It's about Culture, not Compliance

You’ve heard me harp on and on about compliance, and how traditional inservice approaches to staff training don’t make that happen very effectively. You’ve read the reports about legal and regulatory liability risks when you’re out of compliance. I guess on the hierarchy of corporate needs, survival is the most basic, so should, in fact, be “job 1.”

Adequate, compliance training really is a survival issue.

In Texas, a lawsuit filed against a facility alleged that the nursing home was “responsible for the abuse because it did not send the worker to job training.”

According to the California Injury Blog, “understaffing and the lack of training are the most common issues that lead to nursing home abuse.”

Training is very firmly fixed on the radar of nursing home abuse and neglect attorneys, many of whom are targeting assisted living communities now in addition to nursing homes. Any time compliance is not clearly, cleanly 100%, you’re a potential target.

So that’s the survival picture.

But what if you’re ready to move beyond just survival? What if, confident that your QA programs are in place and your compliance is met, you’re ready to attack the finer points of customer satisfaction and loyalty? Of building a highly engaged workforce and clientele?

At this level, it’s all about building culture, not just compliance.

It’s about training every member of your team not just on compliance issues (resident rights, safety and caregiving skills) but also on culture: how to treat every person, resident and guest, in a way that sets you apart from the rest.

Talking about building culture is very in vogue these days. The actual doing part, however, often lags far behind.

One of my favorite books is Fred Lee’s “If Disney Ran Your Hospital.” It’s aptly subtitled “Cultural insights from a hospital executive who became a Disney cast member.” It’s all about making the word “culture” mean something – something that, in this case, becomes synonymous with your brand identity.

Lee points out that, while it begins (and builds and grows) with training, it is also dependent on leadership – leadership that is clear in goals, outcomes and what the definition of the corporate culture truly is. Leadership that rewards, models and reinforces the behaviors that reflect the culture every single day.

One of our newest employees made the comment the other day that a course we were developing still needed to be “aQuire-ized.” What he meant was that it didn’t yet reflect our internal standards, standards that include story-telling, high-impact visuals, motivational/inspirational elements and more. I felt, at that moment, that we were beginning to develop a corporate culture that everyone on the team could understand – down to the very newest member.

Companies looking to establish a foothold in today’s business climate, and, more importantly, wish to grow solidly in the future need to think beyond mere compliance. They need to think – and build – culture.