Ep. 227: Retention Starts With Culture - Michael's UCA Talk

Patient Care Marketing Pros (00:57)
I'm sorry.

Alrighty guys, nope.

It internalized.

All right, you guys, you all ready? Wanna honor your time, of course. It's 3.30 right now, so we're gonna get started. You got 45 minutes with me, so hope you enjoy the next 45 minutes. And just to give a pre-warning.

I like to have interactions with the crowd. I'm not here to orate the whole time. I want to hear from you. So don't be afraid to be shouting out questions. I'll be repeating questions so that I can hear. And so I'm excited to talk to you guys today. So real quick, my name is Michael Ray. ⁓ I was VP of operations. I'm now CEO of the company.

amazing when you turn that in a few weeks ago and a week later that you change your title. Oh well, here's the slides. So real quick patient care marketing pros. We do digital marketing for urgent care. Get more patients in your door. If you have any questions about that, we have a booth at the expo. We'll see you there.

So what am I talking about today is culture. So culture is something that we fully believe in in terms of being intentional with it doing the right things to have retention with your people. Because in today's day and age it's very easy for people to switch and change jobs for a couple of dollars or whatever. And so you want to build an environment that makes sense and it all comes around culture. So that's the goal of today's talk. So we're going get right into it. So first question out of the gate.

What is your definition of culture? Somebody within the workplace, of course. So he wants to give me a first definition of culture. Shout it out. Raise your hand. Come on.

I'll point. I'll come a little closer and point to somebody. What's your definition of culture?

Yeah, so you're saying underlying themes to interact with coworkers somewhat. Okay, who else? I'll keep pointing. Happens when the boss isn't there. Okay, I like where you're going with that. I have something similar to that. So you understand who else? Yeah. What they decide when things go hard. Okay.

Interesting. I'll do one more. Anybody else? Anything different? expectation from the leadership and the support system goes around it. Very good. I like it. So to one of the answers, you got it mostly right. Culture is what happens when you leave the room.

So right now, whatever's happening in your business is your culture because most of the people in here are either owners, managers, or some type of leadership, correct? Does that make you feel a little nervous? You feel good about what's happening right now because you can't touch it because you're in this room right now. You can't look at your phones because you gotta look at me. So are you confident what's happening in that culture? Who thinks it's a good thing so far? Or do you think there's things going on you wish you could change right now but you can't because you're stuck here?

Maybe, maybe, okay. So when it comes to culture, it always exists, but it only changes with intentionality. And today we're gonna be talking about the intentionality side of things. So the first half of this presentation is building up the conversation around culture. And in the second half are some quick things that we could recommend to you right now that you can implement this week and make a positive change into your culture today. So.

So thinking about your culture right now, I need some feedback here. Do you have a positive culture or a negative culture? Who's first? Who's positive? Raise your hand. ⁓ That's not even half the room. Who's negative? Negative culture? Got a couple up here. I saw a hand back there. So back there in the back in the brown, you said negative culture. Why do you think it's negative?

Hang I gotta get a little closer to this. ⁓ a merger.

So you're saying your new culture is better than the old culture. And so there's a challenge of merging things together. Can't disagree enough. That is such a hard thing to merge them together. So that's a good example. What else is negative? Who else has got negative culture? They're afraid, they're not afraid to talk about. Nobody's gonna talk? Everybody's positive? All right, so positive culture, is somebody in the back? No, all right, positive culture, put your hand up again. Who's positive? All right, why is it positive?

Yeah.

Okay, ⁓ so your view of positive is that we're all on the same boat. So, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I think a positive culture is like we're on a similar, like we're all on the same path.

But there's a layer to it where are there sacrifices happening to get to that path? And do we even acknowledge it or not? ⁓ I know we're all in business and there's a challenge of business when like hey, we're trying to achieve a goal and sometimes we overrun people in the process of doing that. And I'm here to talk about some of that today. So give me another positive culture. I just want to hear, yeah.

