Business Advisor: Fostering Culture for the Win

An ASC’s philosophy, values and habits determine its success.

Nurturing and maintaining a vibrant, positive culture remains essential for an ASC and can largely determine whether it flourishes or it fails. To make sure your center thrives, strategies to build and sustain a winning culture must be in place.

Empathy, communication and performance matter

In a time of widespread healthcare stress and burnout, a positive culture allows people to feel valued and heard, leading to high retention rates. According to Gallup, engaged employees produce better business outcomes than other employees do, and this is true across industries, company sizes and nationalities, and economic conditions. Keeping employees engaged and happy allows them to focus on what they do best — providing excellent support for physicians and care for patients.

Alignment within the entire staff enhances both patient and provider experiences, resulting in successful patient outcomes and physician experience, which ultimately drives growth and profitability. Culture is the bedrock of a successful operating model, and I would argue that culture directly impacts the bottom line.

To track the health and success of your culture initiatives, it’s essential to employ listening strategies. Use a variety of tactics, including engagement scoring and physician and patient surveys to gauge improvement and ensure employees feel valued and heard. Such surveys help identify areas of enhancement in patient and physician experiences. Analyzing feedback leads to the implementation of best practices or process innovation, resulting in improved experiences.

Building and maintaining culture on a daily basis requires a multifaceted approach. First and foremost, it begins and ends with attracting, retaining and developing great leaders. This includes ensuring you have leaders who consistently model your values. To ensure culture is integrated into day-to-day operations, measure the performance of the operating model for your surgery center/centers. By assessing whether a center is meeting desired standards, you can focus efforts on improving those centers that fall short.

One effective method: Centering meetings around organizational values, and sharing patient and physician stories linked to these values. Additionally, recognizing employees who embody the mission and values through monthly rewards improves morale and helps keep company values at the forefront. Such methods can help demonstrate that your people are valued and a part of an organization that stands behind its commitment to culture. This can ensure employee satisfaction and engagement, so retention rates improve and productivity increases — leading to enhanced physician and patient satisfaction and outcomes.

Culture can also be reinforced through company-wide events such as holiday parties, team-building activities and family picnics. These events foster connectivity and develop meaningful relationships with colleagues. It’s important to have fun at work and connect informally with your colleagues. In a post-COVID era, these events are even more important in bringing your employees together.

Culture-building efforts start at the top

Your work must also be nurtured at all levels of an organization by setting clear expectations for what it means to be a leader. Leadership training and development play a crucial role in this process, so it’s vital to provide leaders with the necessary tools and resources to succeed.

Identifying individuals with leadership potential and implementing succession planning are essential steps. Promoting from within and providing personalized development plans helps people see a career progression within the company. For example, plans for a surgical technician can be developed for them to grow into roles such as materials manager, business office manager and even a CEO position if they desire.

Significant time and resources should be dedicated to effective onboarding, aligning business practices to your values and employee recognition. It’s crucial for any role, whether it’s a frontline team member, someone in a clinical role or a team leader. Make sure every new hire understands your expectations and values by training everyone in crucial tactics for physician and patient experience, which ensures everyone is aligned from the beginning.

Employee feedback plays a critical role

Regular check-ins and surveys enable you to gather valuable insights from team members. Make sure to stick the landing by communicating back to employees about changes you’ve made, so they can see the improvements you’ve implemented. This feedback loop ensures employees feel part of the process and are invested in shaping and fostering the company culture.

Diversity, equity and inclusion measures should be top of mind when hiring, which means finding new and diverse places to seek out candidates. It also involves training that openly addresses issues related to culture and identity in the workplace. It can include challenging issues such as unconscious bias, cultural awareness and helping people to foster respect and empathy so everyone can speak their truth and feel safe. Annual audits of your compensation practices from a diversity lens are helpful to ensure you’re living your values and goals to be the employer of choice for everyone.

A positive culture also fosters an environment where physicians feel supported and valued, and leads to increased satisfaction and commitment. Workplaces with positive cultures are less likely to experience significant turnover that creates inconsistency in the staffing of top talent. Consistency in staffing is critical for physicians and illustrates commitment to providing high-quality and reliable patient care. Ultimately this leads to excellent quality, safety and experience outcomes for both our patients and physicians.

Building and maintaining the right culture is not a one-time project in which you simply mark off boxes on a checklist. It’s more like growing a garden. You need to plant the right seeds, prepare the soil, water it regularly, keep the weeds at bay and give it room to grow. With daily attention and done properly, the labor of building a positive culture will bear fruits on your ASC’s bottom line in the form of long-term growth and profitability. OSM