Long-Term Care Survey Alert

Published on Fri Mar 22, 2013 PDF

Don’t let your patients or organization suffer.

Nip accountability problems in the bud. Hold your employees to commitments and enforce discipline if you need to rather than letting your SNF and patients get the short end of the stick. Here is expert advice on how you can develop accountability by asking pointed questions.

Overcome Your Hesitation With This Question

Scenario 1: Your SNF has established consequences for employees who are late to work, and you’ve discussed them with each employee. Your schedule coordinator has been late three days in the last two weeks, and you need to muster up some courage to confront her and put your established consequences into action.

What to do: Ask yourself, “How many paychecks would an employee allow to be late, missed or short?” suggests Mike Scott, MA, of Mike Scott and Associates in his audio conference, Creating the Culture of Total Accountability.

If employees expect paychecks to come on time, you can certainly expect employees to be on time, and you should feel confident about confronting the late employee regarding her violation of established expectations.

Discuss Accountability Expectations Early

Scenario 2: Your staff agreed to complete a chart audit by a certain date, but you’ve just learned it won’t get finished on time.

What to do: When someone “surprises” you with non-performance, don’t ask “Why?” or “Why not?” Instead Scott suggests that you ask:

·         “What’s your next step to get it done?”

·         “When are you going to do that?”

·         “Can I count on you for that?”

You can also prevent problems by establishing a policy that the moment a team member knows she will miss a deadline, she must do the following:

·         Talk to the person she made the commitment to;

·         Inform the person of the situation; and

·         Provide a viable solution to meet the deadline.