Program-wide

What if every organization and every union had a labor management partnership like ours?

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. On Aug. 16, more than 250 union, business and government leaders from all over the United States gathered in Chicago for Partnership Day, a meeting hosted by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service at its biennial conference—and offered a realistic look at the ups and downs that occur in partnerships and what it takes to launch and sustain them.

“We know partnership can make a difference,” Allison Beck, FMCS director, told the gathering. “This is not some fantasy that happens in a make-believe world.” She should know. As leader of the FMCS, the federal agency that mediates labor disputes across the United States, she’s seen firsthand how acrimonious relationships can ruin companies and unions—and how more open and respectful ones can help them both succeed.

The partnership between Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions is the longest-lasting and strongest one in the nation, so conference participants asked many questions about how it operates.

A race to the top

Dennis Dabney, KP's senior vice president of National Labor Relations and Office of Labor Management Partnership, told the packed room he spends a lot of time on the phone with leaders from other companies interested in starting and strengthening partnerships.

“I've seen so many companies engaged in a race to the bottom,” Dabney said. “I'd like to see more engaged in a race to the top.” If he has any regrets about Kaiser Permanente’s partnership, he said, it's that we didn’t create unit-based teams sooner.

Colorado

Thanks to a diligent chart review process, the Medicare Risk Business Services unit captured an additional $10.3 million last year in Medicare reimbursements unclaimed in 2010. The hospitals Kaiser Permanente contracts with in the region were submitting documentation with incomplete physician signatures, which prevented KP from submitting the bills for reimbursement. The technical error causing the problem was corrected, but the team had to review 26,000 hospital inpatient notes for 2010. The total collected is more than three times what the team predicted when it began correcting the error.

Georgia

When staffers at the Cumberland Medical Office Building pharmacy in Atlanta open bottles of pills to dispense prescriptions, the bottle is supposed to be marked with a big X, a flag for reordering. But often, a pharmacist or pharmacy tech would find only a few pills left in unmarked, open bottles, not enough to fill a patient’s prescription. So the team brainstormed ways to ensure the bottles are properly marked, including posted reminders and giving everyone his or her own marker. The number of unmarked bottles fell from 30 to zero the first week; went back up the next week; then dropped back down and stayed down—lowering costs and improving service.

Hawaii

When the Honolulu clinic’s Obstetrics and Gynecology team members realized patients were waiting six minutes or more for routine injections, they decided to designate one nurse each week as the “shot nurse,” whose priority duty is giving shots, and one as a “floor nurse,” who helps direct patients to the shot nurse and pitches in when it’s busy. Whiteboards let staff know who is filling the roles. The team has dropped member wait times to an average of 3.2 minutes.

 Mid-Atlantic States

Unit-based team storyboards, a homemade “test of change” video shot by the Radiology UBT on its efforts to boost co-pay collections, and a roomful of enthusiasm and healthy snacks marked the inaugural UBT Expo in the Mid-Atlantic States region. A dozen teams at Largo Medical Center in Maryland—from Adult Medicine to Vision Essentials—exhibited projects on service, quality, best workplace and affordability. When attendees weren’t networking at the exhibits, they heard formal presentations from teams, who were introduced by their sponsors.

Northern California

The Redwood City Medical Center inpatient pharmacy is celebrating success after sustaining, for more than six months, a dramatic reduction in the rate of medications administered late (a half-hour past their scheduled time) in the medical-surgical wards. Previously, 26 percent were late; now, the range is 12 percent to 15 percent. Working with the med-surg nurse manager, the team began using color-coded bins to distinguish new medications from discontinued ones and delivering medications 15 minutes before the hour in which they are scheduled to be administered. These and other changes have improved communication and give nurses more information about where to retrieve the medications.

