This is part two in a deep dive in an article from The New York Times on Monday, December 4th that was about pharmacists and doctors and how they are now unionizing for the first time because of negative workplace culture experiences.
Now, the article doesn’t say anything about culture, but this is an article about culture.
If you haven’t seen part one of this series, then go check it out in the link below.
Why Doctors and Pharmacists Are in Revolt part-1
Part two. What I wanna dig into is the importance of metrics in driving this change.
What you’re seeing in the corporate structures with administrators is a push towards more metrics and tracking of behavior and of activity and outcome in healthcare, and that is creating a squeeze for pharmacists and doctors alike.
They’re not just measuring patient outcomes, they’re also measuring labor budgets.
I’m looking at the article here.
They’re, they’re measuring hours worked. They’re measuring how quickly phones get answered. They’re measuring when prescriptions are filled for 90 days rather than 30 or 60 days.
They’re measuring so many different things that employees are being pulled in 10 different directions.
I remember working at a tech company and the new CMO was hired and he identified 50 metrics that he wanted his team to measure, and many, and many of those metrics we’re pulling employees in opposite directions.
That is why when you are identifying the key metrics that you want to track and measure and instill into the minds and hearts of your employees, you’ve gotta pick three, three key results that are meaningful, measurable, and memorable, that then everyone can rally behind.
When you measure 10 things, 50 things, people’s brains are scattered. Their problem solving is split in multiple directions.
You have to simplify what you’re measuring and allow employees to identify the best way to achieve those three most important goals.
Walgreens figured this out. According to the article last year, they stopped using task-based metrics in performance reviews for their employees because they saw what was happening.
And that’s part two in this three-part series looking at this really important article in the New York Times from Monday about the evolution of workplace culture in the healthcare industry.