And prior to that merger, we were on the negative side of things. During that merger,

managers getting out into the clinics, interacting, working as staff, trying to build those relationships in mutual respect for all parties involved. And that's a big key right there where you had to go out into the, not just manage from afar, right? That's a big challenge, like people so I can manage by the numbers.

No, like there's a layer to that, but you have to like engage with your people. Our leadership team as well as people above us have all made trips into the clinics, asked questions, showed interest in involvement in the day-to-day processes as well. Good. Do y'all agree? yeah. Tell me an experience that inside the positive side that you have where you're like, I'm so glad we're still doing this and we're going into the clinics and you brought something to light.

Anything that comes to mind? ⁓

Yep.

Yeah.

Well there you go. mean that's just great examples of where that matters where you're getting involved in your scenes. I want to help my people, right? So awesome. I love it. All right, moving forward. So I this is the next one because I'm kind of curious. When you do exit interviews, hopefully you do.

If you don't do exit interviews, you should. That's just a quick tidbit right there. You probably should do those because you want to learn what they really thought because now they're on the out the door so they're not that threatened anymore, So when you do exit interviews, why do you think they leave? Most people will say it's because of money. They wanted more money somewhere else. Do we agree? Somewhat?

Part of it, right. So you say part of it. I'll come aside to the second word the other parts come into play. But I would have said two or three years ago, money was definitely a big player because like in social media and other things, they were convincing everybody just switch jobs, you'll get more pay every single time. And then you don't see that anymore because those people don't have jobs anymore. So it's just part of the game. anyway, so thinking through like thinking through your exit interviews that you've done with multiple employees over the years, money probably comes up.

What's give me one more do you think is the reason why they left? Growth. Growth opportunity, which is part of money, right? So absolutely, I do not disagree at all. So leadership dissatisfaction. Yeah, I mean sometimes you gotta get rid of people, right? ⁓ And then there's the other side of it where maybe the leadership's not very good and they wanted to leave off of that too. You can't forget about that.

So this is coming off of the ⁓ human resource ⁓ management. so top four reasons, yes, inadequate pay is in there. It's about half, inadequate pay is about half, but these are the other three. Poor manager, unfair treatment, insufficient regard toward employee well-being.

What does that all tie back to? Our talk today is culture because those three, culture probably could have fixed to a certain degree or could have had a warning sign or could have done something to help prevent that. And as we all know, when somebody leaves, replacing that person is a challenge. It takes time. It takes more stress from other people to do that. And it would have been really awesome if we knew that was coming ahead of time where we could have prevented it. I'm going to give you some tools today to help prevent some of that. We've also found that even the inadequate pay

If they're happy, they're likely to stay regardless if they can have a job making their dollars more an hour. Yeah. Because they're happy coming to work. Well, and they recognize too. So I think that's the thing that's important. Thank you for that. Is they also can see they have something good and why don't want to risk it and go through like, was a terrible job. Why am I still like, and all of sudden they're just in a job market and they're not going be able to come back to you because now there's like, well, I don't want you to come back. You're just going to leave me for a couple of dollars. And so.

It's real, so you want to make your workplace somewhere that people want to come to. And that can be hard in your industry because ⁓ patients are challenging. You have good ones and you have bad ones and it happens every single day.

And so there's a challenge of you want to take care of your people. Absolutely. So I definitely want to push on that. I have a slide for that. But you want to take care of your people. And culture is all part of that. So we talked about which one surprised you. think there wasn't too many surprises. I think we're all in agreement. Is there anything that you didn't see on that slide that you're like, well, this is, think, why people leave. But those are the top four. Anything that comes to mind as to why else people would leave? Schedule. Schedule? Makes sense. But to me, in that sense, it's more of.

that's not a bad place to work. Maybe the pay is okay, but they can't make it seem to fit their mold. So I guess that to me, that's not a bad thing, but all right.