Northwest

By focusing on hospital quiet and Nurse Knowledge Exchange, the Women and Newborn Care arena at Sunnyside Medical Center has earned recognition as one of the best of its kind the throughout Kaiser Permanente, improving its HCAHPS Overall Hospital rating by 17.5 in 2011. The report rooms—where staff members congregate and talk—have doors that close automatically, and nurses try to respond to all call lights within three dings. “A patient does not belong to one nurse, but the whole department,” says Dory Schutte, RN, a member of OFNHP and one of the UBT’s co-leads. In addition, Nurse Knowledge Exchange at shift changes and having nurses join physicians and midwives on rounds has improved communication and patient satisfaction.

Ohio

Giving post-procedure snacks to patients is standard, but Ohio’s Gastroenterology department realized it was averaging $750 to $800 a month on snacks, well over budget. After Carol Zimmerman became manager, the UBT implemented small but key changes: Eliminating rarely eaten snacks, replacing more expensive items (Oreos) with less expensive choices (graham crackers), and removing temptation by keeping supplies locked out of sight. Zimmerman also began to regularly share the department’s budget and costs with staff. The team noticed an impact within two months, with hundreds of dollars saved in short order. Reviewing the budget is now a standing part of team meetings.

Southern California

Faced with the teams using linens inappropriately, Panorama City Medical Center’s Materials Management unit-based team set out to educate other hospital staff about the costs involved—reminding them not to use linens to mop up spills or as makeshift tablecloths and to refrain from overstocking linen in patient rooms. Managers and union leaders worked together to develop a storyboard and presentations and reviewed linen usage and stocking levels with individual departments. The result? The overall costs of linen for Maternal Child Health, one of the first departments targeted, were reduced by 6.8 percent, more than three times the original goal.

Colorado

The Regional Imaging teams in Colorado are lucky to have two effective sponsors: Joseph Gonzales, clinical operations for Regional Imaging, and Rebecca “Becky” Torres, a pharmacy technician and SEIU Local 105 member. Part of their success, the pair says, is the emphasis they have placed on sharing information—with each other and with their teams. The pair also figured out a way to spread effective practices. Using a PowerPoint template, the sponsors asked co-leads to explain what they’re working on, how it supports regional goals, whether it worked and the outcome. Then, the teams came together for a UBT Fair and shared their PowerPoints.

Georgia 

David Jones, MD, has a title unique at Kaiser Permanente: assistant to the medical director for unit-based teams. He mobilizes his fellow physicians in the Georgia region to get involved with UBTs and unleash the power of partnership to improve performance and grow membership. “The first thing I tell physicians about the UBTs is that it is about improving the work that we’re already doing,” he says. “It’s not about adding more work, it’s about looking at the work you're doing and figuring out how to do it better.” Read more from Jones—including how his experience with UBTs has transformed the way he delivers care to his patients.

Hawaii

A small region, Hawaii needed a novel approach to sponsorship: Branch out rather than always branch up. Initially, a five-member unit-based team committee tried to troubleshoot issues for the region’s fledgling teams. Often, those committee members, who also had roles as team co-leads or contract specialists, were trying to wear too many hats and got jammed. So the region, which now has more than 40 teams, has tapped 19 people to receive sponsorship training. The group includes middle managers, directors and other executives, frontline nurses who serve on the Kaiser Permanente board of the Hawaii Nurses Association, OPEIU Local 50, and former labor team members and co-leads.

Mid-Atlantic States

While the Mid-Atlantic States region’s clinical unit-based teams have management and labor co-sponsors, large teams such as lab and radiology are sponsored in a different way: A UBT leadership group made up of labor and management from these area performs sponsorship functions as a united body. “We generated a vision of our UBT sponsorship. We got very specific on how we would work together,” says Jane Lewis, executive director of health plan regional services and a member of the group that sponsors eight pharmacy UBTs. The UBTs report their projects and team dynamics at monthly meetings. The leadership group reviews People Pulse, service scores, quality results and other metrics, identifies struggling teams, and recognizes teams that excel.

