IMPROVING EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION AND PATIENT CARE IN THE FACE OF ONCOMING COMPETITION

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FOCUS: Achieving Your Highest Priorities The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® Signature Program

Executive Summary
With the help of FranklinCovey training in What Matters Most® (now FOCUS: Achieving Your Highest Priorities) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®, Memorial Medical Center, Inc., in Las Cruces, New Mexico has created a culture of cooperation, communication, and achievement, resulting in high job satisfaction, low turnover, and removed barriers to improved patient care. The hospital has realized a 40-percent increase in employee productivity as a result of time saved or gained each week, as well as a return of $1.74 for every dollar invested in training.

What's more, through continuously applying diagnostics of its Organizational Effectiveness CycleTM, FranklinCovey is helping Memorial prescribe the right training solution for each functional area of the hospital. Work processes continue to improve, helping the hospital get business done and enabling caregivers to do what they trained for.

There's likely no more challenging business environment today than that of healthcare. Just ask Carter Campbell, director of Educational Services at Memorial Medical Center, Inc., in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

A registered nurse with years of critical-care experience, Campbell now leads training and education initiatives for what has been the only acute-care hospital in southern New Mexico. Memorial Medical Center, Inc., employs 1,500 ''team members'' and serves the 300,000 residents of the state's second largest city and surrounding communities and counties.

A fixture in the Las Cruces community since 1950, Memorial is also no stranger to the changing landscape of healthcare operations. Nationwide there's a severe labor shortage of nursing, pharmacy, radiology, and lab professionals. Add lower job-satisfaction levels, high turnover, and shrinking federal reimbursements to the mix of national healthcare issues. Then pile on legislative funding cuts and direct competition from a new hospital opening in Las Cruces in August 2002. It's soon apparent that new approaches to quality care, retaining qualified care givers, and finding ways to reduce costs are top priorities for Memorial.

"As a not-for-profit community hospital, our challenge is maintaining our community mission but acting like an investor-owned hospital in order to survive," Campbell said. "The new hospital has an investor-owned mission, whereas we are chartered to provide for the needs of every member of our community. But we had to escape the mind-set that people should come here simply because we've been part of the community longer."

"We've always had competition," said Laura Pierce, Memorial's assistant vice president of Human Resources. "El Paso, Texas is only a 40-minute drive from here. People live here and commute there, and vice versa. We've just never had competition within our own community before."

She added, "The reason our team members work at Memorial is because they care about their community and their patients. But now it will be easier for them to go work for the new hospital, or work both places. We've found it's really important to invest in the talent of our team members. Obviously we want to be their employer of choice."

Answering the Training Call Button
Realizing the need to invest in training in order to help team members adapt to change, improve services, and make Memorial an attractive place to work, Campbell and Pierce first tapped traditional leadership-development and customer-service training, followed by a university-style program with professors doing the teaching. Later, business consultants came in with management training. While each program had its merits, none was specific enough for the healthcare issues facing Memorial Medical Center.

Collaborating with a colleague one day, Campbell discovered their common interest in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and concluded, "Wouldn't it be great if we introduced these concepts to Memorial?" After an initial call to FranklinCovey headquarters, he was put in touch with Debra Larson, FranklinCovey Managing Client Partner, based in Phoenix, Arizona.

"When I called Debra with questions about how to certify to facilitate The 7 Habits training at Memorial, I was impressed that the first thing out of her mouth was not 'this is how you do it,'" Campbell said. "Rather it was 'Why do you want to do The 7 Habits?' That comment intrigued me, because you don't often get that from a company. Debra really exhibits the solution provider model."

Memorial Medical Center signed a license agreement with FranklinCovey, then Campbell certified in both The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People leadership training and What Matters Most time management training. He has since certified in five additional FranklinCovey curricula. Two other Memorial team members are also certified FranklinCovey facilitators.

Getting the Executive Team On Board
With help from Debra Larson and Memorial's guidance team, it was determined that the hospital's executive team should experience The 7 Habits® training first, "so that they understood the principles and could see how we planned to facilitate the training around present-day challenges within the medical center," Campbell said. "When it was over, our chief financial officer, Phil Rivera, said 'everybody in the organization needs this.' To hear something like that from a CFO is very reassuring," Campbell said.