So here comes the part we're starting to build into where your culture lies because this is what you've told yourself in leadership and as an owner or manager, we have a great culture, we're leading all towards the same thing, but let me ask you, how often are you sitting down with your employees? Not about work. Who does that? We got a couple of hands, couple of them. So all right, real quick, who does annual reviews?

Everybody pretty much that's expected monthly a little bit fewer hands weekly Two hands and then or do you just wait till they quit and there's your activity. That's the only time you talk to them Quarterly. Yeah quarterly as well So the and I joke about when they quit part because there are people I've talked to like I had no idea it was coming once I think talked to them well

when we hired them and then when they left. I'm like, well, that's not good. Like you have to sit down with them. ⁓ Annually like, this is where we have to evaluate for the past 12 months, but we haven't talked in between enough to see what's going on. Because whatever goal I gave you 12 months ago may not make sense right now, but I'm going to judge you off of that. And then we got to talk about money because they're looking for a raise because it's been 12 months and it's not a productive conversation, correct? Like it's not something ideal. ⁓ So monthly and weekly, so monthly as a company,

monthly one-to-ones. So one-to-ones is not the same as a review. Who wants to guess what a one-to-one is? Like what's inside of a one-to-one? Anybody? A one-to-one?

Okay, yeah, so the way we function our one-to-ones is, so it's based off EOS. Anybody ever heard of EOS? One? Okay, cool. We got one person that knows what EOS is. So if you want look it up later, it's based off a book called Traction. It's called Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's a fantastic way to run a small business. Highly recommend it. You should go look at it later.

But anyway, so end to one to one, it's all about the employee. It's not about the work. It's not about me, the manager. It's about the employee and what's making them tick. Because here's the thing, if you know what their goals are in life and you can help them achieve their goals through work, they're gonna be a better employee. They're gonna one, do better work because they understand that you care. A monthly one to one will help with that. And then two, just, it allows them to be free to talk.

Because when you're, and I can ahead tell you right now, when it comes to one-to-ones, it takes three or four or five before they'll start to open up a little bit. So it takes time. So you have to be consistent with it. But no, but what we've learned is that with those one-to-ones, I get to learn about their hobbies. I get to learn about what they love and what they don't like. And then they also start to expose what they don't like inside their job and where, I don't know why I'm doing this, but I'm doing it.

Even inside we have a little bit of structure so we call them facts. So it's frustrations, anxieties, and then confidence. Where they most confident, where they least confident in right now. And it can be work related on that one. And then transition, what kind of growth are they looking for? And then systems and solutions. What's something that you're using in our system that you hate or love or you wish you could see a change? So we do that every single month.

And then we also as a manager look for things to help them improve. hey, I saw this was going on, can we work on this to make things a little bit better for you? But at the end of the day, it's one of those, I know a lot about them and they understand that I do care. It's not just a I'm checking a box type of situation. Because when you check a box, they can see that and feel that and they don't feel like you care anymore. Does that make sense? So now that I've explained it pretty well, anyone still doing one to ones? You might line up with a couple of people. Okay.

It does make a difference, right? When you start to no understand how they tick. Because then they can bring things to you and say, well, I want to talk to you about this now because you've allowed that door to open. It's hard to have that door open when you're just going daily work on this and you're just trying to hit fires and so forth. Or maybe they messed up or they did something good. But then you're, you know, I'm trying to sit down and discuss any of it. So all right. Makes sense.

Yeah, it's real because it does have that initial feeling of am I in trouble?

Are you going to bring up something that I did three months ago that I forgot about? You're trying to get away from that. And I'll have a slide about that too. But I agree, getting them out of the environment if you can. We have some that do one-to-ones at lunch. They'll take them to lunch and just sit down for an hour and have a conversation. It's designed to get to know them, ultimately. It's not designed to punish them or to reprimand them or to train them on something new. That's not the goal. If that was the goal, then that's just another training of some sort that's just...

there and they're going to regret it. They want to look forward to the one-to-one, not regret it or just, don't, can I call them sick today? You know, none of that. All right.

