UBTs

For Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, 2011 ended on a high note: We substantially surpassed our goal for achieving high-performing unit-based teams. The National Agreement charged all of us with the achievement of 658 high-performing teams (level 4-5) based on the Path to Performance standards established in the Agreement. As of late December we had some 1,000 high-performing teams in place!

As we come into the home stretch of 2011, we are on track to double the number of high- performing unit-based teams by December. It has us thinking about what structural elements exist in places we consistently find high-performing teams. We find that the facilities with the greatest number of high-performing teams have some consistent ingredients. Our recent visit to the Fresno Medical Center in Northern California demonstrated what facilities with lots of high-performing teams have in common.

It is difficult to overestimate the impact and dedication of unit-based team consultants, improvement advisers, union partnership representatives and others who coach UBTs. In just a few short years we have developed an in-house performance improvement corps that is unique in U.S. health care. These unsung heroes deserve full support from regional leadership. Unfortunately, they don’t always get it.

I am struck by how often the rhetorical commitments people make are belied by their actions. This rhetorical commitment, common in the health care industry, comes to mind: practitioners and leaders of all types are universally heard to say: “I am here for the patient.”

Although they are the newest members of the partnership, Hawaii’s UBTs have made some dazzling progress over the last year. Some of the teams have won a prestigious award, while others are making strides in patient care, safety and reducing waste.

The July-August, 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review is devoted to the study of collaboration, and a lead article in the issue, “Building a Collaborative Enterprise,” by Paul Adler, Charles Heckscher and Laurence Prusak, cites the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership as an important example of how collaboration works successfully.

Labor unions that are seeking to transform the role of frontline workers in health care organizations know that real change will take more than a high level of employee engagement. It will also take a different type of relationship between managers, physicians and workers.

It was on one of our seven-and-a-half hour flights to Hawaii that we encountered a flight attendant who seemed to be suffering from either a lack of sleep, overwork or just the frustration and stress of a job whose fortunes have declined badly over the past 10 years.

Our work in the Labor Management Partnership has many important implications for achieving success at Kaiser Permanente and the health care industry as a whole. Why is this so important to union members and the unions to which they belong?

The Path to Performance has been on the minds of regional LMP co-leads, UBT consultants and sponsors recently as we finished gathering baseline data on high-performing teams. None of us were surprised, as we collapsed four different score cards and multiple criteria into a single system for rating team progress, by the decrease in the number of high-performing teams. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, we reached agreement on the tool, and the process for the rating was unified and the data loaded in UBT tracker by January 14.