BLOGRIGE

How to Delight Your Customers (aka "Guests")

 Posted by Pamela Wong

Business has been challenging for the fast food and restaurant industry. These establishments have had several difficult quarters, according to the most recent data compiled by the American Customer Satisfaction Index™ (ACSI). In 2008 and 2009, industry sales dropped 4.1 percent as consumers cut back on eating out and on the amount of money they spent when they did.

Generally, ACSI found that large fast-food companies weathered the hard times better. But I know of at least one small business that defies that trend and stayed on top: K&N Management, a 2010 Baldrige Award winner, which owns four Rudy’s “Country Store” & Bar-B-Q and three Mighty Fine Burgers, Fries, & Shakes casual-dining restaurants in the Austin, Texas, area.

 

Gross profits for Rudy’s “Country Store” & Bar-B-Q have surpassed the industry standard of 40 percent in every year from 2001 to 2010, reaching nearly 47 percent in 2010. Mighty Fine Burgers, Fries, and Shakes has exceeded the industry standard since 2008, with a gross profit of 44 percent in 2010.

 

K&N’s customers rate their satisfaction with food quality, hospitality, cleanliness, speed of service, and value at least 4.7 on a 5-point scale. This outperforms the best competitor. Overall customer satisfaction ratings are over 4.7 for both, also beating the best competitor.

 

How does K&N earn such high marks? Founder and co-owner Ken Schiller says a key practice is to treat customers just like guests in your home. K&N even uses the term “guest” instead of “customer.” When guests enter the restaurant, they are greeted immediately. They notice a sparkling clean operation and how quickly the line moves.

 

At the counter, the team member determines if this is the guests’ first time to visit. If it is, the team member takes time to tell them how the restaurant works and offers tasting samples.

 

In Ken Schiller’s words, “Rudy’s or Mighty Fine is represented by that one person who serves [the guest] that day, and that’s why our mission statement is ‘to guarantee that every guest is delighted because of me.’”

 

K&N’s focus on its customers is succeeding. More than 97% say they will come again, and the restaurants’ gross profit shows that they are.

 

K&N’s community service also is worth pointing out. In 2010, the company contributed over $365,000 to charitable organizations, and the 450-plus team members volunteered more than 1,600 hours.

 

A great role model, don’t you agree?

 

 

 

 

Without Mr. Cronkite, Hospital Finds New Ways to Engage with Customers

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

 

When iconic newsman Walter Cronkite anchored the CBS evening news, people stopped what they were doing and listened to their one, most trusted source of news, said Tama Wagner, chief brand officer at Heartland Health, a 2009 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient. But today, people want to interact, not just be told about news and events. If organizations, including hospitals, want to interact with their customers, they must find a way to actually engage them, she said.

At the 23rd annual Quest for Excellence Conference, Wagner said Heartland Health has employed a social media strategy that is not necessarily about understanding the quickly changing technology but understanding the people who use that technology. She added that people born before 1942 want information that is directive, Baby Boomers want to be engaged and debate issues and opinions, Generation X wants to be educated, and Millennials want to be connected through peer-driven forums.

Wagner said not having a social media strategy is like ignoring half of your audience, and research shows that 93% of social media users feel a company/organization/even hospital should have a social media presence. To allow the patients to engage with the hospital, Heartland uses social media to have a conversation with its patients and other stakeholders, she said.

The 2011–2012 Health Care Criteria now include social media as a key aspect of listening to the voice of your customers. The Criteria ask how you use social media and Web-based technologies to listen to patients and stakeholders. According to the Criteria, use of social media may include blogs moderated by your organization and unsolicited opportunities to learn based on social media outlets your organization does not control, such as wikis, online forums, and blogs not moderated by your organization. "Customers increasingly are turning to social media to voice their impressions of your health care services and patient and stakeholder support."

As a user of the Health Care Criteria, Wagner said monitoring local discussion boards and other social media outlets allows Heartland Health to better understand patients and stakeholders, as well as to acknowledge and thank customers or to acknowledge and correct any customer issues. For example, Marcy George, marketing/communications consultant, media for Heartland Health, said she uses the News-Press discussion board "to judge public opinion of our news coverage and issues that arise.”