Northern California

The region has been on a roll with its “A Leader’s Role as UBT Sponsor” training. Launched in the spring, the tutorial gives management and labor leaders an easy-to-understand yet in-depth look at providing effective support to unit-based teams and their performance improvement work. The short, online training covers everything from outlining a sponsor’s role and how a sponsor can model partnership to tips on developing strong UBT co-leads and high-performing teams. Several facilities have combined the training with in-person, interactive exercises, and early feedback suggests the blended approach is striking a chord with sponsors. The online training can be found at KP Learn.

Northwest

“My role as a senior sponsor is to bring the message of UBTs to physician leadership,” says Rasjad Lints, MD, the region’s executive sponsor of UBTs. Lints is especially interested in helping teams focus on outcome metrics—a measure of the final result of something, such as how many patients with hypertension have their blood pressure under control—and to help everyone on the team understand that improving on process metrics often drives improvement on outcomes. It can be difficult to see the value in participating in process metrics if team members don’t see how it relates to the outcome measures. “At the end of the day, physicians have to drive the care,” Lints says. While working in UBTs presents physicians with some unique challenges, he believes that “if the physicians aren’t engaged, it’s a lost opportunity.”

Ohio

In an effort to improve the quality of team project information in UBT Tracker, the regional LMP support team solicited the help of the people who support the work of teams—sponsors. In June, an improvement adviser met with Ohio’s 20-plus sponsors and asked them to work with their teams to boost the input of that data. To illustrate the value and role of quality data in UBT Tracker, they used the data in Tracker to brief the sponsors on their UBTs’ projects and status. Their approach made an impact: The region has reported an increase in sponsor engagement, and several teams have reported performance and relationship improvements. 

Southern California

The regional Labor Management Partnership department is launching a new sponsor training curriculum that covers the nuts and bolts of what sponsors do and how they do it. Topics include: the responsibilities of sponsoring bodies (such as helping define how the teams should be structured and guiding selection of co-leads); coaching skills to help develop UBT leaders; the similarities and differences between labor and management sponsorship; how managing in partnership differs from traditional management; and how the sponsor role differs from that of facilitators, project managers, trainers and consultants. Also included in the course are basics of the Labor Management Partnership and unit-based teams, such as the key elements for UBT success, the roles and responsibilities of UBT co-leads and members, and consensus decision making.

Colorado

When the Minor Procedures department at the Franklin Medical Office added three surgeons to its staff, the impact was positive: Access improved—patients got in faster. But staff members noticed the new surgeons were using $20 to $30 more in dressings and drapes than surgeons who had been in the department longer. The physicians responded positively when shown the information and, while allowing for medically justified exceptions, have standardized their usage of soft goods so it is more cost effective.

Georgia

The Oncology/Infectious Disease staff at the Cumberland Medical Office Building embarked on a medication reconciliation project to keep patients safe and avoid unnecessary hospital admissions. A manual cleanup of patient records came first. To check the accuracy of the records, medical assistants and licensed practical nurses, all members of UFCW Local 1996, called patients and asked them to bring their medications (or a list) to their next appointment. Providers deleted duplicates and worked across clinical disciplines and with pharmacy colleagues to sustain and improve the process. In just three months in 2011, the percent of duplicate medications fell to 15 percent, which translates to $90,000 saved by reducing hospital admissions.

Hawaii

The nurses in the 23-bed Mother/Baby unit at Moanalua Medical Center learned a lesson in human nature when they placed life-saving emergency airway kits—essential for keeping a weak infant's airways unobstructed—at each bedside. Individual parts of the kits come in handy in other procedures and regularly turned up missing. Keeping everything in zippered plastic bags with a “do not remove” sign didn’t do the trick. But after the team started re-purposing breast pump kit bags--which are sturdier and have labels with room to list the kit’s contents, whether an item has been used and if it’s been replaced—the team went from 75 percent of beds with fully stocked kits to 100 percent in four months.

