Take the Easy Way Out
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Speed your team on its way with ideas from other teams
Do you or your teammates want to shrink wait times? Save money on supplies? Reduce time wasters or roadblocks? Once you’ve identified a problem to solve, you may wonder where to start. No need to invent an improvement project from scratch. Visit the Team-Tested Practices section and see what’s worked for others. We’ve got short summaries of successes from every region and every type of work environment to give your team a kickstart.
1. What’s here?
When you visit LMPartnership.org/team-tested-practices, you’ll find the first several “tiles” of the dozens you can choose from as you scroll through this section. Each tile will have a photo and short preview about a specific, measurable improvement a team has made.
2. Sharpen your search
Want to narrow down what you see? Use the filters on the left side of the page. There are several to try, including:
- Topic. Choices include affordability, patient safety, service and more.
- Department. See what departments like yours have done.
- Region. Check out the projects done in your region.
Selecting more than one filter at a time works, too. And remember that you can get great ideas from departments very different from yours and regions other than your own. You’ll notice these filters throughout the website to help you focus your searches.
3. Intrigued?
See something your team might want to try? Click on the tile to get a more complete description of the challenge the team was facing — and the main tests of change that helped the team achieve its goal. And the measurable result: “Saved $40,000,” “decreased wait times by 11 minutes,” “69 percent drop in costs.”
4. No dead ends!
So, maybe the practice you clicked on isn’t right for your team. Before you move on, check out the related tools and stories in the colorful columns farther down this page. Throughout the site, the color orange means, “Here are tools to get your team started on work like this.” Blue is, “Get inspired by stories and videos about teams working on similar efforts!” And, “Just for fun” — green will take you to puzzles, games and other light-hearted resources to kick off your improvement campaign on an upbeat note.
From the Desk of Henrietta: What’s in It for You?
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Treat our website like a one-stop shop for all your partnership needs
What’s your favorite thing to do online? Watch cat videos? Scroll through Facebook? Maybe some occasional retail therapy?
Going online can also help make your work life better and save you time. It can help your unit-based team solve problems so you can deliver the best care and service to our members and make Kaiser Permanente a great place to work. All that, after all, is what the Labor Management Partnership is all about.
This issue of Hank magazine is a whirlwind tour of the Labor Management Partnership website, a one-stop shop for everything you need to turbocharge your team’s performance. Tip sheets, videos and inspiration are always just a few clicks away. If you can’t find what you want easily, just use our vastly improved search function. As one of our biggest fans put it, “Boom — there it is!”
On LMPartnership.org, you will:
- learn from other teams — what worked, what didn’t, what sorts of roadblocks to expect and how to overcome them
- download icebreakers to build trust and help quieter team members gain the confidence to speak up
- meet the Humans of Partnership, a gallery of short, personal profiles that will make you proud to #BeKP
If you don’t sit at a computer as part of your day-to-day work, it’s easy to access LMPartnership.org on the go. Follow these instructions so we’re always at your fingertips on your smartphone. You’ll find yourself in a UBT meeting and calling up just the tool you need to help a team through a sticky situation.
You can even share resources from your phone with others who may not be as smartphone savvy. Pretty much every page has buttons that make it easy to email it to a colleague or share it on Facebook or Twitter.
Here’s another handy tip: even if you don’t visit LMPartnership.org (though I hope you do), reading this issue of Hank will help you learn how and why we do the vital work we do. So read on, log on and enjoy.
Keep Your Eye on the Prize
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How to stop being distracted by shiny objects
Let's be real: If everything is important, nothing is important. The prize for us is providing high-quality care and service at an affordable price to our members, patients and communities we serve — and the Focus Areas section of LMPartnership.org is a tool for helping unit-based teams prioritize their work and stay grounded.
What will you find here? Let’s start with the Value Compass. The Focus Areas section has pages that go in depth on each of the four points — Quality, Service, Affordability and Best Place to Work. You also can learn more about topics that are part of the National Agreement, including Total Health and Workplace Safety, Workforce Planning and Development (Workforce of the Future), and Union and KP Growth.
And then two pages are specifically for improving your team’s culture — which will in turn improve performance (we have the stats to prove it). The Join the Team, Be the Change page has tips and tools for improving team communication and engagement, while the Free to Speak page will help you build a Speak Up culture on your team.
Join the team, be the change!
How do you get your unit-based team to be excited about the work? Why would staff members want to be involved? How do you get those quiet people — who you just know have great ideas — to speak up?
Ideas to answer these questions and many more are found on the Join the Team, Be the Change page of the website. You’ll find tips and tools for improving team communication, the first step in getting employees interested and involved.
