Define who you want to be and use those values as a tool to get things back on track when issues arise.
Late one night at an emergency veterinary hospital, the overnight team decided to play a four-hour game of Monopoly, ignoring the building’s three floors of animals and skipping several scheduled procedures … right in front of the security cameras.
When veterinary consultant Mary Ann Vande Linde, DVM, reviewed this incident, she was shocked. “If you have a team that’s doing this, you may have a values crisis,” she says. “They don’t understand the practice values and aren’t using them to make care decisions.”
Vande Linde shares how to use practice values to create a powerful, smoothly functioning team and keep everyone on track.
Define your top values. First, choose three to five words or phrases that best describe the customer service and the client experience of your hospital, such as courtesy, safety, efficiency, friendly, family or community.
Engage your team. Next, bring your team into the discussion about defining what the values mean and what behaviors the team could show to live these values. “This is really important to do, because everyone will have their own ideas,” says Vande Linde.
Bring the values to life. Use coaching to encourage the specific actions you want in your practice. For example, the actions/behaviors to signal practice value of “friendly” might include making eye contact, smiling, greeting clients and knowing clients’ and pets’ names.
Find small areas for improvement. “Don’t try to fix everything all at once,” advises Vande Linde. Ask yourself: What procedures or processes do you have the most trouble executing consistently? What’s the one thing that really drives you crazy? Something that the team just never gets right? Choose one area to focus on, and write down your current process.
Check perspectives. Once you’ve defined your values, the desired related behaviors, and a problem area to improve, get feedback from all parties and try to figure out the root of the problem. “Everyone sees a different side of the problem,” says Vande Linde. “If you don’t have all that information, the system won’t work.” For example, she says, you could confuse your team, or make a change that works for receptionists buts causes technicians to struggle.
Follow the “10% rule.” Take the client experience you want to improve—such as reducing the amount of time it takes to check in for surgery, calling back pet owners with test results, or calling families of hospitalized patients by a certain time with updates—and see if you can change things by about 10%, Vande Linde suggests. “The reality is that you just have to move 10% toward a goal and measure it, and you’ll get exponential changes,” she says.
Look through the lens of your values. Using your values will help guide any difficult discussion. For instance, when Vande Linde was called in to deal with the emergency team that had played Monopoly, she used the practice’s values to guide a discussion, rather than launching into a lecture and punitive consequences that might have prevented any true change of heart. “It’s much more effective to have people sit down and work out problems through your values than to focus on what they did or didn’t do,” she says.
Take action. Vande Linde asked the team to explain what safety meant to them, whether they thought the animals under their care had been safe, and if they thought the CSRs had felt safe when they checked people out in the morning and charged them for services not provided. The team decided their actions had not been safe and resolved to change their behavior. Vande Linde had them write down their conclusions and their new plan of action and communicate them to the practice owners.
Link values and vision. Make your defined values the guiding principles for your vision for the practice. These values will help you drive your hiring, onboarding, reviewing performances, handling issues as they arise and growing as a practice. “You have to make changes around your values, or people don’t follow,” Vande Linde says. “But if you use your values in your leadership, it takes away the blame game and helps you coach each other to get better every day.”