Mid-Atlantic States

The Adult Primary Care UBT in Falls Church, Va., is using the New Member Identifier tool in KP HealthConnect as the basis for targeted welcome letters and phone calls to set up appointments with primary care physicians and help refill prescriptions. And, when a new member comes in, he or she is provided with a new member kit and offered a one-on-one facility tour. Patient satisfaction percentile scores have risen from 84.6 in the first quarter to 87.4 in the third quarter. Cassandra Hodziewich, MD, a family practice physician, says more new members “are getting needed labs (and) screenings."I think it’s made a difference in the quality of their care."

Northern California

Santa Clara Medical Center showcased its performance improvement work in October to eight UBTs from five regions as part of a two-day LMP learning lab. Visiting the Cardiovascular ICU, the delegation learned how the team uses visual boards to share improvement ideas and track projects. The Pharmacy department explained how it used Six Sigma to reduce workplace hazards, and the Women’s Clinic department outlined its use of process mapping to reduce lab errors. On returning home, the visitors were tasked with finding ways to implement some of what they learned.

Northwest

The Primary Care Team B staff at the North Lancaster Medical Office feels especially strongly about the importance of detecting colorectal cancer early, when it’s highly treatable, since some of their own providers have suffered from the disease. The team, which presented a poster at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement conference in December, tracks who’s eligible for a Fecal Immunochemical Test (FIT) kit, makes sure those members get one, and follows up if the kit isn’t returned. And staff members tell patients how early detection made the difference for their co-workers. The return rate is now 85 percent, up from 50 percent. “We add a personal touch by telling our story,” says labor co-lead Bill Waters, a medical assistant and SEIU Local 49 member, “and people respond.”

Ohio

The Parma Internal Medicine UBT has had a host of successes in its journey to becoming a high-performing team. In addition to improving meetings by defining roles and responsibilities, it has ensured sponsor support and increased staff engagement by creating sub-committees to work on projects. One of its innovative tests of change? Team members decided that while continuing to reduce actual wait times, they would work on the perception of time that patients experience while waiting—and created a slide presentation. The slideshow plays on computers in exam rooms and features health information on chronic diseases.

Southern California

The Bonita Primary Care unit-based team in San Diego, which was included in a poster presentation at the annual Institute for Healthcare Improvement conference, set out on a four-month blitz to reduce its supply expenses by 10 percent, or about $4,750. The team agreed to decreased minimum levels of stock and made diagrams of shelves with new quantities. Staff labeled bins and removed, combined and organized the excess stock, and then used the excess as the primary source for exam room restock over the next four months. As a result, fewer supplies were stocked in exam rooms, fewer supplies were ordered and less stock expired (which would have needed to be replaced). In five months, the team saved nearly $24,700.

Take, if you will, the humble cell phone.

Oh wait. The cell phone may be ubiquitous, but it’s far from humble. Today’s smarty-pants phones have more power than the computers on the Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 and 36 years later departed our solar system. Its three computers can process about 8,000 instructions per second. A smartphone swallows more than 14 billion.

The articles in this issue of Hank—articles about how technology is transforming care delivery and about how individuals and Kaiser Permanente are meeting the challenges that presents—would have overwhelmed the Voyager computers’ memory.

For communicating across distances, the string with two tin cans is humble. Even the rotary phone, patented in 1892, seems modest in comparison with today’s devices, which are used more for all manner of modern information sharing than for something as quaint as talking to another human being.

A rapid tech-based transformation, akin to the makeover of the old-fashioned phone, is already sweeping through care delivery. It’s hard to fathom the many ways technology will allow us to decentralize the delivery of health care while improving our connection with our patients and members. The changes will require new skills.

And starting today, the mindset we bring to the workplace is just as important as our skills. Without a willingness to explore new ways of doing our work, we are (to mix a metaphor) like an ostrich dialing the operator for help on a rotary phone, patiently waiting the long seconds for the 0 to return to its starting place while the future creeps up from behind. We’ll never know what got us.

Be bold. Be willing to go where no one has gone before.

Struggling with stress? Got the burnout blues? We’ve all been there. A long line of patients snaking out the pharmacy door; appointments running a half-hour late.

