By asking its customers what they wanted and then giving it to them--giving it all to them--Griffin Hospital not only made itself over but reinvented the practices of a stodgy industry.
By asking its customers what they wanted and then giving it to them--giving it all to them--Griffin Hospital radically reformed its culture in a change-allergic industry
Looking spiffy in a white jacket, Charlie is getting ready to perform rounds at Griffin Hospital. He's adhered to the basic standards expected of hospital staffers: he's freshly bathed; his teeth have been brushed. But Griffin is a bit more demanding of its caregivers than some hospitals are, so Charlie has also been carefully appraised by his supervisors for both disposition and height. Height is a concern because if Charlie were too short, patients would have to lean out of bed to reach him; too tall and he'd be frightening. But Charlie, who happens to be a dog, is just tall enough to place his slightly moist muzzle on the edge of a bed for convenient, nonthreatening petting.
A few obvious questions probably spring to mind. But let's just skip them for now, and instead simply note that Charlie is by no means the oddest thing you'll see at Griffin Hospital. In fact, it's hard to know where to begin or end, oddity-wise. The music in the parking lot? The double beds? The magic act in the patient lounge? The banana muffins baking in one of the cozy kitchens found on every wing of every floor?
Businesses routinely embark on grand campaigns to satisfy the customer, to please the customer, and in the most recent escalation, to delight the customer. But delighting customers is easier said than done, as will be revealed by a quick check of your own delight level the next time you're in the middle of a business transaction. Imagine, then, what it would be like if the customers you were supposed to be delighting were widely considered the most inherently miserable ones around. Further imagine that you had to do all this delighting while changes in your industry were sucking per-customer revenues down a black hole--and while far bigger and better-heeled competitors were frantically merging with similar companies to create far, far bigger and better-heeled competitors that were hell-bent on stealing market share away from you.
In other words, imagine you were a community hospital.
How, then, to explain the fact that at Griffin, which serves a mix of the modestly white collar and the working-class ethnic in south central Connecticut, patient satisfaction has soared to 96%--an astounding level in any industry, and one that's almost unheard of in the hospital business? Not coincidentally, Griffin has boosted admissions an average of 2% a year over the past four years, with healthy revenues and cash flow--and all while being within coughing distance of no fewer than seven fiercely competing hospitals, including the world-renowned Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Griffin's secret? A clear, three-step recipe that any organization can follow to similar success. First, cultivate a decade-long obsession with reconceptualizing every element of the business around customers' desires. Second, implement the resulting insights with the sort of thoroughness and attention to detail usually reserved for, say, manned space flight. And finally, be really, really nice. All the time. To everyone.
But if Griffin's journey has proved just how basic the formula for real business transformation is, it has also demonstrated why most companies attempting even a modest metamorphosis usually fall short. Qualities that most managers would consider the building blocks of a successful business--stability, reasonable compromise, moderation, careful prioritization--are also the very qualities that forestall radical, lasting change. What Griffin's homegrown, do-it-yourself makeover suggests is that it is extreme, uncompromising behavior--in Griffin's case, extreme common sense--that makes real change possible.
For nearly 80 years, nonprofit Griffin Hospital had been able to count on the steady patronage of the citizens of Derby, Conn., where it's located, and the surrounding towns. It was a population bound by tradition and by its dependence on the gritty rubber and metal mills that were the core of the community's economy. But in 1985 a new highway joining two of the state's main commuter routes passed right through town, and suddenly Derby was just a convenient commute away from New York City, Hartford, and other faster-paced, more affluent locales. Factories closed, and companies like Tetley Tea and Pitney Bowes moved in. Over a period of four years, housing prices tripled as many old-time residents sold out to young corporate marrieds.
And Griffin started losing patients at an alarming rate. The newcomers all seemed willing to travel 10 or even 30 miles to be cared for by Griffin's competitors. To find out why, Griffin commissioned a survey of local residents. More than a quarter of the respondents labeled Griffin a hospital "they would avoid." The reasons given: the medical staff was lacking, the facilities were shabby, the parking was inadequate. Oddly enough, many of the people who leveled the harshest criticisms also noted they had never so much as driven by the hospital. "How did they know parking was a problem if they had never even been here?" asks Bill Powanda, vice-president of support services. "We realized the sort of effect that word of mouth was having." (Powanda's life has been so linked with Griffin's history that he can actually say he was born in his office--the space he occupies was once part of the maternity ward.)
In 1987, when Powanda was starting to ponder the question of how to counter the hospital's bad rep, his father-in-law was admitted to Griffin with terminal stomach cancer and a bleeding ulcer. Right at the unfortunate man's bedside, the doctor told Powanda and the rest of the family that the ulcer was inoperable, and the appropriate thing to do was to stop the blood transfusions that were barely keeping him alive and let him die. Powanda's father-in-law suddenly spoke up. "Is it OK if I have something to say about this?" he asked. Everyone looked at him. "I'd rather die on the operating table, if you don't mind." Suit yourself, the doctor told him. The operation was surprisingly successful, and though the man died 18 months later, he went home to his family that next week, feeling well.