So we all say here we focus on patients, right? As an urgent care, we focus on our patients, patient experience, patient care, all the patient things. Half of the solutions at today's expo are about patient engagement and along those items and making sure it's a smooth process. But the reality is if you don't focus on your people...

who actually focus on your patients, then it's never gonna work out. You're gonna have, and you know this too, I did last year front desk training on phone calls and so forth, and you have people on there that just don't give a care about the patient, because there's a good chance they weren't cared for by their manager or their owner. that's the reality of it. If you really care about your patients, you gotta start with your people. And because if you don't take care of them and make sure they're...

doing what you want but also from the standpoint they're achieving their own goals they'll never take care of the patient the way you would take care of a patient because as an owner or leader you have a I'll say like just a natural I want to do as much as I can for this patient because you have a company that you're trying to grow that's part of your own goals right and so when you think about everybody it's working for you

Their goal may not be to run an urgent care per se. They have other goals, but they're using working there with you as a way to get there. And so making sure you're just focusing on your people just makes the difference. All right. So I put this up here because we're going to talk about some of the things, the tactics of how to make your culture better. But I have to, this is my warning. When you start focusing on your people, you can't react.

Now what does that mean? Who wants to guess what I mean when you can't react? Haven't heard much on this side. Taking things personal. Good. What else? Don't react. What is it? Getting defensive. Same. Anybody else?

Say again? Try to fix every problem that they bring up. Exactly. So why do I say don't react? If you react every time a problem is brought up, a question is brought up,

anything that's not in the positive path and you have a hard reaction to it, they're not going to give you your full answer. They're not going to be transparent with you. They're going to be the yes-men of situations where they're just going to tell you what you want to hear. Or the best part is where you ⁓ find out later and because they were too afraid to tell you. recently we had a mastermind of urgent cares come into our town.

And in that mastermind, the owner had two other people with him. And they said, well, you didn't know that someone was stealing from you? He's like, how would that be stealing from me? And then they explained, he said, I had no idea. And it was one of those, we just didn't want to tell you. nobody wants to hear that, right? Have ever noticed that when you do like somebody go, you start hearing about these things that were happening that nobody told you, you just found out because you investigated a little bit? That's why that reaction matters. It really does. so, because I mean, we all know it too.

Growing up as a child like if I do something wrong I don't want to tell my parent because I'm afraid the reaction I'm more afraid the reaction the actual problem that happened when we can't do that with our people right they can't be afraid of you Do you think some are afraid of you? Maybe do you like the fear? Yeah? I Mean some people do I'm not a fan of it, but some people do like fear so alright And as I just said there you're creating a yes people situation if you do that

No matter what I tell you today, your culture won't improve because it will be in your bubble and not the whole company because you're thinking that we're moving positively. But the reality is you're being told that and it's probably not happening until you go visit your clinics and you start seeing what's going on. You're like, why hasn't anybody told us about this? It's been going on for months. It's because of the reaction part. All right. So we're going to go into the quick wins of things here.

So I'm at the halfway, I'm actually at the halfway point in the timing too, so that's good. So this is the halfway point. This is the quick wins. These are things that we do in our company right now. I will explain each of them in more detail. You can probably guess on the first two and the last two you're probably not sure about, that's my guess. So obviously, you know, when it comes to gossip and politics, we know what that means. Usually I'll have a definition for you. But what we've learned, like these four items right here make the biggest impact. It's one of those.

it can solve a lot of problems before they even become a problem. And I'm curious for you guys, do you have policies in place that have some of this information in there? Like a no gossip and no politics discussion, anything like that? No? No policies? Do you think you should? Maybe? All right, so let's see. First, a no gossip policy. So this is my definition of no gossip. This is what we use from a...

inside of our handbook right now. Tell me if this makes sense. When you have two co-workers talking together about a third co-worker without them present. Can you imagine that right now? There's probably somebody you can think of right now that's probably had that conversation and then this third person's being made fun of or ridiculed and they can't do a thing about it. Do y'all have gossip in your workplace?

