The 90-Day Checkup

Quint Studer, president of Baptist Hospital, in Pensacola, Florida, explains how he made Baptist an employer of choice by revamping its culture.

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How Quint Studer used quarterly evaluations to help Baptist Hospital reach its goal of becoming the employer of choice

It's a cliche these days to say that the best way to satisfy your customers is to satisfy your employees. Like favoring motherhood and apple pie, it's a hard thesis to argue against. But as a manager, how do you get started? How do you actually change a company's culture? And how do you know if you're succeeding? Until we met up with Quinton Studer, president of Baptist Hospital Inc., in Pensacola, Fla., we were skeptical of those advocating cultural change within an organization. Most had never given it a try in the real world.

Studer, who arrived in Pensacola in June 1996 from a stint as senior vice-president at Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago, has spent the last several years developing a system to improve both patient and employee satisfaction. Surprisingly, the model is based on his years as a special-education teacher. "Maximizing an organization's ability is similar to maximizing a child's potential," Studer says. "The first step is to diagnose the situation and then set achievable goals. The higher the goals, the closer the student--or organization--comes to reaching full potential. Every 90 days the teacher does an individual education plan to ensure that all resources directed to the child are aligned with the goals. And at the end of a year, old goals are reassessed and new ones are set."

While that's the basic plan, Studer has refined his system over the years and brought it to the point where it's replicable not only in other hospitals but in any service business.

When Studer arrived, Baptist's admissions were flat, and patient satisfaction as measured by a national survey was slightly below average. After just two years--in an industry in which admissions are staying the same or going down--Baptist's admissions were up 8.3%. Outpatient volume was up 33%. As for patient satisfaction, Baptist ranked number two in the country for all hospitals and number one for hospitals with more than 100 beds. Employee satisfaction had improved 30%, and physician satisfaction had risen from 72.4% to 81.3%. Job turnover for nurses went from 30% to 18%. Inc. senior editor Nancy J. Lyons queried Studer about Baptist's cultural turnaround.

Inc. : Changing a culture seems more than ambitious--it's an absolutely daunting idea. Yet you seem to have accomplished a great deal in a very short time at Baptist. How did you get started?

Studer: We decided we had to have a measurable service goal. I believe you have to measure what's important to you, and that you have to have some means of comparison. If a company can't afford an outside group to do a survey, which I strongly recommend, it should develop its own tool. So, first of all, we met with all the employees and talked about why the hospital exists, what our purpose is. They said that they wanted to be the best. Becoming the employer of choice also became a goal at Baptist.

Inc. : So you started out measuring patient satisfaction?

Studer: Yes. We use a large patient-satisfaction-measurement company that can compare us with at least 500 hospitals across the country. We send a survey to every patient. The results help us set specific goals. They also give us an opportunity to recognize employees who receive positive comments on the survey.

Inc. : OK, so you know where you stand from the survey, and you know where you want to go. But up to now, nothing has changed, right? It seems that this would be where most CEOs would get stuck.

Studer: What we do next is the number one thing companies just don't want to spend money on: middle-management development. We take every one of our leaders--nurse managers, supervisors, and department heads--off-site for 2 days every 90 days. We also have employee forums every 90 days and survey employees on their attitudes toward their supervisors. Our employees knew their supervisors hadn't had any "real" training, but we also let them know it's an organizational issue--not their supervisor's issue--to provide development. We call it leadership muscle building. That's what my whole job is about. Accountability, by the way, is key.

Inc. : What do you mean by accountability? Who's accountable to whom and for what?

Studer: All our leaders get "report cards" every 90 days. That's how we align behaviors to our goals and how we can reward objectively, which takes politics out of the game. A typical person in our organization will have four measurements. One is customer service, which we measure against our goal, which is to be in the top 1% of hospitals in the country. All the employees know what will satisfy our customers and where our weaknesses lie, because they know the results of the patient-satisfaction survey. The second measurement looks at efficiency: how long patients are in their units per diagnosis. The third one is expense management: how well they're managing expenses. The fourth thing we're measuring this year is turnover. Everyone's got a turnover goal based on his or her unit and its past history.

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