For example, Stern sees industry consolidation commoditizing health care linen services. Health care providers in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Erie or Youngstown will increasingly have decision-makers in other parts of the country.
“We’re still a regional player, and in the health care market, it’s still a regional game. But what happens is the people who are making decisions that aren’t in the region, they want to deal with the least amount of vendors as possible,” he says.
To counteract that, Stern and three other progressive companies across the country created the National Health Care Linen Alliance. It allows hospital systems to deal with a single point of contact for more facilities in different regions.
“It’s getting traction. I think it will be successful in how regional players can compete on a national basis,” he says.
Exceptions to the rule
To ensure your business has continual long-term growth, it’s important to create a culture of accountability.
That starts by measuring everything to get a baseline, Stern says. With measurement tools in place, you can create dashboards and ratios for the managers that need that information.
“What I’ve found is when you give them the correct information and tell them that it’s important, the issue always improves,” he says.
Timely measurements will drive the people to the accountability that they are hired for.
“If something is supposed to happen and it does, then I never get too excited. If something is supposed to happen, and it doesn’t, that’s when I pay attention,” he says, adding that sometimes this is a flaw because he doesn’t naturally celebrate expected success.
But by focusing on the exceptions, you develop continuous improvement, Stern says. Because everything that happens that shouldn’t has a cost to it.
Then, you can look at what needs to be changed. What internal processes need to change? Where did you fail and how can you improve that?
The exceptions can be good, too. Why did you do so much better than expected? What happened and how can you duplicate that?
Every job has two or three key result areas that are important to it, so it’s management’s role to sort through the data and isolate that for employees, he says. By sharing what’s important to that job and how the company is doing as a whole, employees are more engaged.
“If you don’t share the information, they always think we’re doing worse or better than we really are,” Stern says. “So, it’s important to share it — Hey, this is exactly where we’re at — and make them part of the team.”
That in turn drives accountability, because if you hire people for the right job, they like information, he says. You can tell them how they’re doing, praising them when they do well and coaching them when they don’t.
“Most people actually like that — and the people that don’t like that, I don’t really want working here,” Stern says.
Let them know it’s coming
Whether you have a culture of continuous improvement or not, things are always going to change in business.
About every five years, there’s a major change in almost all industries, Stern says. That’s why you must learn how to communicate that change.
“I always say I learned change management from my kids,” he says.