I see lots of nods. Lots of nods. Okay, so somebody give me an example of some gossip situations. Let me guess, probably, somebody got fired or reprimanded shortly after once you discovered it or they left, correct? So who in here has a gossip? Something comes to mind. When I explain that, what's an example that comes to mind in gossip? I lot of nodding heads, so know somebody has an example. How you?

actually this happened very recently when a couple of employees came up to me saying, our lead MA, pretends to work a lot. We're seeing her, she hardly takes patients, she's pretending to

inventories and other things and so that constant talk that created animosity towards her because more people joined in and added fuel to the fire until and it was good that we found out so we were able to indirectly hold some huddles, spend a little more time at the site to diffuse it and try without accusing people that hey I heard you said this because that never works

and indirectly also monitored the lead MA's performance to help improve it. It took a few weeks and it improved. So, perfect example, right? Where they were making a situation far worse. It wasn't solving a problem. It was just really just taking a human and just throw him in the trash can essentially. And that person had nothing. They couldn't do anything about it.

Because for all they knew that she was doing all the right things, but they saw an instance that said, this person's not doing their job or whatever. They're terrible. And then the other version of this, we'll see if people can identify with this, they said, well, I just need a vent. So who in here has heard that before? I just need a vent. Yes. I saw a big knot over here on that, on the venting side. She's like, no, please don't call me.

But no, it's on the venting side. So you can take a quick not see. No one talking about what's an example that comes to mind of venting.

Yes. So, and I love what you said there. What have you done? Have you, cause that's something inside of this policy here where if you, if there's two of you that have an issue, you have to work it out first. And if it's just not going to work out, you come to leadership who can help work it out and solve the problem. It does not need to be leadership that has nothing to do with your department. It needs to be the people in charge who can actually do something. So it's a fantastic example. Any other venting examples that come to mind?

She's required to pick up one on holiday. long story short, for like two months, she worked a total of like three days. Calling out, dropping her ships, like the whole thing. I did a ride up.

and submitted it to our HR department so that they can review. And our policy is that you get four attendance occurrences before you get a write-up. And at different levels, right? Have a point for this, if you're late, blah, blah, Anyway, I got totally shot down on this write-up, and I was lying.

What? This is ridiculous. I'm in my office like so frustrated. So you're venting. I frustrated to the point where I was crying so full stop. Well the owner of, excuse me. This owner here? The owner of our company, he doesn't practice anymore but he makes rounds daily to all our clinics.

Well, he popped into my office and he saw me and I, of course, just finished crying. He was like, what's wrong? And I was like, ugh. I submitted this to HR. I got shot down. Was she a good employee? And I was like, oh no, she does the minimum when she's here. I'm just trying to progress and discipline type stuff. And I feel like I'm just blocked at every turn. anyway, he turned around and,

So there you go. So venting is something that typically creates a far greater problem than you intended for and then here you are. So that's just something you got to be aware of, right? So the next

one, this should be super obvious, I don't know why it's not obvious to everybody. You guys have enough going on. Everybody's got an opinion on something. There's no reason to bring in who's a Republican or a Democrat argument into the workplace. They can do it outside of the workplace. I don't have to go too far on that, but it's something that seems so simple. the next one we're going into will help guard some of that. But at this point in time, there's always a lot of tension in the air about whatever is happening in the world.

You guys are here to take care of patients, take care of each other. Let's focus on that. Don't let this be a distraction to your company. Because the last thing you need is somebody reprimand or fired because they got an argument with somebody else over something they have no influence over. And then all of a sudden, everybody's mad and it's a bad day and a patient has a bad day and then you get a bad review. So like why, why, right? Just simply why. Like I said, I won't go too much on that, but I just want to point it out.

