PROBLEM
In hospitals, one of
the key performance issues is recruiting and retaining nurses. There is a national nurse shortage. As we being our review of Lean Six Sigma in
Healthcare, we are therefore starting with an administrative area, Human
Resources.
HR at
this VA Medical Center was not meeting it's goals in recruiting
timeliness. In the past they blamed slowdowns
on the government bureaucracy and internal customers not providing complete
information. Instead we focused on the
HR department's own inefficiencies.
LEAN SIX SIGMA TOOLS
Performance Measurement
IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS - Scorecard Creation
1) Lean Six Sigma
begins by measuring performance. HR
created a simple performance scorecard and a complete performance measurement
system. http://www.supplyvelocity.com/July_2009_HR_Perf_Scorecard.xls
2) A Performance
Measurement System includes the departments:
> Goals
> Monthly updates
on actual performance
> Department
Action Plan
3) Perhaps the most
important part of the Performance Measurement System is the Action Plan. This is a list of projects that are happening
in the department. This action plan has
action item owners and expected completion dates. We try to limit the number of action
items/projects to 5 or fewer. The fewer
actions the department is working on at one time the more likely they are to
get them done. (see the HR Action Items
worksheet)
4) To handle more
ideas we made a list of projects-in-waiting that the HR department will tackle
when they finish current projects.
5) Scorecard
results are reviewed with all HR employees monthly at a 15 minute performance
review meeting. This meeting is quick
and effective. It reviews actual
performance and an update on action items.
It gives the entire HR department status and performance update. No one is in the Dark!
DETAILS - Executive Management
1) A very important
part of making Performance Measurement effective, is to get buy-in from Executives
of the Medical Center.
2) We needed their
agreement that these measures and goals were correct and their promise not to
add new measures.
3) We also needed
their agreement that they would not add new projects to the HR department
without making sure that the current list wasn't getting closed-out. This also ensured that any new projects
directly improve the Key Performance Measures.
4)
This is easy to say, but hard to do in most organizations. The Performance Measurement System creates
focus, both for the employees of the HR department and for the top management
of the Medical Center.
IMPACT ON PEOPLE
1) The HR staff
enjoys knowing what is going on and how the department is doing.
2)
Initially, all measures were in the Red.
This grounded everyone in the reality that they weren't meeting their
goals. Immediately, however, they began improving
a little each month
RESULTS
The "Recruiting
completed within 90 days of application" measure increased from 33% to 56%
within 6 months. This is still below our
minimum expectation of performance, but definitely better. More work continues to improve this measure
and the trend is upward. This
demonstrates the philosophy of slow continuous and sustainable improvement.
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