Leaders Lead the Way
The next management tier to be trained was the hospital's 150 directors, managers, team leaders, and supervisors, who experienced a What Matters Most time management workshop designed to boost individual and team productivity. They were introduced to the Franklin Planner® as the tool to prioritize and carry out tasks critical to reaching team and organizational objectives. Participants also learned about Habits 2 and 3 of The 7 Habits: Begin with the End in Mind® and Put First Things First®. They then spent the next three weeks using the planner and honing newfound time management skills.

At 30 days, Campbell trained these leaders in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, introducing the methodology of principle-centered leadership, "with the understanding that we'd bring them back the following year for The 4 Roles of Leadership® workshop after they'd had a chance to practice and renew skills in The 7 Habits."

Memorial teamed with FranklinCovey to develop Introduction to The 7 Habits for Healthcare, a new workshop now offered as the second day of new employee orientation. "It's all about setting the stage for new hires in how we work together and want them to work," Campbell said.

Standing Up to Scrutiny
Increasingly, corporations of all sizes are reticent to support training programs that can't prove themselves. Memorial Medical Center tapped the Jack Phillips Center for Research, the measurement and evaluation arm of FranklinCovey that studies the return on investment (ROI) of training and performance-improvement programs.

Specifically concerning The 7 Habits training at Memorial Medical Center, the Jack Phillips research determined that the hospital realized an ROI of $1.74 for every dollar invested in training. What's more, the training was responsible for 40 percent of the time saved or gained each week in increased productivity.

According to BusinessWeek Online, the most important key to increased earnings today is productivity.1 Getting workers and their managers focused on the truly important things may be the biggest untapped source of increased productivity and performance.

A Jack Phillips study of 46 organizations across 12 industries2 reveals that training in What Matters Most and The 7 Habits helps people become tightly focused on the key initiatives and goals of the organization:

• They spend less time distracted by competing priorities and focus on what really matters.
• They develop strategies for managing their time so that the truly important doesn't fall victim to the merely urgent.
• They become more committed and purposeful as they feel more engaged in work that matters to the organization.

According to Campbell, use of the Franklin Planner is widespread throughout Memorial, "and it's expected in some quarters. If you show up without your Franklin Planner, others ask you where it is."

"Internal Experts" Make the Difference
Laura Pierce is convinced that FranklinCovey training at Memorial wouldn't have been as effective without having an internal expert like Carter Campbell to facilitate it.

"Carter knows us inside and out and what our challenges are. He's been with us a number of years and has built a level of credibility with the executive and leadership teams and knows how to tie everything in with healthcare. Plus, he has the perspective of a critical-care nurse. He knows what it's like working those shifts. He's instilled confidence with team members that they really can make the training work within their areas of responsibility, improve processes, and improve patient care."

Focus on the Future
Campbell credits FranklinCovey curricula and the Organizational Effectiveness Cycle with helping the hospital not just identify issues, but to create full-circle processes to ensure leaders and team members implement what they set out to do and measure the impact on every department throughout the hospital.

"We applied the What Matters Most model to re-craft our mission statement and core values as an organization," Campbell said. "We asked our stakeholders, 'If a healthcare organization were operating at its best, what would its core values be?' We solicited responses from patients, team members, and members of the hospital's foundation, and distilled the core values down to: community, compassion, respect, and unity. And that drove our mission statement, which is: To Care for Our Community with Compassion and Respect."

Laura Pierce acknowledges that processes are interwoven throughout the hospital. Once they're ironed out and running well, what are the benefits? "A work environment where team members feel supported, satisfaction is high, and turnover is low," she said. "We remove the barriers so team members can do what they went to school for, taking care of the patient with compassion and respect."

1 US Productivity: Galloping to the rescue once again. BusinessWeek Online. Feb. 18, 2002.
2 Jack Phillips Center ROI study of 46 organizations across 12 industries; Feb. 2002.

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