Preliminary Steps, Establishing A Process

An old adage I once heard says- “If you read something in one place, you should pay some attention to it.  But if you read it over and over again from several sources, your attention should be focused on it!” If you are a reader of business theory and ‘how to’ books, there is an instruction you can read over and over, so you can be sure that it is important. Over and over, in more books than can be counted, you can read: “Hire the right people!” So, this must be important, right? Home health agencies who are successful really do work hard. In order to achieve consistent success, there are lots of obstacles; the difficult Medicare and other insurance regulations, reports, and billing processes; the sometimes cranky and depressed patient population; and the occasionally stressed out workforce of clinicians, aides, billers and administrators.

It is time to sharpen your focus on your workplace environment

Now is the time to assure your agency’s effectiveness. The environment surrounding home health is quite dynamic. Population Trends indicate that our society is evolving towards a more and more elderly composition. With the baby boomers approaching retirement age, there are more people every day who need home health assistance. There is financial pressure on hospitals to make sure they are efficiently discharging patients in order to optimize their reimbursements. To remain agile in this dynamic market, HHA’s must attract, hire and retain effective and productive employees. This is a sure fire way to withstand and adapt to the continuing challenges of the home healthcare regulatory marketplace.

Great Hiring is linked to Workplace Culture

Achieving excellence in hiring is inextricably linked in priority to assessing and assuring a proactive and positive workplace culture, which includes positioning the home health agency to maintain a fulfilling, productive and “fun” work environment. What is this type of culture? It is a culture where people know they are the most important assets of the agency. The productive, fun atmosphere of an effective culture must be nurtured and must be consciously guarded, and thoughtfully considered. This is true, no matter how razor sharp you are in composing a strategic plan.

Culture is strategy

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory once postulated, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. A Positive Workplace Culture; i.e. having the right people and constantly nurturing and valuing them is absolutely essential for success in the home health business. And, making the right hire is where all this should begin and it is…well, “common knowledge”. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric expressed this fact about hiring so succinctly in his book, “Winning”. Here are some key Welch quotes:

“Hiring good people is hard.  Hiring great people is brutally hard.  And yet nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field. All the clever strategies and advanced technologies in the world are nowhere near as effective without great people (winners/champions) to put them to work. Effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information.  Little is worse than a manager who can’t cut bait. If you’ve hired the right people, they will want to grow…They will be bursting with the desire to learn and do more… Good people never think they have reached the top of their game, but they’re dying to get there… A company that manages people well helps to make that happen…that company makes sure that training is seen as a reward for performance, not a sop for time served…”

So, like Welch stresses, hiring the right people, investing in their development, rewarding them with more training and more challenges – this is the path to business success. Winning is usually impossible without winners. Let’s put it this way.  Making the right hire may not absolutely guarantee home health business success.  But it comes close. This is for certain: making the wrong hire – is a sure fire path to agency owner disappointment – poor workplace morale and a diminishment of the overall quality of the agency culture.

Process Orientation yields Champions

Making a good hire requires a conscious process which is crucial to the success of the agency, and as most successful agency professionals know, the hiring process does not simply begin with the interview and end with the job offer. Rather, it involves planning and considering each aspect of the agency workflow and each member of the workflow’s job prior to an interview.  Recruiting and interviewing must be undertaken wisely in order to bring in the right person, a champion. Once you find that champion, the best agencies provide their new workers with an orientation and great training that enables them to get off to a strong start with the home health agency.

Stay tuned for Part Two: When and who to hire—Establishing the process

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 “It really does start here-The Right People Make all the Difference”, Mayeaux, 10/7/2010, https://ffbscn.wordpress.com

2 “Employee hiring“, https://answers.com/topic/employee-hiring