Benchmarking

Keeping the driving and restraining forces in mind, Mrs. Alvarez conducts a brainstorming session with the group and generates the following alternative solutions for solving the problem of the staff's lack of adherence to the schedule:

• Attendance control: use a time clock to ensure adherence to the schedule.
• Flexible schedule: ask the personnel to work eight hours daily on a flexible schedule, developed according to their scheduling needs as well as taking into account the users' needs.
• Motivation: motivate the personnel through incentives (such as trips), more training, and better resolution of problems, so that they will feel motivated to follow the schedule.

Before going any further, Mrs. Alvarez decides to seek some outside help. The Santa Rosa Health Center is not the only one in the country: there are other health centers situated in the same kind of area, with the same type of users, and of the same size and offering similar services. At this point in the planning process, it seems logical to to find out what another similar health center is doing to solve this problem, using benchmarking.

Mrs. Alvarez decides to contact Health Center Y about some of their scheduling problems and how they solved them. She creates a list of questions that she wants to ask:

• Have you had a problem with user waiting time due to staff not following the schedule?
• How did you face the problem?
• Do you think that a flexible schedule can be helpful to solve the problem?
• What other solutions have you used?
• How do you motivate your staff to arrive on time?

Mrs. Alvarez set up a meeting with Health Center Y and asked the questions to the staff there. She learned a great deal from the Health Center Y staff about how to solve the scheduling problems.

Upon her return, Mrs. Alvarez presented her findings to the team:

• The benchmark health center set up an employee task force to figure out ways to increase staff satisfaction with their work.
• The task force came up with many different solutions, such as: more flexible schedules, more employee control over processes and procedures, salary increases based on merit, increased opportunities for training, and longer breaks.
• To motivate the staff to follow the schedule, the benchmark health center administration agreed to let staff have more flexible schedules, but in exchange, staff were required to follow the arranged schedule and were disciplined if they arrived late more than once per month, or if they did not follow their schedule.
• The administration is also considering some of the other solutions posed by the task force.

The team is pleased with these new ideas. They like the idea of an employee task force. They decide to include some of the ideas from the benchmark health center along with the ideas they generated themselves previously.