategies that they forget: all the leaks are related back to culture.
Culture as a Key Differentiator
The reverse is also true. When you have a good culture, it is a differentiator. It makes your organization a place where:
- Patients want to come for care.
- Employees want to work.
- Providers want to practice.
When leaders focus on culture as a core strategy, it helps with building patient loyalty, improving patient experience scores, improving employee engagement, and decreasing turnover.
Culture isn’t soft. It’s strategic. Over the past decade several studies including those by McKinsey and Gallup have demonstrated that organizational culture has a profound impact on business success including clinical outcomes.
Culture Matters to Employees Today
I was talking with a young lady recently who had graduated at the top of her class in high school, undergraduate school, and graduate school. The world was her oyster. She could go anywhere and do anything.
We were talking about some jobs in my area and she said: “You know, I’m not looking for a job. I’m looking for a culture.”
She was very clear that she wasn’t just going to sign on anywhere for a title or responsibilities. She wanted to make sure that she was connecting with a culture that really matched up with what she wanted out of life. And I thought: No wonder she’s so far ahead of the game.
We have to remember: Just as you’re interviewing the candidate, the candidate is interviewing you. And if they’re astute, they’re looking and paying attention to the culture.
What Culture Signals Are Your Patients Seeing?
I remember visiting my sister in the hospital. She was gravely ill and I was struck by something she shared. She commented that the staff didn’t get along at all.
I said, “I’m just curious. What impact do you think that has on you?”
Her response: “If they’re all caught up in their own drama, they’re sure as hell not focused on me and my care.”
That hit me hard. Because she was absolutely right. Patients can see teamwork and it raises their confidence.
I had a similar conversation with my mother when she was having cancer treatments. But her observation was the opposite—and positive.
She said, “God, they (the staff) love where they work.”
I said, “How can you tell?”
“They talk and laugh with each other. But when it comes to doing my procedure, they were like a well-oiled machine. You could see how everybody anticipated the other person’s next move.”
Always collecting qualitative data I asked, “How did that make you feel?” She responded, “It gives me confidence in the care. They are a team and they care about me and their work.”
Patients are watching. And they’re drawing conclusions about your culture based on what they see, hear, smell and touch. Everything. A clean environment. Green plants. How staff interact with each other. Whether people smile. How quickly problems get addressed.
All of it comes back to culture. And all of it is born of leadership that holds everyone to a high standard and promotes ownership.
So here’s what I want you to think about:
When hundreds or thousands of people—employees and patients—leave your building today, what will they say about working there? Will they recruit their peers for you? Or warn them away? What about your patients? Do they recommend you or disparage you on social media?
What’s your cultural competitive advantage? How will you make culture a core strategy?
Tags: corporate culture, culture, Employee Engagement, employee experience, healthcare leadership, Organizational Culture, Patient Experience