Finally, so not finally, but this is the one that's so fascinating. So this, not our original work, we found this out of a book called, freedom at work, it's called 10 words. Technically you can call what you want, but what this means, this is your opportunity to stop people in their tracks before they say something they really are going to regret. And so the concept is pretty straightforward. You are 10 words away from violating a policy, making somebody mad.

probably gonna get reprimanded or something you just do not need to do. It sounds silly, doesn't it? But think about it this way. Let's say you're into a clinic and you hear a conversation between employees and you could say, that's going really sideways. They don't need to talk about that. Instead of you saying, hey, hey, I don't think we should talk about this. That's kind of awkward, right? I don't think we should talk about this. Please move on. You can just say, it's basically a code word, hey, 10 words. They're like, sorry, 10 words, you're right.

Now what we also find that sometimes, hey two words, two words, you're getting too close. then sometimes up negative 25 words, you went way too far. Let's come talk. because you caught it in the middle of it. So this 10 word concept, anybody do this of any stretch? we got one over here, I'm actually surprised. So tell me about it.

Check yourself for you, wreck yourself. In a positive way. ⁓

yourself for your ex. It's fantastic. I like it. But yeah, the 10 words part, it just, and the best part is you can say that in front of a patient, they'll have no idea what you're talking about. And so that kind of keeps it from a standpoint of like, ⁓ they're about to get in trouble. No, they have no idea. 10 words, what do you mean? And they move on. So I would encourage that. I'm curious, anybody have a code word they think they're thinking of other than 10 words that comes to mind if they're wanting to implement this? Any code words? No? Okay. All right. So the 10 words though, I

Like I said, it sounds so simple, but we have stopped so many conversations. Like the conversation of that gets stopped in its tracks when we say 10 words. Because you can hear it coming, especially around election time and all the things where maybe there was a policy change that people aren't fans of. 10 words will stop it right in the tracks. And so if you have a very chatty clinic that likes to have lots of conversations, this is super easy to implement.

and it makes it be very effective. So I highly encourage it for sure. Makes a difference. All right. Next guy right here. So this one is one of my more favorite ones because this is how you keep track of people without having to spend one on one time with them on a constant rate. Because you know if you have five employees, 10 employees, 50 and 100 plus, it's hard to spend that time accordingly. And so this weekly report, we've been running this type of weekly report now for

Five years. Yep, five years. And we started off with the first four questions. How was your morale this week? How was your stress this week? How was your workload this week? And what was your high and what was your low of the week? So we started and it's and within that we also have ⁓ a box where they can put in the details around it. They can say I had nothing to say. Most of the time they'll say hey this was really a stressful week because of blank. Great, now that we know and then we're looking for trends, right?

But this is important because we have them filled out at Friday at 10 a.m. Has a little email sent out, hey, don't forget to out your weekly report. Usually by two o'clock we get all of them in and so we can kind of see what's going on. And it's really been fantastic because it predicts things for us. So a couple of things that what it does. I know when somebody's about to quit based off of the weekly report, because they change the way they answer. When they start saying a certain way how they say their name, because we have one of the questions like what's your name? Just so we know.

how they say their name may change, how they pick out that and how they respond in the comment box for each one. When we see a trend shift, we're about three weeks away they may be quitting. Because they've mentally moved on from the company and are doing something else. And so it's held up pretty well. I can see it almost every single time. Also, we can also see how stressed out somebody really is. Because here's the thing, if you have a stressful week, I get it. If you have a stressful month,

We got to fix that. mean, two weeks of stress, too much stress. You got to fix that. Same with workloads. If this person says, my workload is maxed out every single week, is it time to hire? Or did you hire the right person? Do they need more training to help make them more efficient? Are they doing the things that's already out there? We don't know. And then the high and the low of the week. Here's the thing. We spend naturally so much time on the negative of what's going on in our business, right? So we're focused on bad patient reviews. Our patient numbers are low.