Yet not all things that trigger stress are bad—getting excited before running a race is stressful; so is falling in love.

“A little bit of stress is good,” says Dawn Clark, MD, an ob-gyn specialist and chief facilitator of physician wellness for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group. “It helps you avoid boredom and keeps you engaged and energetic. But too much stress burns you out.”

Unfortunately, the chronic stress that leads to burnout is commonplace in health care. A 2013 survey found nearly 60 percent of health care providers are burned out. A 2015 nationwide poll showed burnout affects nearly half of all physicians.

The result? A burned-out workforce is one with low morale and high rates of absenteeism, turnover and workplace injuries. Inevitably, service and quality of care slip.

This issue of Hank takes a look at the causes of health care stress and burnout—and at the solutions. Read on to find out more about how:

• Individuals can take steps to handle stress better.
• Leaders can be role models and make solving workplace stress a priority.
• Unit-based teams can address the root causes of burnout, finding remedies for lasting change.

Burnout: A widespread problem

Stress is the brain’s response to the demands put on us. Your pulse quickens, your muscles tense and you breathe faster. Everyday stresses are like small flames keeping you on alert. Burnout—which sets in when stress and frustration pile up without getting fixed—is your own personal forest fire.

Your body wears down as the constant flow of stress hormones suppresses your immune system and other functions. You don’t sleep well, and you become edgy, irritable and cynical. You don’t make good decisions. In short, you shut down. Making matters worse, your black cloud is contagious and can quickly spread to your co-workers.

Experts say burnout is usually caused by:

• inefficient work procedures—and no power to change them
• no sense of meaning and purpose to your workday
• lack of work-life balance

In health care, the problem is even more complex. Frontline employees are expected to be selfless and put others’ needs first. But patients may be unhappy or demand answers when there are no easy answers to give. That’s stressful, and even more so when busy schedules are factored in.

UBTs to the rescue

Poorly designed jobs and systems are a leading cause of burnout, which means UBTs have amazing power to improve matters.

Say, for example, overlapping processes make a member-patient feel like she’s getting tossed from department to department. Her justifiable frustration may get unleashed on employees. A UBT provides a forum where an employee can speak up and say: “This process needs to change. What can we do to make the system smoother for the patient?”

That’s what Michael Leiter, an expert on workplace stress, says has to happen to reduce burnout. To fix it, you need to “change something that really matters about how you participate in your job.”

Sometimes the solutions are relatively simple. For members of the Esoteric UBT in the Sherman Way Central Lab in Southern California, working in cold, noisy room that made it hard to concentrate was causing stress—but they worked together and were able to move a key piece of equipment to a more comfortable room.

“Now at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like I’ve just finished climbing a mountain,” says Gene Usher, one of the team’s research scientists. “It was a UBT success.”

Working together on performance improvement can cure what ails a team, as the Revenue Cycle team at Roseville Medical Center near Sacramento discovered. It also learned—as many teams do—that before it could fix its processes, it had to clear up underlying tensions first.

The team had low People Pulse scores; old conflicts between co-workers had never been resolved. So the team chose to improve its response to the survey question about “having a say in influencing decisions.”

“We decided to do tests of change that involved the staff more,” says management co-lead and former UBT consultant Kimberly Jones.

Team members started working together on improving the annual vacation process—a big morale boost. The 37-member team also took customer service trainings and a Kaiser Permanente Courageous Conversations class, which teaches different ways of approaching conflict and taking responsibility for your actions.

The class “made it easier to approach someone if there was a work problem,” says Stacey Kearny, an admitting representative and SEIU-UHW shop steward. “Now we act more like a team. When we come onto our shift, we ask the person leaving, ‘Is there something I can help you get finished?’”

Rotonya Parker decided her journey to a healthier lifestyle could use some traveling companions.

She was already eating better and being more active when she learned that her unit-based team needed a Health and Safety Champion.

