Skip to content

Voices for Safer Care

Insights from the Armstrong Institute

Voices for Safer Care Home › fellowship

fellowship

Putting a little Ritz in health care

Recently, I had an enlightening encounter with Horst Schulze, who led Ritz-Carlton Hotels to national awards and has since opened his own hotel chain, Capella. Hortz gave an informal presentation to members of a program that I’m taking part in, the Baldrige Executive Fellowship, and we continued to talk afterwards. Capella has five ultraluxury hotels from New York to Singapore, and all have been recognized as tops in their region. Horst spoke to us of a culture of excellence. He knows—he has built such a culture time and time again. Excellence does not occur by chance. It requires clear goals and a system.

Horst explained that to be great, everyone in the organization needs to know the goals, in order of importance. For Capella, the goals are 1) keep existing customers, 2) add new customers, and 3) optimize the spend of each customer. Every employee not only needs to know the goals, but they need to know the behaviors to achieve them. The Capella employees ensure a warm welcome, compliance with and anticipation of guests’ needs, and a fond farewell.

All employees are required to know service standards. Twenty-five of them. One of them states that you are responsible to identify and immediately correct defects before they affect a guest—for example, getting customers food when the restaurant is closed. Defect prevention is key to service excellence, just as it is to delivering safe health care. Another service standard states that when a guest encounters any difficulty, you are responsible to own it and resolve the problem to the guest’s complete satisfaction.

Capella has standard processes for everything—how to submit defects, how to resolve them. And they trained staff in the goals, the behaviors and the processes. Each hotel, every morning is required to have a huddle at which all staff attend. They review the goals for the company and read one of the behaviors, called service standards. Every day they read a different one. They cycle repeats every 25 days.

If a manager did not do this, Horst said, they would be fired.

Read More »Putting a little Ritz in health care

Company churns out burritos, French toast — and inspiration for health care

This year I am participating in an executive fellowship that is designed to expose leaders in various industries to the Baldrige Framework, a model for organizational excellence. As part of the program, the fellows visit companies that received the coveted Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Recently, we toured Cargill, a large, Minnesota-based company that has about 75 business units, and spent time with two of them: Cargill Kitchen Solutions, which largely makes egg products for McDonald’s, schools and many other customers; and Cargill Corn Milling, a maker of corn syrup, animal food and ethanol.

We not only talked to leaders and reviewed their strategic plans, but visited the plant. We spoke to employees on the floor, as food was prepared on a massive scale: eggs being cooked by the thousands, breakfast burritos being assembled and placed on conveyor belts, French toast cooked, stacked and placed into boxes.

As we talked to leaders, toured the plant and reviewed their strategic plans, I was struck by three things.

First, everything and everybody was focused on the customer. The customer was at the center of every discussion, every decision and every strategy. From the CEO to the managers to people on the shop floor, they talked about meeting customers’ needs. Usually it was the first thing out of their mouths, and they used the impact on customers as a scale for weighing every decision. Indeed, many staff, from senior leaders to line operators making an hourly wage, said, We know who pays our paycheck; it’s the customer. If we want a paycheck, we better meet their needs.Read More »Company churns out burritos, French toast — and inspiration for health care