Social media also allows the hospital to engage in conversations directly related to long-term health improvement and illness prevention, always focusing on leading with a servant's heart and learning what is best for the customer. Heartland Health uses the following tools most frequently: 

• a Facebook page to promote and build a community around health improvement events; for example, to encourage discussion around weight loss, exercise, and eating tips during the Pound Plunge, its 12-week weight-loss challenge. Heartland Health also uses Facebook as an outlet for dialogue with its caregivers to further build and maintain relationships.
• a YouTube channel       
• Event discussion boards (e.g., www.takethepoundplunge.com)
• The monitoring of local discussion boards
• Executive blogging
• Tools to promote and highlight events, such as Coed for the Cure (celebrity softball tournament), and to build a community around health issues
• Marketing/advertising campaigns

Wagner said next up are e-blasts with a professional blog from its massage therapist and estheticians.

In what ways has your organization engaged with its customers through social media?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Baldrige...in Three Questions

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

Okay, you asked for it. You tell me Baldrige is too complex for beginners. You ask how to get your boss or your employees convinced Baldrige is a journey worth beginning. You blog about needing silver bullets. Well, here they are. The three silver bullets to convince you that Baldrige is worthwhile and that all organizations can benefit from taking the challenge to start a Baldrige journey. I'll even keep the blog post short, so you can get through it quickly. You can even include all three questions in a "tweet"!

Ready?

1. Is your organization doing as well as it could?
2. How do you know?
3. What and how should your organization improve or change?

That's it! The rest of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence are the details to make sure you are truly considering everything that is important in a systematic and systemic way. How does your organization stack up against these questions? Good luck!

 

Making U.S. Health Care Great, the Holistic Way

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

The New York Times recently published a blog on "What Makes a Hospital Great?" that was written by a surgeon sharing advice she received from another surgeon: "It’s not the techniques or the fancy equipment. It’s how they do things [their systematic processes], it’s their culture that makes them really great."

The surgeon's wisdom was that superior patient results and operative skills were not enough to make a hospital's reputation. The blog writer goes on to cite a study from The Annals of Internal Medicine that hypothesized that "improving patient outcomes may require first investing in and focusing on the culture of the organization itself."

As I read this blog, I knew Blogrige would be a perfect place to point out the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipients in health care who already do this—who invest in both their cultures and their processes, who invest in the Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence, and who have been able to improve patient and organizational results. The Baldrige Criteria show that a whole systems approach is needed: culture and process; process alone is not enough. Baldrige asks the questions that lead to the holistic approach. The other key point from the Baldrige Criteria is not only do results improve, but Baldrige Award recipients tend to outperform other organizations and place the Award recipients in a role-model performance group.

In fact, the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is working on a book with the working title Baldrige 20/20: An Executive's Guide to the Criteria, and we've been comparing health care measures across Award recipients.

What we've found is that U.S. health care organizations who have invested in the Health Care Criteria to improve their overall systems and cultures have found the following:

• reductions in overall mortality rates
• reductions in mortality resulting from pneumonia
• reductions in mortality resulting from acute myocardial infarction
• reductions in mortality resulting from congestive heart failure
• increases in net revenue
• compound annual growth rates
• increases in overall market share
• increases in total revenue
• increases in patient satisfaction
• increases in physician satisfaction/loyalty
• improvements in nurse vacancy rates
• declines in net days in accounts receivable

We are really excited to share this book and data with you later in the year. Please stay tuned!

Meanwhile, check out the data, results, and stories of Baldrige health care Award recipients. The investments they have made in the Baldrige Health Care Criteria and the results they have achieved speak for themselves. 

Follow the Fellows...Part Two

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

Preceding the annual Quest for Excellence (Quest) conference last week, we held the third face-to-face meeting of our Baldrige Executive Fellows. I reported on the second meeting of the Fellows in an earlier blog. This time, the Fellows also had the opportunity to attend Quest. If I was energized before this meeting of the Fellows, I am doubly so now. What a great group of people, what stimulating discussions, and what an amazing collaborative learning experience. The Fellows had the opportunity to spend time with two former Baldrige Award winners, Paul Westbrook and his senior leadership colleagues from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and Paul Worstell from the PRO-TEC Coating Company. Their topics for this meeting were workforce and customer focus. But before I share some nuggets from those discussions, let me tell you about a couple of the other opportunities the Fellows had at this meeting. Each Fellow has selected a year-long project of strategic significance to their organization's business. At this meeting Fellows updated each other in three-minute speeches about those projects and posed questions where they wanted some input from the other Fellows. This process, repeated at each meeting, has already resulted in benchmarking visits among Fellows' companies, comments on potential blind spots to explore, and advice on approaches to pursue. The Fellows also had a dinner with a guest from their own company, executives from the seven Baldrige winners from 2010, and members of the Baldrige Foundation Board. The conversation in the room was so intriguing that it became hard to decide whether you should turn left, right or across your table.