“I thought I should volunteer because doing it as a team would be an extra incentive,” says Parker, an external referral coordinator in Atlanta and a member of UFCW Local 1996. Since stepping up, she’s shared healthy recipes with her team and is planning a contest to see who walks the most.

Her activities help her UBT fulfill part of the 2015 National Agreement: The latest Path to Performance requires that Level 1 UBTs identify a Health and Safety Champion, who will help build the “culture of health and safety” required of Level 5 teams.

UBTs began identifying champions last fall. In January, they all received “Walk & Roll” buttons to help encourage their colleagues. They got going with an emphasis on walking and moving. In February, the theme was speaking up at work about safety concerns. Each month has a new focus.

With 32 years at Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles under his belt, Darren “Tree” Wallace, a lead attendant in environmental services (EVS), offered to be his UBT’s champion. EVS departments frequently have a higher rate of workplace injuries, Wallace notes, so safety is key. Members of his UBT share daily tips about everything from how to avoid needle sticks to the proper way to push and pull.

“You don’t want to be old, retired and injured,” says Wallace, a member of SEIU-UHW. “You have to make sure your body is safe at work and at home.”

Take a break to thrive

For Johnyia King Turner, RN, a UFCW Local 400 member in the Mid-Atlantic States, volunteering to help her UBT as a champion was an obvious choice. Turner, who recently began working in Gastroenterology at Largo Medical Center in Maryland, frequently held two-minute thrive breaks when she worked at Capitol Hill Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

“We did squats, wall push-ups or ran in place,” Turner says. As lead nurse, she also presented safety messages in UBT meetings and paused during the workday to have quick safety conversations.

She says the messages were well received: “If you are not healthy and you are not safe, it decreases productivity and we can’t assist the members.” 

She’s excited to have a formal title to go with her passion. “I have my Walk & Roll button, and I encourage everyone to walk the stairs,” she says—and adds, laughing, “Now that I’m official, I can really go run my mouth and tell people what they need.”

The chances are good you are a person who deals—directly or indirectly—with life and death every day. You might be an EVS worker who keeps patient rooms germ-free to reduce the odds of infection, or an ER nurse helping a baby with a high fever. If you are not on the clinical front lines, you likely support this honorable work from behind the scenes.

We put others first. We give everything to give the best care to our patients. But far too frequently, we don’t leave anything in reserve. We neglect to take care of ourselves. This imbalance undermines the admirable ethic of our modern health care system.

One survey showed 60 percent of health care providers are burned out. In this issue of Hank, we provide practical tips and tools that individuals, leaders and teams can use to reduce workplace stress.

But more than that, we challenge the notion that the responsibility for preventing burnout lies solely with one of these groups. Let’s call it the “yes, and” approach. Yes, individuals need to eat better, exercise more and cultivate a positive outlook to reduce their own stress. And, leaders need to ensure safe staffing levels and create a solution-oriented workplace culture.

Our Labor Management Partnership gives us a third “yes, and”: Yes, individuals and leaders matter. And, our unit-based teams can fix inefficient processes that cause unnecessary stress and interpersonal conflict.

Every day, Kaiser Permanente’s 3,500 UBTs use performance improvement tools that make our work go more smoothly. Moreover, those tools and the foundation of trust and openness fostered by partnership give everyone a voice in making improvements.

And that also reduces our stress.

Our National Agreements commit us to operating principles that you won’t find in most labor contracts:

Power of partnership

Interest-based bargaining doesn’t guarantee success. It works for us because our partnership works.

The partnership between Kaiser Permanente and the Union Coalition came about in 1997, in a challenging environment. The company had a long and close history with the labor movement. But amid growing market pressures and labor unrest in the 1980s and ’90s, we were at a crossroads. Most of the local unions representing KP workers formed the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions to launch a unified corporate campaign.

Facing what would have been a mutually destructive strike, the leaders of both parties took a chance on an alternative approach. They agreed to:

• Work collaboratively to improve the quality and affordability of care for the patients and communities we serve
• Help Kaiser Permanente lead the market in health care
• Involve unions and individual workers in workplace decisions
• Provide job security and be the best place to work in the industry.