We have somebody that's about to quit. We focus on all the bad. Well, you should focus on your wins well. So the highs and the lows. You want them to say, you know, maybe it was a long week, but one of these things happened. And it gives you a chance to say, I'm so thankful for you, right? Well, you can go take this information and go to them and say, I saw you say a high week or just low. I just want to say, we're watching this and thank you for doing that. And I'm going make sure you're taken care of as well. So it's super important to remember the wins. It's hard to remember the wins, right?

your name is going on. And so it's just this is a simple weekly reminder. You have to think about those things. All right. So these last three questions were added in the past year, year and a half, we've learned. So how appreciated you feel this week? That's a tough question, because a lot of as you know, in leadership, you're not allowed to feel appreciated, right?

Right? Like you're just simply not allowed to feel appreciated because you're doing your duty and you have to take care of those people. Who's going to take care of you? So, but for your people, if they'd never feel appreciated, why are they working there? Just to make money? So like there's a mental health side of things that's being happening. And we see it, that when somebody feels no appreciation at all on a consistent basis, it shows up in their work quality.

Like they just do okay on their work. Their performance isn't ideal. So it makes a difference. Next is, this is interesting. these last two are optional. So first one is, what one thing if changed would make the biggest difference right now? This is where your operations get more efficient. This is where maybe there's somebody that's there that shouldn't be there anymore. This is the opportunity for them to say, I know you're not in the clinic every day, but this is what's going on.

I don't know why. I don't know why we do the way we do something. So this is a fun one so it helps you improve things and you don't have to ask like you don't have to go say we need to make a 10 improvement in revenue or reduce our expenses by 10 percent. Well could be hiding in that question right there you just don't know. Next is this one you want to give a shout out to. So this is where the camaraderie increases.

And there's a secret part to this last question as well. So when it comes to this, our goal is that we want to appreciate the people we work with, and we want to make sure like, we actually do like working with each other. And let me give a high five to somebody, essentially, because sometimes it's hard to do it in the moment. So when this happens, I will screenshot the answer and send it to the person who received the shout out. It makes it their day, because they just say, you know, I'm so thankful they saw that.

Because I just thought I was doing my job or I thought I did a terrible job. But they recognized like, hey, you handled that really well, whatever it is. And so it's a simple thing that gives that improvement and helps with the mental health side of things. Does that make sense? Anybody do this type of thing, any type of weekly report? We got one in the back. Are the questions similar or how much different are they?

Moments of excellence. So our care is under a hospital and every day we have what we call bams for administrative meeting in Simmons or less, every single hospital director.

cafeteria worker, the janitor, the nurse on three west, the so and so. It's a moment of excellence for anybody and they get published every single day. And then we meet all of our staff teams with the same thing. It's an excellence. Moment of excellence. I love it. And I love that you guys are publishing it all the time because you want people to see like, we see you. We see what you're doing. It's fantastic. I love it. Any other examples? That's great. Oh, we got another one.

So we do ask for a name. The rest, you know, no nothing else needed. Just fill out the question. And I'll show you what that looks like. So, and we use, we just use our main website, use a form on our website and fill out and just sends an email just once a week. So please fill this out.

Obviously in your world, please don't include any patient information or anything like that. Please don't include like a name of somebody you've done something with, patient related. Obviously you won't do that. But yeah, just the name and here's the questions. And I'm about to share what the questions look like. Any other thoughts or questions on that?

cool.

Yeah, it makes a difference, right? Because the appreciation side, I we ignore super quick. And then this is just to help structure that. This is that structured intentionality part of things. All right, so this one right here, we're getting toward the end now. Yeah, getting toward the end now. So this is funny, but it works. Before, this is what we've learned. Before, it'd be one to five. Nobody knew what three meant.

