Today in health, it designing the job for today and tomorrow. Great post by Scott Becker, and want to run through with you. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health, a set of channels dedicated to keeping health it staff, current and engaged.
We want to thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health Taos. So site nuance, Canaan, medical, and current health. Check them out at this week. health.com/today. I was rolling through my LinkedIn today and came across this post from Scott Becker. Who's great posts. So I thought I would base today's show on this post.
And it's pretty simple. , let's see, designing the job for today and tomorrow 11 thoughts as we rethink what work should look like in various sectors in areas we are rounding. To an incomplete list of concepts. This is a work in progress. Please provide your ideas and thoughts. All right. So then he has this list of 11 things. I'm going to hit them pretty quickly.
It must include some easy wins. If every part of the job is hard work, it's very hard to stay with it for long period of time. It's too much of a prescription for burnout. There has to be easy, measurable, wins from time to time and people have to be able to see those wins. All right. So easy wins part of the first thing.
Number two. The bosses and leaders must take away friction points and hurdles to completing the job wherever possible. We want to make it easy for people to do their job. We used to have a cadence meeting with all the project managers at, when I was at St. Joseph's CIO and we had 120 some odd. Projects and the project managers come in and they had four points that they could make. And one of the slides was essentially, what do you need? What obstacle do you need me to remove for you as leaders or the leadership team to remove for you? And we came out of those meetings typically with a boatload of things that we needed to do.
And that was our marching orders. Our job was to remove those obstacles that they could not remove themselves so that they could be successful. So that was number two. , the results of one's work should be fairly apparent. And that's along the lines of what I was saying before, when people are successful in performing their work, doing their job effectively, they should be able to see the results of their work. And if not, you need to make it so that they can see a scoreboard.
There needs to be a scoreboard of some kind to know how they're doing. Number four performance should be wherever possible, based on did the person do their work and their results and not based on the hours. Or excessive oversight, the quantity and quality of work required must be rational both to the person who's doing the job and to the needs of the company and its customers.
Which I think is self-explanatory I don't really need to go into this too much. , But. You know, the, the, it should be about the work that they're doing, not the number of hours, not when you see their car in the parking lot. And those kinds of things. Number five, there should be an opportunity to pursue different challenges and opportunities within the job. There was there's organizations that do this extremely well.
They set aside if let's assume it's 40 hour work week, it's no longer a 40 hour work week. It's. Whatever. , it needs to be, but, , Oregon a good organization set aside time where people can pursue their own projects and that's important. Because it's it's in that space where creativity happens and solutions are developed.
Number six. Coupled with number five and number one, the job can't be so all consuming that there is not energy left to pursue different challenges and opportunities within the job. Okay, so you can't drain people and then say, Hey, but we're giving you extra hours to do some really cool creative work.
, the, the, the work cannot be that draining number seven. The job must include some flexibility. If there are quotas and other requirements, there must be room for them to be missed periodically or time to take breaks. And I think that's important to communicate to your team that you don't expect perfection.
You don't expect perfection from yourself. Hopefully you don't. And you shouldn't expect perfection from your team. There should be an allowance for missing deadlines, missing some things. Granted, we are running. Healthcare organizations and we are required to beat certain objectives in those kinds of things.
But perfection. Is not our, our goal better is we're getting better every day. We're getting we're, we're pursuing perfection through getting better on an incremental basis. , number eight, there should be room for growth and opportunities and reward where a person exceeds the core job. Absolutely. Number nine, there must be pathways for growth and promotion.
And people need to see those pathways. One of the things I find as I do surveys of organizations, and I do a handful of them every year. Where I talked to the teams. , within healthcare. And what I find is people don't know what the next step is for them, or even what is available to them within the house of some, they're just looking at a job board and then potentially a job board comes up. That should be what's going on. There should be an intentional planning process.
Where people are talking about, what do you want to accomplish? Where do you want to go with your career? And what type of work would you like to be doing within healthcare? And then identify those roles and give people a pathway to those roles. All right. Number 10, everyone must look for ways to make the job more efficient and easier.
Without sacrificing quality. , you know, we have as one of our core values at this week, health, , effective, not busy. And way too often, we celebrate busy. And we, , we also encourage busy. We ask people, Hey, what are you working on? And they need to give you a list of all the things that they're busy working on.
, instead what we should be looking at is efficient, not busy. , are we making the lives of people around us better? By making their jobs easier. Are we making our life better by making our job easier? That should be rewarded. And that should be applauded and shouted from the mountain tops because we don't have enough people. And it's only going to get worse as this baby boom generation moves out and number 11, but not least the business culture must include both nice people and a culture of appreciation.
, this is one of the things that I used to talk to my hiring managers about all the time. Which is, , we are building a culture and the biggest aspect of that culture. Obviously we want to create the parameters for it, and we want to create the best opportunity to have a great culture. But one of the things that leads the most to it, it's the people that you bring in.
People bring culture with them. They bring, , their, their biases. They bring their, , their, their work ethic. They bring their, , approach to, , personal interactions and those kinds of things that they bring that in. , and so that's important in the hiring process to identify people that are going to going to be a good cultural fit.
I've recently, we added about four people to this week health. And every person that has been brought on, I think the number one quality we're looking for. Is a good cultural fit. Now we're a very small organization, so it is really critical to get this right. , , you know, on the outset to bring people in that, add to the culture, not take away from the culture.
, the second thing I would say on number 11. The business culture is dictated a lot, depending on how large your organization is by your managers. Your managers create many cultures within your organization. You gotta be cognizant of the type of culture they are creating. I've talked about this over and over again, doing pulse surveys, identifying which managers are not creating the kind of culture that is conducive to the environment. You're trying to create, , identify them, get them trained or move them out.
Potentially. If they are not a good manager, they, they may not be. They may be a great individual contributor and get them in those roles. They may not be a good manager. you know, sometimes that happens. So it's your job as the overall leader. To identify that and to make sure that you are stewarding the culture. All right, great post by Scott, Becker love, , love the work that he's doing in the industry. Love to amplify that message that's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.
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