Before I risk going on too long for a blog post, let me share a very few nuggets from the meeting with Ritz-Carlton and PRO-TEC for you to consider in your own organizations. Consumer customers today are wired, tired, and focused. You need to delight them in a way that recognizes their situation and needs. Business customers are focused, want honest relationships, and supplier agility. Your employees are constantly listening to you for clues. New employee orientation should be emotional. Gaining emotional commitment to the organization early speeds up learning by 6-7 months. Communication between supervisors and employees and among employees needs to be worth-based and not hurt-based. Too often words not chosen carefully lead to hurt rather than help, when the goal was open communication to help a colleague achieve high performance. While these are very few nuggets from much longer discussions of all concepts associated with customer and workforce focus, they are three easy concepts to agree with and internalize, yet challenging to change or establish in organizations. How is  your organization doing? Your comments are welcomed!

And, BTW, if these comments about our Executive Fellows' Program intrigue you, we will soon be opening the application process for our second cohort group of Fellows. Consider having your company apply.

Intelligent Risk at Richland College

Posted by Pamela Wong

Richland Collegepresented a thought-provoking session at the Quest for Excellence® Conference this week. Richland is the large (15,000 students enrolled for credit) community college in Dallas, Texas, that earned the Baldrige Award in 2005.

The session focused on responsible risk-taking, a core competency for Richland that meshes with the intelligent risk concept discussed in item notes and item descriptions in the 2011–2012 Criteria for Performance Excellence.

Dr. Kay Eggleston, Richland’s interim president, noted that in times of cutbacks and a difficult economy, organizations tend to become more risk averse. But those times are really when risk taking, because of its relationships to innovation and improvements in student learning, becomes critical.

She used Richland’s acceptance to the Achieving the Dream (AtD) consortium, the largest nongovernmental initiative in the history of community colleges, as an example. AtD focuses on closing achievement gaps for low-income students and students of color, influencing state and national policies, and making data-informed institutional decisions.

However, participation in AtD doesn’t come with funding. In this time of very tight budgets and an extra-lean workforce, that’s risky. The question: Was it an intelligent risk?

Thinking strategically, Richland determined that AtD would make the college eligible for grants, provide benchmarking opportunities, and integrate well with its other activities. It was a risk worth taking. Although it’s too early to report Richland’s results with AtD, it will be interesting to track the progress. 

To make AtD work for them, Richland took the following strategic actions:

• To encourage buy-in, it made the program totally faculty driven.
• It focused on student success in gatekeeper courses that had the largest enrollment of all.
• It developed a new-to-college program for the lowest-performing students.
• Finally, it obtained a Department of Education grant to finance all AtD initiatives.

Kay said that involvement with the Baldrige Criteria causes Richland to focus fully on the future and embrace intelligent risk taking.

How is your organization taking intelligent risks in this risk-averse economy?

Kay Eggleston will be at the conference of the American Association of Community Colleges, which begins tomorrow. We hope to be exhibiting there, if the federal government does not shut down. Stop by to see us.

 

 

 

 

Do Government Agencies (and Taxpayers) Need Baldrige?

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

 

At the 23rd annual Quest for Excellence Conference on April 4, two federal agencies, both Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipients, presented what they felt was a compelling argument for why Federal government agencies need the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. Especially based on the current federal budget challenges, I'd like to reprint their business case and see what you think. Could federal government agencies—and frankly all U.S. taxpayers—benefit from adopting the Baldrige Criteria?

The Baldrige Criteria allow government agencies to benchmark organizational performance excellence against best-in-class organizations from other sectors in the areas of Leadership; Strategic Planning; Customer Focus; Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management; Workforce Focus; Operations Focus; and Results, said Joseph Brescia, director for the Strategic Management and Process Office of the U.S. Army Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC); Mary Manser, director of the Financial Management Office of ARDEC; and Wanda Umber, chief of strategic planning and learning resources of the Veterans Affairs Research Pharmacy Center. 