Nobody really knew what four meant. They knew what one and five meant. They didn't know what the rest meant. And they meant different things on different questions, right? So, if you're curious, just go to Canva, pull up emojis. You'll probably find these, because that's where find mine. But look at the difference. When you say morale, are you crying? Because it's been a horrible week. That's the whole idea behind it. Or it's like, it's okay. Or like, man, it was fantastic. I'm on cloud nine. Emojis matter, because once we started putting emojis in the...

the answers became more real.

And we began to understand them a little better and it was a really a direct reflection of what was going on. so the number, because everybody would just hit one or five and they weren't sure it be a three or four. But now they would actually lean into it and they understand. They even told me like, I don't know what to put. I'm like, well, let's figure that out. So the emojis mattered. I always liked the stress one here, but you know, heads exploding because too much stress going on. But that's the real thing. And the last one here is how appreciated you feel. So is your tank empty? Is it halfway full?

or is it full? And we get a lot of can't complaints. So like, I didn't feel bad or good, but it felt all right. And then when we get the amazing ones, you can see it in their work. Like you could tell they had a great week. And so this is just another simple way to get that. But this is key, because just doing simple one to fives just don't work. You don't get good answers. You don't get good reactions from it. all right. Finally, this is just to kind of sum it up.

These are some changes I'm recommending to you guys. There's a handful. Technically you could implement these in a couple of days and just start working on the implementation of it. As you know in leadership, there are challenges that come with anything when it comes to change. And here's the thing. Be consistent. If you're going to commit to it from like a, I'm going to do monthly one-to-ones. Do them every month. Put them on the calendar. Make them recurring. Don't ignore them. Don't say, we'll get to next month because I'm out today.

move it to the next week or whatever to get it done. It's super important. Also as a side note, if you guys use Gusto or something like that, your payroll system, they have these built in usually. You can just create the actual meaning yourself. ⁓

Even on the weekly reports, if you're going to commit, you tell people, please fill them out. Because there was a moment where I had that email going and people kind of quit filling them out because they forgot. And I said, this is not optional. You have to fill us out every single week. And now it's to the point they're asking me, hey, we had something happen. The automation didn't go. And so they said, hey, where's my link to click on weekly reports? ⁓ sorry. And like half the team asked me because they were looking for it. So we built that into it. Like they want to tell us what's going on.

They want us to know what's happened. They want us to know what's good and what's bad for them. Next is though, if you have within your leadership, you have to have buy-in on this. This sounds simple enough, but you, the owner or you, the manager or somebody, you're here. Maybe you're excited about something and when you come back, you know that you come back to your office, we're going to do all these great things. And they're like, why? Well, I was there and we're going to do this. Like, well, I don't get it. So if you don't get the buy-in part of it, this won't happen.

They'll just fall apart. And then a year from now, they're like, oh yeah, I forgot about that talk and we just never did it. And then finally over time is just being consistent with them. If you're being consistent, they'll appreciate that. I know from our standpoint, one of the biggest things that they tell me, it's like, consistency wins in leadership where they know who they're getting every single time. I may be having a bad day, but they're not supposed to see, like, oh he's having a bad day, don't talk to him. Like, that's not the goal. That goes back to that reaction side. So from a leadership standpoint, please don't do that.

Please be consistent. Please give people the confidence to talk to you and not question should they talk to you. But anyway, that's it guys. Thank you all so much for that. I got your two minutes left. Thank you. And of course, please scan the code to give a review on this.

Any questions? We got two minutes left, so you got any questions or thoughts? Yes.

Yeah.

So it's mostly why are you leaving and what could we have done better essentially also let's be real like is it towards a disliking towards somebody that caused this to happen or was there something that happened that just created a avalanche essentially and the heavenly and we have one guy once he's like well I'll tell you exactly what happened over a beer so I went over to the fridge opened the beer and it to him. Let's go let's talk about it.

So that's real. All right, anybody else? That was a great question. Anybody else? Good. All right, well thank you guys so much. We'll see tonight at the expo. Thank you all.