Solving tough issues

Today it is the largest, longest-running and most comprehensive such partnership in the country. It covers 80 percent of our represented workforce and includes 43 local contracts, in addition to the national agreement. It has delivered industry-leading contracts, and helped Kaiser Permanente achieve industry-leading quality, solid growth and a culture of collaboration.

In short, our partnership is more than a labor relations strategy, it’s an operational strategy that provides strength and stability for Kaiser Permanente and our workforce, and better care and service for our members, patients and customers. It provides an infrastructure for continuous performance improvement and a way to better resolve difficult issues.

For example, during the Ebola crisis of 2014, health care providers and members of the public were concerned about how to best control spread of the disease. Kaiser Permanente, our union partners and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stepped back from the fear and misinformation that prevailed elsewhere. We worked together to develop training processes, educate people and agree on steps to ensure the safety and compensation of employees involved in caring for patients with the Ebola virus. Two of our hospitals were among the first in the United States to be recognized as part of the nation’s Ebola preparedness and response plan.

Frontline teams lead change

Day-to-day partnership is most evident in more than 3,400 unit-based teams—our term for the natural work groups that deliver care and service. Team members are trained in performance improvement techniques to spot opportunities, conduct small tests of change, assess results and implement solutions. They provide a new level of learning and decision making about the quality of their work and how to do it better.

UBTs are co-led by a union member and the manager or supervisor. In clinical settings they include physicians. We track the performance quarterly of every team, based on jointly set measures of performance, and we set aggressive goals for the number of teams to reach high performance, measured on a 5-point scale.

Seventy percent of them are rated high performing. That’s important because our data show that high-performing UBTs get better outcomes on service, quality, safety, attendance, patient satisfaction and employee satisfaction.

New tools and skills

Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, has studied Kaiser Permanente’s model of teaming and offered this assessment:

Unit-based teams are a way to be entrepreneurial and a way to build greater accountability by those on the front line. The teams push people to brainstorm, to be attentive to what they see and to put their own experience to good use. The teams have the opportunity to identify challenges and they have tools and skills with which to work, but it’s up to them to put them to good use to make a difference for patients.

Our teams now have more than 7,700 frontline improvement and innovation projects under way. To align local team efforts with the organization’s broader strategic goals, all projects are focused on one or more points of the Kaiser Permanente Value Compass – a guidepost that shows our four shared goals of best quality, best service, most affordability and best place to work, with our patients and members at the center of all we do.

Kaiser Permanente Value Compass

About 35 percent of these projects are focused on reducing waste or improving affordability. And 267 of those projects, produced joint savings of $10 million in 18 months; potential savings are much more. Twenty-eight percent of projects are focused on service enhancement. Here’s a snapshot of improvement projects conducted at each point of the Value Compass:

• Best quality: A medical imaging team worked across departmental lines to ensure that patients who visited the medical office for a flu shot, and also were due for a mammogram, could get one promptly, many within 20 minutes.
• Best service: A cross-functional team of service center workers redesigned work processes to handle incoming calls in the wake of the Affordable Care Act. The team cut the number of customer handoffs by 60 percent and reduced mean processing time for members’ issues from 26 days to three days.
• Most affordable: An inpatient pharmacy team launched a cost-reduction effort that is saving more than $600,000 a year by better managing inventories, alerting physicians to less costly equivalent drugs and reducing drug wastage.
• Best place to work: As part of our voluntary workforce wellness program, 62 percent of eligible employees – more than 80,000 people – participated in a confidential health assessment to identify potential health risks. 

Getting measurable results

We know our strategy is having an impact on organizational performance and the workplace experience. Our 2014 employee survey showed strong correlations between several measures of employee engagement and job performance.

