How to Anchor Change in Culture

This is the eleventh in a series of excerpts from a recent Arch Collaborative exclusive webinar, hosted by Taylor Davis and featuring Rob Schreiner, MD, President of Wellstar Medical Group. 

Taylor Davis:
"So in your efforts, especially when it is hard, what do you find is the key to setting a really good anchor?"

Rob Schreiner:
"I'll answer that with each of these. In terms of candidate selection, if teaming and team based behavior and continuous improvement and trust and stuff like that are the kernels of success for healthcare operations in general, and continuous improvement in particular.

If that's true, then we ought to be selecting our candidates based on behavioral interviewing. You know, "Hey Jack, tell me about a time in your past career where you, yourself had to take a specific action in order to achieve better teaming than what existed. What did you do? How did it come out? What did you learn?" Those kinds of questions. Instead of, "Do you believe in teaming in healthcare?" And then the second one is to carry that forward into the orientation process.

You've already heard me say, "train up to a higher level of proficiency on the EMR for, for MAs, LPNs and the doc and everybody in between." Lastly, I draw a distinction between orientation, which is: "Here's how you get paid. Here's your ID card. Here's some compliance training. Here's some EMR training." That is all orientation.

On-boarding is another animal entirely. It's "enculturation." It's a sense of belonging and believing. It's an affirmation that I chose the right place to go to work. It's a sense of, "I do or don't have a safe and just culture on my healthcare team." Or even "I can or I can't speak up when I see a problem that we should address as a team." Those are the three ways to anchor any change effort."

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