Best Place to Work

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How to Find UBT Basics on the LMP Website

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LMP Website Overview

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How to Find and Use Team-Tested Practices

Does your team want to improve service? Or clinical quality? If you don't know where to start, check out the team-tested practices on the LMP website. This short video shows you how. 

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How to Find the Tools on the LMP Website

Need to find a checklist, template or puzzle? Don't know where to start? Check out this short video to find the tools you need on the LMP website with just a few clicks. 

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Videos

Beating the Odds

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When Cassandra Phelps decided to take advantage of the programs and support that are available through the Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust, the then single mother of two thought she would be lucky to complete one college-level course. But once she got started and the A's rolled in, Phelps saw no reason to stop. Five years later, she achieved more than she imagined possible when her journey began.

 
 

Working Her Way Up

Deck: 
RN builds her skills, and career, with a little help from her partners

Story body part 1: 

When Donna Fraser sees something that needs doing, “I like to get it done,” she says. Twenty-one years ago, she joined Kaiser Permanente as a clinical assistant, one of the first in the Mid-Atlantic States region in the urgent care setting. After a few years, Fraser led a couple of her colleagues in approaching their supervisor at the Camp Springs, Md., facility about moving beyond registration and clerical duties to assisting nurses with patients’ health care needs.

“I said, ‘We believe you can utilize us.’ I knew I could do so much more to help out when the nurses were busy.”

She found a training program that ran from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. five days a week. Meanwhile, she worked 3 p.m. to midnight shifts, mainly on weekends, and completed her courses in about three months. After struggling mostly on her own to pay for certifications in performing EKGs, phlebotomy and other tests and specimen collections, Fraser joined the facility’s fledgling class of urgent care technicians.

Hard work, good support

Today she is the lead RN at the Urgent Care/Clinical Decision units at the Largo Medical Center Hub, one of the newest facilities in the region. Fraser, a member of UFCW Local 400, says she owes much of her success to one of the Labor Management Partnership’s scholarship and wage replacement programs.

“I grew up here,” says Fraser. “It’s a great company if you work hard. You have to show up to win, do the best job.”

Trying to get an education while working full time is not easy, even for someone as motivated as Donna Fraser. That’s why LMP’s Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust was created, to support lifelong learning for union coalition-represented employees.

Wage replacement allowed her to take time off from her regular work schedule to attend classes, continue her employment, and keep up her clinical skills and knowledge. She’s taken advantage of the program twice since her first promotion, becoming an LPN in 2009, an RN in 2011. Fraser became a lead RN in 2013.

Taking ownership

Jennifer Walker, the Mid-Atlantic States region improvement specialist who works with Fraser’s unit-based team, has seen greater benefit to the training. “Donna has become the person who organizes her group, serves as a support to all and keeps the team motivated,” Walker says. "And she has done this while working a full-time job and raising a family.”

But Fraser credits the Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust program with giving her a sense of ownership and responsibility for her education and her career. “We did the scheduling,” she says. “The big difference was the empowerment our manager gave us. As long as we could find the backfill, we went to our classes.”

The keys, says Fraser, are a supportive supervisor who “believes in the partnership” and a willingness to look to the union as a positive force: “Sometimes when you are an employee, you think you just use unions for when you are in trouble.”

The greatest challenge is helping people see that if they are involved in the process, it will be easier to move up.

“You can always find places within KP that need your expertise,” she says.

 Tips from a frontline career strategist

Donna Fraser has steadily climbed the career ladder during her 21 years at KP. She offers five tips for others who want to stay on top of their game:

  1. Communicate with your manager about your career advancement interests.
  2. Set your goals—don’t expect that things will to come to you.
  3. Have a support team. We all need encouragement when taking on a difficult challenge.  
  4. Expect light at the end of the tunnel: Remember why you are making the effort.
  5. Inform yourself. Information about career advancement programs for most Union Coalition members is available at bhmt.org

Career advancement programs for SEIU-represented employees are available at the SEIU UHW-West & Joint Employer Education Fund.

 

TOOLS

Issue Resolution and Corrective Action User Guide

Format:
PDF

Size:
110 pages

Intended audience:
Managers, union members and stewards

Best used:
This guide provides an overview of two critical LMP issue resolution processes that are used to address workplace issues at the front line.  It includes examples of completed issue resolution tracking forms, which are used at the end of the process. Also, it explains the philosophy behind the process to create a lasting foundation for change. Read it cover to cover, or use it as a reference document.

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TOOLS

10 Essential Tips for 'Greening' Your Work Life

Format: 
PDF

Size: 
8.5" x 11"

Intended audience: 
Frontline employees, managers and physicians, and UBT consultants

Best used:
Use this tipsheet as a starting point for team discussions and brainstorming over ways to make your workplace more environmentally friendly. Post on bulletin boards and discuss in team meetings, too.  

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See how teams have put these tips to use:

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TOOLS

Certificate of Appreciation—Version 1

Format:
Word document (color and black and white)

Size:
One 8.5" x 11" page

Intended audience:
UBT co-leads and sponsors

Best used:
Customize this certificate to reward and recognize individuals and teams who've improved performance. Celebrating and recognizing achievement builds morale and inspires your team.

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TOOLS

Powerpoint: Busy Call Center Boosts Morale With Fun

Format:
PPT

Size:
1 Slide

Intended audience:
LMP staff, UBT consultants, improvement advisers

Best used:
This PowerPoint slide highlights a call center team that improved employee morale with fun, healthy diversions. Use in presentations to show some of the methods used and the measurable results being achieved by unit-based teams across Kaiser Permanente.

Related tools:

You Gotta Learn

Deck: 
A psychologically safe environment is essential to teamwork and innovation

Story body part 1: 

The theme of the 2012 Union Delegates Conference was “You Gotta Move”—and Amy Edmondson’s advice for the delegates was “you gotta learn.”

The Harvard Business School professor studies what she calls “learning environments.” To support innovation and teamwork, it’s essential the Labor Management Partnership and unit-based teams foster learning environments throughout Kaiser Permanente.

Imagine the ideal learning environment: People feel free to take risks. They feel psychologically safe. They believe they won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. “Without that kind of psychological safety, it’s very hard for an organization to learn,” says Edmondson.

Now imagine the opposite of a learning environment, one where no one speaks up. “Nobody ever got fired for being silent,” says Edmondson. “And yet many bad things happen as a result of silence. Silence is a strategy for individuals to stay safe, but not necessarily for patients to stay safe or for organizations to stay vibrant.”

Creating a learning environment is up to leaders—to those people with influence, whether or not they have a formal leadership role.

“Leaders have to go first,” Edmondson says. They “have to be willing to ask questions themselves, invite participation, acknowledge their own fallibility, and to explicitly state we don’t know everything yet.” These behaviors help an environment where others can take the risks of learning.

But, she cautions, “The learning environment doesn’t live at the ‘organization’ level. For the most part, there are pockets of learning environments.…In a large, complex system, answers don’t come from central headquarters or the CEO. The answers come from the people at the front line doing the work.”

A labor management partnership like the one at Kaiser Permanente “is an important foundation” for building a learning environment, says Edmondson. “A true partnership is completely consistent with the context for mutual learning.”

Both management and union UBT co-leads can help create a learning environment by articulating the unit’s or department’s purpose and goals “in a meaningful way that touches hearts and minds, that motivates and encourages,” she says.

They can—and must—also reduce the fear people experience that makes them reluctant to speak up. The LMP helps develop and support people, helping them be their best and most courageous, Edmondson says.

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