Departments that scored high on an index of 18 measures of workforce effectiveness (including things like taking pride in the organization, information sharing, understanding of goals and being held accountable for performance) reported significantly better results in service, quality, workplace safety and attendance. For instance:

• 9 percent higher patient satisfaction scores
• 18 percent fewer lost work days
• 41 percent fewer workplace injuries
• 91 percent fewer bloodstream infections in at-risk patients

In addition, members of high-performing unit-based teams are far more likely to say they have influence in decisions affecting work, are comfortable voicing opinions, and feel co-workers are respected despite differences.

Higher job satisfaction also contributes to significantly lower employee turnover. In California, for instance, our turnover rate for all hospital-based employees ranges from 6 percent to 8 percent, depending on the job type – versus the 2014 industry average of 9.4 percent statewide reported by the California Hospital Association.

Union Coalition members and Kaiser Permanente also collaborate on many issues rarely open to union participation. For instance:

Workforce planning and development: We invest heavily in workforce training and development – and we develop and implement most of that work jointly. For instance, a union-management Jobs of the Future Committee in Southern California is identifying emerging technology, assessing the impact on workers, managers and physicians, and developing training plans and career paths. More such efforts and investments are under way.

Market growth: Bringing together union members and Kaiser Permanente sales and marketing teams, our joint growth campaign helped win, expand, win back or retain 33 accounts covering 125,000 Kaiser Permanente members in 2014.

Meeting organizational challenges

Our partnership is not perfect. It can stretch us to engage and educate our many stakeholders, and find time to solve problems and improve work processes in the course of day-to-day operations.

But in my experience, the biggest challenge is spreading innovation – facilitating the exchange of ideas and the adoption of successful practices from one team, medical center or region to another. We know that new initiatives can take root faster and more consistently if they’re modeled on a proven concept – especially when they are championed by our own work teams. Variation can be a plus when you’re looking for new and better ways to do things; when you’ve found the best way, you need to make it a work standard.

We recognize and spread success by communicating with teams regularly in multiple formats; through peer consultants and sponsors in every facility; a system-wide database that tracks teams’ tests of change and outcomes; and UBT Fairs, where teams share their findings in person.

Keys to success

Our Labor Management Partnership is now in its 18^th year, and we are still learning how to take it further. We continue to believe it can be a model for labor relations and health care delivery. Four factors in particular are essential to success:

• Develop leadership at all levels: Since its founding, our partnership has thrived under three different Kaiser Permanente CEOs and three different Union Coalition executive directors. Change is not sustainable if it depends on one top leader. Frontline and mid-level leadership, on both the management and union side, is key. We train for partnership at all levels, and have found that interest-based problem solving and bargaining are powerful learning development tools for up and coming leaders.
• Build trust: To work together, partners must trust one another. That trust must be earned, and is established over time. It will be tested, but the building blocks are well known: Do what you say you will do. Honor your commitments. Treat others with respect and deliver results.
• Measure results and share data: We set goals and track performance for all our teams. We share business and financial data with our partnership unions in bargaining, and share departmental and unit-level results with teams working on performance improvement projects. Teams can’t succeed without good information upon which to set clear expectations.
• Create a shared framework: Our workforce is diverse in every way – demographic, geographic, professional and technical. We also have different (and sometimes competing) needs, interests and concerns. But we share a desire to make our members’ and patients’ lives better. The Value Compass – with the member and patient in the center – provides a common touch point that we use to set priorities and guide decision making.

Our union and organizational leaders know how to do business in traditional, more adversarial labor relations settings. We’ve done it. We choose to work in partnership – not because it feels better (though it does) or because it’s easier (it’s not). We do it because it gets results – for the organization, the unions and workers, and the members, patients and communities we serve.

It’s time to look beyond labor relations and find new ways to innovate and engage teams. Our leaders took a risk 18 years ago to listen, understand and work together. It proved to be better way to deliver health care and achieve our social mission.

This article was originally published in “Perspectives on Work,” the magazine of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA), Volume 19. Reprinted with permission. For more information, visit LERAweb.org.

Also see a PDF of the original article, with additional information about Kaiser Permanente and the Labor Management Partnership.