But it doesn’t stop there. As communication improves, it’s easier for the team to pull together and solve problems — which in turn raises morale and can foster a sense of joy at work. Teams with good communication have more fun, report higher engagement, have better People Pulse scores and are rated higher on the Path to Performance.
And when employees are happy and satisfied with their jobs, our members and patients feel the difference in the care we give. Have fun with your team and make things happen!
Browse or Borrow, No Library Card Needed
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And you don’t have to be quiet
In a large library, visitors often need a map or librarian to help them find what they’re looking for. But the LMPartnership.org Library is easy to navigate: A quick click on the Library tab at the top of any page on the website takes you to a great collection of videos, all sorts of tools, stories, short profiles of colleagues, issues of Hank magazine, the eStore and more. Everything is in its own category — exactly like your local library — except you don’t have to be quiet.
Hot off the presses!
Want to know the latest? Always check the Library first. Interested in an inspiring video to open a meeting? The Library is your place. Each new video, story, tip sheet and profile is posted here. Be sure to check out the Humans of Partnership, a collection of short, heartfelt stories from people — like you — who make up our partnership. Read their own words about:
- how they used a partnership benefit
- a time they spoke up at work
- how their UBT handled a challenge
Share these stories and videos at UBT meetings and huddles — they provide a great lift. We’ve got dozens to choose from.
Get the right tool for the job
The Tools page in our electronic library is like the reference section of a brick-and-mortar library, with Tools to help you and your team complete successful improvement projects, conduct productive meetings and improve our workplace. Access the Tools page by clicking on the All Tools tile in the More to Explore band on the Library landing page, or click on Tools in the dropdown menu in the main navigation bar. Then use the filters on the left side of the page to zoom in on what you’re looking for:
- Need an activity that promotes health for a unit-based team? Use the topic filter and select Total Health.
- Looking for a simple way to explain interest-based problem solving? Use the topic filter and select LMP Processes.
- Find an engaging activity to kick off a meeting! Use the tool type filter and select Icebreakers and/or Puzzles and Games.
Consult the How-To Guides
Don’t overlook the 13 LMP How-To Guides, which provide smart collections of related tools to speed you from start to finish on an activity (planning a meeting, doing a performance improvement project, improving workplace safety and more):
- Use the tool type filter and select How-To Guide.
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12 Tips for Building Your Team in 2018
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Take one action for every month of the year
Want to take your team to the next level? Make good things happen for yourself, your co-workers and your members and patients? Collaboration is one of the four critical skills needed to meet future challenges with ease. Use these 12 team-building tips to make every month count in 2018.
1. Par-tay
Celebrate your team’s successes and acknowledge — even celebrate — failures. Failures are great opportunities for learning if you focus on where the process (not the person) needs improvement. After each test of change, recognize and reward contributing team members at huddles and meetings. Use small wins to keep the momentum going.
2. In and out
Help employees track their sick days and time off by printing out and distributing our colorful, always popular attendance calendar.
3. Follow the money
Learn your department’s budget as a team and get everyone’s ideas on how to reduce costs. Sign up for a business literacy training.
4. Track it in tracker
Document your team’s work regularly, accurately and concisely in UBT Tracker. It will let others see and learn from your team’s accomplishments.
5. Stop the line
Ask for help or call a stop to the work when you see an imminent danger or need help to safely complete a task. Then look for system improvements and root causes of problems — ask not just what happened, but why.
6. Grow leaders
Rotate responsibilities for leading meetings and managing improvement projects among all team members. This will build your team’s skills and strengths.
7. Two words
Huddle daily. It works. Watch the video “Huddle Power” and use the tools there to get you started huddling with your team.
8. Clean up your act
Become supply savvy. Make a full assessment of supplies — track inventory, tidy up storage areas and streamline ordering. Simple changes can save thousands of dollars. Download our 6S tool to make this work a snap.
9. Take a (waste) walk on the wild side
Perform a waste walk. Impartially observe a work area or work process to identify waste or inefficiency. Get walking with our online Waste Walk toolkit.
10. Save a tree
Go paperless. Don’t print out agendas and documents. Send them out via email or use a projector instead.
11. Get online
Help patients sign up on kp.org. Remind them they can securely view their medical records and most lab results, email their doctors, schedule appointments and refill prescriptions online. Bonus tip: Encourage tech-savvy members to download the kp.org app so they can access these features on their phones. Check out how one team got 90 percent of its patients signed up.
12. Spread and borrow
Did something work for your team? Spread the word to others. Need inspiration for your next improvement project? Look for other teams that have succeeded. Work with your UBT consultant or union partnership representative to spread your successes. Visit our Team-Tested Practices section to get ideas you can try with your team!
