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Today’s healthcare leaders are reluctant to hold employees accountable for fear that they’ll leave. But believe it or not, accountability is what makes your best employee stay. Building a culture of accountability is the key for organizations looking to retain top talent without compromising standards or lowering expectations.
In this blog I’ll break down why it’s a challenge to hold employees accountable, practical strategies to build a culture of accountability without increasing headcount, the benefits this will bring to your organization, and tools for getting started.
Webinar: Empowering Healthcare Teams Through Accountability
Why Is It So Hard, Yet So Important, to Hold People Accountable?
No matter which side of the accountability equation you’re on, it can feel uncomfortable. Whether you’re holding someone accountable or being held accountable yourself, it can feel like you’ve done something wrong.
As leaders, there are times we feel like a fraud, or experience imposter syndrome. Whether you’re an executive or a frontline leader, it’s easy to feel like you’re not qualified enough to lead a team, especially if there’s a gap in age or experience. Holding people accountable through this imposter syndrome is challenging because we often avoid conflict, hesitate in our authority role, or overcompensate by picking up parts of other people’s jobs we see falling behind. While this may seem doable in the short term, it’s not sustainable long term, and it does a disservice to your employees and the broader organization by failing to hold people accountable.
Also common among leaders is a tendency to see people’s potential, but overlook their patterns. In an effort to retain top talent, we as leaders will let it slide when they neglect responsibilities or fall short of expectations. Over time, this can get in the way of acting like a true leader for that talented individual, and weaken relationships with high-performing team members. When high performers see lower performers getting away with less, they question themselves and whether their contributions are truly valued at the organization, and perhaps consider leaving for other roles.
In the relationship between leaders and employees, there’s often a gap in expectations. How many times have you found yourself thinking something like, “why can’t they just do what I want them to do?” Oftentimes, it’s due to this gap in expectations that we view people to be falling short. Accountability is how we can begin to close that gap, open productive lines of communication, making sure everyone feels supported, their contributions valued, and improving performance on both sides of the relationship.
By developing a culture of accountability, you can develop strong leaders within the existing staff at your organization. You’ll improve outcomes without adding headcount by empowering employees to step up to higher expectations, and retain top talent by making sure they feel valued and have opportunities for growth.
How to Improve Accountability For Greater Employee Satisfaction
1. Set Clear Expectations
It’s important to set clear expectations so everyone knows what they should be working towards and how their success will be measured. People aren’t mind-readers. If you don’t say or show your expectations, it’s not reasonable for them to be met. Through a compliance lens, expectations are contained in our policies — and in the consistent enforcement of policies.
Expectations should be clear and measurable to remove assumptions that can cloud understanding and disrupt communication. Explicitly discuss consequences so everyone is on the same page about what has to happen, when, how, and why it should happen, and what the consequences will be if the expectation is or is not met (consequences aren’t always bad!). If there’s an expectation not being consistently met, it’s worth reviewing the related policy to make sure it is clear. You could even send it out for staff acknowledgement.
By developing this open, thorough communication, both leaders and employees will feel empowered to do their jobs with confidence and know that their contributions are productive and valued.
2. Provide Feedback in a Brain-Friendly Way
As leaders, we want to make sure we’re creating a learning environment. A learning environment creates optimal conditions for productive conversations around performance. By creating an environment clearly focused on learning where giving and receiving feedback becomes routine, conversations about performance feel easier, feedback feels less punitive, and people are more likely to internalize it and change their habits in the way we ask them to.
There are specific, neuroscience-backed ways we can make sure the feedback we’re giving is as brain-friendly as possible to make it desirable for recipients to internalize it:
- Regulate emotions during conversations to maintain clear, balanced thinking
- Use specific facts and data points to illustrate our ideas objectively
- Collaborate on action plans so both parties’ wants, needs, and concerns are accounted for
All of these strategies work with our brain’s natural response patterns to make sure that accountability can be seen as supportive rather than punitive, and make direct conversations around performance seem less threatening.
3. Foster a Culture of Responsibility
By taking steps to cultivate a strong sense of individual responsibility among staff members, you will develop a team who performs better, feels satisfied with their own performance, and sees opportunities for growth within your organization.
When employees are held accountable, they feel safer. In the accountability matrix, studies have shown that employees are happiest when they’re in the “learning” zone of the accountability matrix — where both accountability and psychological safety are high.
Leaders can provide a learning zone by setting boundaries, clear expectations, and encouraging collaboration. With guardrails, employees can enjoy more autonomy, while leaders are confident employees are on the right track. Investing in opportunities for growth and professional development, such as offering continuing education (CE) or continuing medical education (CME) courses, can help high performers thrive and stick around.
How Software Improves Accountability Without Adding Headcount
When it comes to improving accountability, the impact of small, consistent actions is always greater than the grand, one-time conversation we hope will fix the problem. Software standardizes these small, consistent actions so you can improve accountability among your staff without adding headcount.
Technology doesn’t discriminate and it eliminates the chance of human error so every employee in the same role across the organization completes the same compliance training, acknowledges the same policies, and submits incident reports the same way. Automated reminders of things like overdue training or incident reports that require attention make sure accountability checks are occurring without necessarily requiring a personal conversation, saving time and avoiding tension.
Healthcare compliance software, such as MedTrainer, extends the capacity of healthcare teams with automated tracking and reporting so leaders can see what has been completed and hold employees accountable for progress, without time-consuming work. This standardization across roles cultivates a greater sense of responsibility, both individual and collective, amongst your staff, leading to higher employee satisfaction, greater performance, and opportunities to develop strong leaders within your organization.
Want to see MedTrainer in action? Schedule a demo today to see how MedTrainer empowers greater accountability at healthcare organizations of all sizes.
*Content taken from webinar.