Re-printable Health Care Newsletter Articles
Baird's popular monthly customer service e-newsletter provides timely feature articles, book reviews and tips for making your service efforts stronger than ever. Feel free to reprint any of the following articles but please include the required credit lines.
5+ Secrets for Powerful Phone Connections With Patients – and Prospective Patients
Where do the vast majority of your patients and potential patients interact with you? Not in person. Not via email. But, by phone. That’s right – the telephone remains one of the most significant contact points in health care. Unfortunately, while significant, it is often overlooked as a crucial part of the patient experience.
Secret #1 ...
It's Not Just a Call, It's a Customer
Consumerism is here, and the emergence of transparency in healthcare cost and quality is quickly changing the landscape for the nation’s hospitals. Consumers, armed with the responsibility of spending their own out-of-pocket dollars, will become much more discriminating purchasers of healthcare services. Hospital executives will not only have to focus on providing quality services at a competitive price, but they will have to differentiate themselves in a key area they’ve generally ignored – customer service.
What Can You Do in Eight Seconds? You May Be Surprised
Eight seconds. That’s how long it takes to form a first impression. If you think about your own interactions, you can quickly see the validity of this statistic. Whether at a job interview, a social event or a retail setting, we form impressions quickly. So do our patients.
Patients in a clinical setting take eight seconds or less to form an opinion about the facility, the care providers and their overall experience. What you don’t know about these experiences can and does hurt you.
Fostering Exceptional Patient Experiences: 7 Steps for Health Care Leaders
There are many leaders in health care environments – each with an opportunity to exert positive influence on those who follow them. If you’re in a position to guide and shape the behaviors of those around you, here are some specific things you can do to help foster exceptional patient experiences:
Want to Add Millions to Your Bottom Line? Focus on Engagement
No matter how many employees you have on your team, having even as little as one percent of those employees disengaged can have a significant impact on the bottom line. Recognition is one of several leadership skills that helps strengthen employee engagement and results in a measurable bottom line impact.
Sodexo has 110,000 employees and they are committed to being leaders in integrated food service and facilities management. I spoke at a Sodexo conference recently in Dallas and was impressed, as always, with how much they value recognition and the efforts they go through to make recognition as easy as possible for people in the trenches. Those efforts make a difference that directly impacts the bottom line. They’re a company that’s committed to investing in their people.
What Drives Employee Engagement? It Depends.
When it comes to employee engagement, one size truly doesn’t fit all – or even a majority of – your employees. Each of your employees has different motivations and drivers that impact how engaged they are with their work, with their colleagues and with your health care organization. The challenge for leaders, of course, is deter mining what those drivers are and then finding ways to provide employees with what they need to stay connected to their work.
Four Levels of Engagement
Through our partnership with the Center for Talent Retention, we have found that virtually every workforce can be categorized into four distinctive segments:
1) The disengaged
2) The somewhat engaged
3) The engaged
4) The fully engaged
Silence Isn't Always Golden - 3 Tips for Confronting Problem Behaviors Head-on
Whoever coined the phrase; silence is golden, was not talking about a management technique. It’s widely accepted that positive reinforcement is one of the best ways to increase good behavior. But don’t be fooled into thinking that ignoring overtly bad behavior or marginal performance is the antithesis of positive reinforcement.
May 2008
Are you someone who puts in their time at work each day, with no clear idea of where that time will lead you? Or are you a new manager, faced with having to give a poor performance review and quickly losing your nerve to do so? Or have you ever felt like the pile of work on your desk is threatening to suffocate you before you can complete it?
"Turnover is good" (and other surprises overheard in healthcare)
Healthcare leaders spend a lot of time
predicting and planning for the future, but
when it comes to hiring and retaining
employees, I hear a lot more about future
problems than I hear possible solutions
Practical wisdom describes the essence of this book. The author, CEO of United Foods, Dan J. Sanders shares the leadership principles that have elevated his company to great success. In reading this book, I can see that we share many of the same philosophies about what it takes to inspire and lead people toward a common vision. This book isn’t a how-to book of leadership but rather one that encourages leaders to craft a compelling mission and vision and never waver from the top priorities. It urges leaders to understand the value of the workforce and the importance of maximizing human potential at all levels.
Sanders makes a strong case for building a culture-driven, people centered organization. He feels that leaders have historically spent far too much time focusing on fiscal resources and not enough time on human resources. Coming from the grocery industry, Sanders knows the value of great service. He states, “No loyalty exists when the nature of the relationship between the buyer and the seller is based on price and nothing more.” He knows that in a culture-driven, people-centered organization, leaders are energized and equipped to motivate followers to see beyond the present. He knows that leaders should create energy and not deplete it particularly in tough times.
Sanders shares stories from his personal and professional life that make the fundamentals of leadership come alive. This book is a fast read and one that I will keep handy for its snippets of practical wisdom.
Baird Consulting has joined the
blogosphere. Posts to the brand-new blog
will offer health care leaders practical ideas
and opinions on how to improve their
pateints' experiences.
Kristin Baird's new book, Raising the Bar on
Service Excellence - The Health Care
Leader's Guide to Putting Passion Into
Practice, will be released this summer.
(Feb. 2010) Click here to read more.