From the Desk of Henrietta: A Tale of Two Ankles
I have a friend who loves to play softball. In 1999, she tore her left Achilles tendon while sliding into first base. Her surgery involved getting cut open and then stitched up, which was painful and created a risk of infection. It put her in a heavy cast for six months, left a five-inch scar and was an all-around miserable experience.
Four years later, while playing racquetball, she (you guessed it) tore her right Achilles tendon. In just those few years, surgical technology had improved so much that she could get her leg patched up with laser surgery. She still had to wear a cast — but for only three months this time, and there was no scar. There was hardly any pain. “It was like night and day,” she says.
When someone says, “I don’t want to learn the new way. The old way works just fine,” I tell them about this friend.
Imagine that her doctor and care team had not bothered to learn about the laser surgery. Their patients would have suffered with a longer and tougher recovery than necessary. Caregivers want the best for their patients. That wouldn’t have been the best.
In everything we do, we put the patient and member at the center. Developing the skills of our workforce is no different. We learn new treatment methods to help our patients get better faster. We learn new software programs to help them get their medications more quickly and efficiently. We figure out the new technological gizmos so we can have virtual visits with our members, saving them the time, effort and sometimes discomfort of getting to our brick-and-mortar offices. We invent new ways of doing old jobs, or create entirely new jobs, to meet new needs.
Giving up the old way of doing things is scary, but also liberating. Learning new things can be difficult, but also fun. We’re navigating our way into the future together, supporting one another all along the way.
Meet Your National Agreement: Change Is Here, Be Prepared
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As health care evolves, so do our skills
In the early 2000s, Blockbuster ruled the video rental roost.
Now it’s all but gone.
Blockbuster didn’t adapt to customer needs and technology trends. Netflix did.
Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions recognize that if you don’t change with the times, you can get left behind.
The National Agreement addresses the importance of preparing for the future in partnership; section 1D of the agreement covers workforce planning and development.
Under the 2015 agreement, two educational trusts — Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust and SEIU UHW-West & Joint Employer Education Fund — received additional funding to provide workers represented by a coalition union with a variety of services, and training and education programs. Joint work on addressing experience barriers, which have sometimes prevented newly trained workers from being hired into KP jobs, is also under way.
The agreement details the structure for coordinating workforce planning and development. A national team aligns, integrates and coordinates workforce development and training efforts in partnership with the regions. Each region has a workforce planning and development committee chaired by labor and management co-leads.
The five key components of this work are:
- workforce planning and development
- career development
- education and training
- redeployment
- retention and recruitment
“The goal is to prepare union workers for changes to jobs,” says LeAnda Russell, the coalition’s national coordinator for job innovation. “We support the lifelong learning and career development of our workers.”
It’s paying off. Use of the educational trusts has increased to record levels.
Russell encourages employees to keep learning to build the job skills needed as health care evolves. In other words — don’t hit the rewind button. It’s time to press play.
“Technology is here,” Russell says. “Don’t be afraid.”
Navigating the Future
For Carolina Aceves, technology and health care go hand in hand.
Shortly after completing a new online digital fluency course for Kaiser Permanente employees, she saw firsthand how technology can transform a life. Her mother needed a kidney transplant, but neither she nor her siblings were a match. In October 2017, however, in a series of matches orchestrated through a national computer system, she donated a kidney as part of a chain of donations that resulted in her mother receiving a kidney.
In December, she returned to work at the California Service Center in San Diego, where she is an account administrative representative, fielding calls from KP members and answering their questions. She also chairs a young leader council for OPEIU Local 30 — and is leveraging that role to mobilize all represented members of her unit-based team, urging colleagues of all ages to take the digital fluency course.
“Health care is changing,” Aceves says. “Be current. Do your homework. Advance your career.”
At ease with technology
Digital fluency is one of four critical skills that will be essential in the health care of the future. The new online program, which helps participants understand the role of technology in health care, is free to workers represented by a union in the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions through the Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust, the SEIU UHW-West & Joint Employer Education Fund, and National Workforce Planning and Development.
The national workforce office also is developing programs for the other three critical skills — consumer focus, collaboration and process improvement — as part of a larger strategy to encourage employees to upgrade their skills, advance their careers and meet the changing demands of health care.
“Whether you work in a medical center, clinic or office, we encourage employees to take the digital fluency program,” says Monica Morris, the director of National Workforce Planning
and Development.
Digital fluency skills are good for workers, KP members and the organization, says Jessica Butz, the coalition’s national coordinator for Workforce Planning and Development. While some may fear technology will eliminate jobs, the push at KP is to use it not to replace workers but to enhance the care and service they deliver.
“Learning these critical skills will prepare our workers for jobs in the future and give them the tools to shape and improve care for our members and patients,” Butz says.