Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/170067
32 adaptable, innovative and compassionate. Some of these traits may be trainable, but most are not. Every day you are hiring or promoting people who either have these traits or don't. Accordingly every one of these decisions has the potential to move you in the right direction, or away from it. Think of the last outstanding manager you hired and the positive impact he or she had on outcomes and department performance. Now think of the last poor hire in a similar position and their negative impact. How will you ensure that more often than not, you choose the former and not the latter? The research, and more importantly the empirical evidence from other industries, is conclusive. By adding objective measures to the selection process, you significantly increase the odds of making the right decision. Other industries, for decades, have used scientific and structured selection strategies to improve customer satisfaction, productivity, quality and profitability. Leading hospitals are adopting these strategies. Technical skills are rarely the reason for performance failures. Performance issues turn on behaviors. The traditional approach to sourcing and screening candidates is wholly inadequate at evaluating these behaviors. For example, it's been shown that the traditional candidate interview, be it for a physician, nurse or tech, has no predictive value. Yet we continue the process. Step one is to design and implement a consistent, behaviorally based, structured interview process to glean useful information and ensure you are evaluating patient-centered competencies. There also now exist easy to use and user-friendly tests and assessments for various healthcare positions. These may serve to eliminate candidates who clearly don't fit your culture, or to differentiate between candidates who look similar on paper. Combined with a well-designed interview program, these assessments add significantly to the predictive nature of your selection system. You will increase the odds that those you bring into the organization have the requisite behavioral skills. 4. Coordinate all talent functions. It is not uncommon that there are different sets of competencies and priorities between what should be coordinated and consistent HR functions. Selection, training, performance management and succession planning are handled by different departments that don't necessarily communicate and may even be working from multiple behavioral competency models designed specifically for each department. Successful hospitals work from a single behavioral competency model, designed for use across all HR functions. In this manner, the behavioral competencies form the foundation for all related functions and for the organizational culture. 5. Look at the entire organization. A change in organizational culture doesn't occur because of work at one level of the organization. An example: You may hire front-line nurses who are patient-centered high performers, ready to innovate and adapt. High performers need to be supported, and the single most influential factor in turnover is the relationship Executive Briefing: Selecting Top Talent with the direct supervisor. If you neglect, then, to find managers ready to lead them, you will have little impact on the culture and likely lose many of these wonderful new nurses. Don't overlook the importance of "lower" level positions. While nurses make up 30 percent of your workforce, front-line workers including dietary, environmental services and transporters, make up a significant portion of the people who influence the experience of patients and their families. While these positions are easier to fill and have lower per employee labor costs, high turnover is costly and has a negative impact on patients. Finally, don't exclude physicians from this thought process. We are expecting more of physicians as partners in crafting patient-centered, high value care models. You need physicians who have the behavioral skills to help the organization succeed. With the growing trend of physician employment by hospitals, we are creating a very unique physician "workforce" that needs to be built, managed and developed with the future in mind. 6. Enhance the effectiveness of patient satisfaction training; incorporate healthcare EQ. The current approach to patient satisfaction-based training is to give everyone the same program and hope for the best. This approach is the equivalent of a cardiologist treating every patient who walks into his or her office with the same diet, same exercise prescription and same medication, regardless of the patient's diagnosis. Just like every patient with a heart condition is different, each staff member brings a different psychological and behavioral make-up to the patient interaction. Each has different strengths and weaknesses. Until each staff member understands these strengths and weaknesses, and develops strategies to improve how they address patient's needs, real change will remain elusive. There is a renewed interest in healthcare, in emotional intelligence, a concept popular in other industries since the 1990s. Healthcare has been slow to adopt, partially because of a lack of early evidence of its effectiveness, and partially because the traditional construct of EQ does not quite fit the unique nature of healthcare. Recently though, the idea of healthcarespecific EQ is proving more relevant. EQ is a complicated concept to begin with and applying it to the idea of patient-centered care requires an understanding of how EQ in this setting differs from traditional EQ. For instance, empathy (a traditional component of EQ) must be understood within the context of the provider-patient relationship and scoring too high on empathy may be problematic. More importantly, there is evidence that some components of HEQ can improve with training. Rather than blanket training staff on a checklist of actions that will, hopefully, improve the patient experience, progressive organizations are providing staff with insight into their own behavioral DNA via a measure of HEQ. Just as talent selection strategies are focusing on the behavioral competencies of the individual, patient-satisfaction training can target specific behaviors of each individual staff member. n Since its founding in 1993, Select International has been dedicated to developing assessment solutions that help companies identify, select and develop top talent throughout their organization. Select's Healthcare Solutions Group specializes in developing assessment technology to help healthcare organizations improve the return on their most important investment – their people.