HJBR Nov/Dec 2019

Healthcare Journal of BATON ROUGE I  NOV / DEC 2019 23 Pinecrest Supports and Services Center in Pineville, helped lead a project to improve talent recruitment and retention at LDH. The department had noted high turnover among nursing and direct care employees, and leaders knew that it was very important to hire andmaintain the right employees to improve quality and continuity of care. “Our team wanted to examine what improve- ments could be made in efforts to identify the target audience for every job posting,” Bolton said.  Bolton’s team created a tool that rated the quality of applications, and then exam- ined how the posting was written when there were a higher number of high-quality applications. The team found that because of nuances in the way that job postings were being presented online, some of the job titles were vague and non-descript, and other postings were not clear enough about required certifications. The teamdecided to sculpt a newway for departmental leaders to advertise job post- ings by using a working job title. For exam- ple, if the Civil Service required a techni- cal job title such as Sanitarian I, a manager could add something more descriptive in the title in parentheses, like health inspector. They also improved the quality of job post- ings around certifications, linking poten- tial applicants to ways they could receive a required certification. “We wrote the job posting to appear more user-friendly to applicants. We show the required job qual- ifications, and then let themknowwhat steps to follow in order to become qualified if they are not already qualified,” Bolton said. “We also worked with the Louisiana Civil Ser- vice Commission on improving howwe are identifying the most effective job recruit- ment strategies.” The strategy has beenworking, and by the end of the year, Bolton said her teamprojects they can scale up the pilot program to the point where they can train human resources staff to do what the team is doing with job postings. The results are projected to shave hours of time off of the application-filtering duty of a hiring manager, freeing them up for other duties. Both Bolton and Hudson said that Lean Six Sigma training has transformed the way they see things in everyday life, as well as in their regular day-to-day work. Bolton said she has even been doing housework dif- ferently according to principles learned in Lean Six Sigma. “You begin to readily iden- tify and avoid rework mishaps by properly sequencing steps,” Bolton said. A former administrator of a large healthcare facility, Bolton said she wishes she’d had that train- ing earlier in her career, particularly when transitioning service platforms froma large institutional facility setting to a single fam- ily dwelling community. “With these tools, we could havemore efficiently arranged ser- vices,” Bolton said. Recently, her office has begun restructuring its medical charts, and she applied Lean Six Sigma tools to that pro- cess. “In our first workgroup, I was amazed by the amount of work we finished in only one hour,” Bolton said. “I walked out after the workgroup and thought, ‘That was great.’ What a tremendous experience learning Lean Six Sigma has been, due to the proj- ect planning by Louisiana Department of Health.” Richard said that while Lean Six Sigma stresses goals that can be applied through- out LDH—accept no defects is a common mantra, for example—the department also sees the program as an important tool for retaining employees. “Dr. Gee and Mark Thomas have whole- heartedly supported building this culture of quality,” Richard said. “It takes coura- geous leaders to invest in, engage in, and promote this approach. Quite simply, having top-down support is the difference between mediocre and excellence in effective, sus- tainable improvements.” When Lean Six Sigma-trained teammem- bers can come to work with the knowledge that they have the skills to make a change that will help LDH eliminate waste and be more efficient, job satisfaction rates are likely to rise. “When they begin to see their ideas and the impact, they are moti- vated to do more. It’s so fulfilling for me to see the transformation,” Richard said. “My past experience has been that when you invest in people in a way that fulfills them, it stops them from looking for something else. It takes the place of looking for a new job with higher pay that may not offer the same opportunities to make change.” Dr. Gee said she sees Lean Six Sigma as an important part of a goal to make LDH a destination workplace. But she said it’s also about changing the department’s culture for the better. “If the culture doesn’t value what- ever change you’re trying to create, it won’t endure,”Gee said. “When you build the skill- set and promote those skills, we’re bridging the gap with the skills of now and the skills of tomorrow.” n Kevin Litten is a communications strategist for the Louisiana Department of Health. Before his current role at LDH, he was a reporter for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans until July 2019. “Dr. Gee and Mark Thomas have whole- heartedly supported building this culture of quality. It takes courageous leaders to invest in, engage in, and promote this approach. Quite simply, having top-down support is the difference between mediocre and excellence in effective, sustainable improvements.” —Mendy Richard