“We need to eat our own cooking.” This is a statement that resonates with me. I write and speak about customer service, employee engagement, creating cultures of high performance, and building foundations of trust. I feel it’s important to practice what I advise others to do. This includes measuring how we’re doing in these areas.
When I was at Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago, we became well known for having excellent patient experience. I spoke at conferences on the topic. In 1996, I moved to Pensacola, Florida, to be president of Baptist Hospital. I declined speaking engagements for a year. How could I talk about great patient experience when we did not have it? Once we had achieved a high patient experience, I was comfortable speaking about it again.
Another area I spoke about often was employee engagement. I started Studer Group in 2000. After about seven months, we were up to eight employees. I contracted with the company that conducted the employee engagement survey for Baptist to survey Studer Group. The company had never had a request to conduct a survey for such a small company. They asked me, “Why now?” Didn’t I want to wait till we got bigger? I said, “No, we need to do one now. I want to have an objective view of how we are doing. This is what will help us grow.” Fifteen years later when the company was sold, it had over two hundred employees.
A challenge I find often with companies is the lack of measurement. A company might talk about how they are a great place to work, yet they do not measure it. They might say they provide great service but do not measure it. A community might say they are a great place to live but do not measure quality of life.
Some tips:
- Measure. If you say you are a great place to work, use an outside company to objectively measure employee engagement.
- Take your standards and values and meet with staff. Let them know you want feedback on how well the organization is doing following the standards and living the values.
- Assess what you are saying to the public. Measure whether you are delivering it.
- If you are a new leader in the organization, send out a survey that can be filled in anonymously. Ask these questions: What are 1-3 things you feel we are doing well? What are 1-3 things we have an opportunity to improve? What questions do you have? What do you feel the focus should be in the next 90 days? People love being asked, and their answers provide good insight into what actions to take.
Let’s not hesitate to measure our own performance. Often the results are better than we might secretly fear. And the sooner we discover any concerns, the sooner we can move to fix them.
