WestJet Airlines built their reputation breaking rules to improve customer experience. The Christmas Miracle video went viral showing WestJet staff run around buying Christmas gifts for travellers based on wishes they made as they boarded. Travellers got their wishes when they landed, and WestJet got famous. No rulebook could lay out the performance needed for the Christmas Miracle.
Medicare stands at the other end of the customer service spectrum. Over-regulation makes outstanding customer service all but impossible. Here’s how.
Regulation decreases quality.
Rules stop staff from thinking.
Rules mandate a one-size-fits-all approach to individual patients.
Regulation doesn’t keep pace with progress.
Regulators rarely know the job like front line workers.
Regulation impoverishes decision-making.
Thick rulebooks make staff hesitate, or freeze with indecision.
Rules are open to interpretation.
Rules never account for every possibility.
People can’t remember all the rules.
Rulebooks get long and cumbersome.
Regulation is expensive.
It requires hordes of managers to enforce.
Rules take hours to maintain…at huge cost.
Rules are costly to produce.
Regulation crushes ingenuity and personal effort.
Provider effort withers with command and control rules.
You can’t regulate innovation.
Regulation undermines leadership.
Top-down edicts to front-line workers don’t influence change.
Regulation assumes an air of infallibility and certitude.
Who decides which new regulations to adopt?
Regulations are complicated, but life is complex.
Healthcare should define great customer service, but it never will as long as it’s over-regulated. What can we learn from WestJet about customer service?
Good challenge, Shawn, for leaders to inspire rather than suffocate.
It’s scary for leaders to give their team freedom…who knows what the troops might come up with! 🙂 It turns out better in the end, though.
Thanks for reading and commenting!
Shawn
Shawn….good forward thinking ideas & thoughts. Now ….can you perform some lobotomies for new thinking?
Too funny! I take your point, though: easy to talk about this stuff, but hard to make change.
I’m stubbornly optimistic. Change happens.
Thanks for reading and commenting!
Shawn
Hello Sean:
Great reminder that ‘miracles do happen when you give people what they want” including those visiting Emergency Room Departments!
Hello, Janet. Thanks for taking time to comment, and what a great point you make!
We have to get back to putting patients first. It will be painful for many of us to change, but I believe it’s worth trying.
Thanks again,
Shawn
I was just perusing your blog and found this article quite topical describing how my hospital is morphing into an over-regulated, inflexible institution. It is so hard (almost impossible) to remove rules once they have been established. Some rules are necessary and protect patients, but some aren’t. Rules are often imposed upon us usually without consultation or consideration of consequences. Not only does this usually not improve patient care, but it is emotionally draining for the provider forced to follow these rules. I don’t think this point is emphasized enough: smart people working in a stifling, over-regulated environment is beyond depressing, it is exhausting. It feels like someone is saying “I’ve never met you, I don’t do your job and cannot do your job, I’ve never even been to your unit, but I’m going to tell you how to do your job.” This is emotionally very hard to swallow. Good people leave this environment and the jobs become occupied by individuals who lack the desire to improve things or change things, thus resulting in more stagnation and further entrenching this regulation that got us there in the first place. People end up conforming and not caring because it is so much easier.
I suppose the solution is to get more involved with hospital politics, but quite frankly, I didn’t go into medicine to fight with administrators. But when administration starts to interfere with my ability to take care of my patients, that is when the gloves come off.
Perhaps all rule books should have an expiry date. The rule has to be renewed every year to remain on the books. I wonder if that would work?
Great comments and excellent suggestion, Philip!
You captured the issue: people find it harder to change than to maintain dysfunctional structures. Those of us who get involved in medical politics want to help improve things, not spend our lives fighting bureaucratic structures. Maybe we were dreaming to assume otherwise?
Thanks again for taking time to read through to an older post and share a fresh comment!
Best regards,
Shawn