Quality problems—particularly sample contamination—were common often causing entire operation shutdowns several times each week. Demand had doubled nearly overnight and staff members were buried in work working overtime nearly every night and weekend. Emotions often ran high and social breakdowns were common as morale plummeted and absenteeism reached an all-time high. These problems, coupled with a growing backlog extending to nearly a year, threatened the organization’s ability to retain existing contracts.

Quality problems—particularly sample contamination—were common often causing entire operation shutdowns several times each week. Demand had doubled nearly overnight and staff members were buried in work working overtime nearly every night and weekend. Emotions often ran high and social breakdowns were common as morale plummeted and absenteeism reached an all-time high. These problems, coupled with a growing backlog extending to nearly a year, threatened the organization’s ability to retain existing contracts.

Quality problems—particularly sample contamination—were common often causing entire operation shutdowns several times each week. Demand had doubled nearly overnight and staff members were buried in work working overtime nearly every night and weekend. Emotions often ran high and social breakdowns were common as morale plummeted and absenteeism reached an all-time high. These problems, coupled with a growing backlog extending to nearly a year, threatened the organization’s ability to retain existing contracts.

Patient satisfaction had been falling consistently for several years. Community dissatisfaction with the clinic had become quite public prompting a call to action from the clinic’s board of directors. Even though employees had received training in several customer service programs, problems persisted. Staff felt they had no latitude in their work and feared to take extra time to assist patients. In-fighting was common, and patient ‘horror stories’ were being circulated throughout the community.

We trained leaders in new, customer-centric practices that empowered staff. We created a steering committee to support and drive quality care solutions. Through large group meetings that shifted the culture, staff and leaders identified barriers to success and opportunities to improve processes, and confronted choices that harmed patients. We created process improvement teams and trained them to address specific patient needs, addressed in-fighting and held special integration sessions to break down silos.

The new culture provided staff freedom to assist patients and participate in process improvement teams. Such teams discovered causes of excessive wait times and addressed them with new processes and procedures. Improvement teams eliminated frustrating mixups associated with sending patients to specialists. The shift from in-fighting to collaboration allowed staff to work together and support improving the whole patient experience.

Internal staff groups responsible for servicing researchers felt overwhelmed by the workload and unable to process research requests in a timely manner. Antiquated work systems and processes segregated employees into narrow ranges of tasks causing bottlenecks. Delays and conflicting answers from staff frustrated researchers causing loss of key contracts. The relationship between staff and internal customers was strained and high profile departments threatened to establish their own staff group if their demands for change were not met.

We led learning sessions to help the staff group understand its charge from senior management relating to the institution’s research goals and helped the team forge a new future. We led staff group-to-customer meetings to identify and capitalize on quick opportunities to improve work practices and processes, which also strengthened previously strained staff group-customer relationships. We helped staff groups analyze work processes and flow, and redesigned systems to overcome customer identified deficiencies. Broad building of whole system literacy and cross training supported greater competence and accountability to researchers as well as senior administrators. Staff group members replaced central decision-making with visible tracking and direct accountability.

Staff groups reduced processing and approval times dramatically—from months, to days, in some cases—and quickly dispatched their backlogs without compromising standards. Once staff groups committed to work redesigns, the turnover problem was rectified. The loud and frequent complaints to senior leaders that motivated the turnaround ceased and were replaced by unsolicited accolades for remarkable improvements made by the staff groups. Calls for bypassing the university system disappeared altogether as a higher volume of research—including privately funded studies—moved quickly through the system.