To improve value for taxpayers, the speakers said that federal organizations have three options: (1) do nothing; (2) use traditional methods to try to influence public opinion; or (3) use the Baldrige Criteria to measure organizational progress and participate in awards programs, examination, and feedback to make their processes transparent and improve their overall agencies on behalf of taxpayers.

Brescia, Manser, and Umber led the audience through a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis. Here's what they suggested:

 STRENGTHS

• The Criteria are time tested, and results are proven.
• Receiving the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is a thrill for the workforce, and the workforce becomes even more engaged and committed to the agency and its mission, vision, and values.
• Organizations that adopt the Criteria become learning organizations.
• The feedback from applying for the Baldrige Award comes from the "world's best consultants" at an extremely nominal fee (less expensive than almost all management consulting).

WEAKNESSES

• There is an incorrect mindset that Baldrige does not apply to government agencies.
• It is hard to capture immediate return on investment.
• There are a lack of role models and benchmarking opportunities among nonprofits.
• Leaders often change in federal agencies, with different leaders valuing performance excellence and Baldrige differently from other leaders.

OPPORTUNITIES

• Great opportunities exist in the feedback received and the chance to stand out among agencies as being stewards for taxpayer money.
• The President or his delegate recognizes Baldrige Award recipients as national role models.
• The Baldrige Criteria force an agency to become data-driven and a quality organization.

THREATS

• Other federal agencies may become jealous when one agency receives this Presidential honor.
• You make yourself transparent (not necessarily a threat) and expose organizational weaknesses.
• Bureaucracies are not very good at sharing best practices.
• Money does need to be spent on benchmarking, and budgets can be cut.
• Some agencies say they are too busy (however, Umber said that once the agency becomes more efficient with Baldrige, you find more space).

Based on this business case, what do you think?

 

 

Putting Race on the Table

Posted by Pamela Wong

The sessions that feature 2010 Baldrige Award winner Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS/Maryland) are well attended here at Quest for Excellence.® MCPS representatives have used the phrase  “putting race on the table” in discussing the district’s desire to achieve equity for its students, that is, to demonstrate through its results that  “success is not determined by race.”

MCPS says that “putting race on the table” means being willing to talk about race data and teaching and learning. Through its Equity Initiatives Unit, the district created equity teams in schools that communicated its vision, which comprises 1) high expectations, 2) caring relationships, and 3) cultural competence.

To this end, the Unit provided 750 hours of professional development to more than 1,000 employees, and staff developed strategic tools to raise, for example, algebra 2 achievement without lowering standards. The district also arranged meetings for high-performing schools to share their best practices.

The results to these processes? Steady and favorable trends in results for African American and Latino students for kindergarten through grade 12; following are just a handful:

• Those reading simple text (level 6) by the end of kindergarten increased from 50–72% for African American students and 38–56% for Latino students from 2006–2010.
• The percentage of students scoring advanced on the grade 4 Maryland State Assessment for math increased for African American and Latino students from 14% to 29% between 2004 and 2010.
• The percentage of 8^th-grade students completing algebra 1 with a “C” or higher increased from 19–45% for African Americans and from 14–44% for Latino students between 2001 and 2010.
• The percentage of advanced placement exam scores of 3 or higher increased from 627 to 1,527 for African American students and from 605 to 1,708 for Latino students from 2003–2010.  MCPS alone represents 2% of African Americans in the U.S. scoring a 3 or higher on APs and 1% of all Latinos in the U.S. 

Thanks to MCPS for leading the way. 

Small Businesses: Doubling Revenue Growth With Baldrige Framework

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, the nation's small businesses totaled 27.3 million in 2008, and, of these, approximately 6 million were employers, accounting for 49.6% of U.S. private-sector jobs. Unfortunately, 50% of small businesses fail within their first five years, but there are role models.

What does this have to do with the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence? Aren't the Criteria just for big business? The simple answer: No. Of roughly 1,500 applications for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, 400 were from small businesses, and 22 small businesses have been named Presidential role models. Here's the story of two of those role models: MESA Products, Inc., and Stoner. At the 23rd annual Quest for Excellence Conference on April 4, both presented their stories of tremendous and sustained growth.

MESA, which manufactures products to prevent metal structures from corroding, including providing engineering and installation services, reports a 20% annual growth rate since its inception. In 2006, after five applications for the Baldrige Award, MESA was honored as a Presidential role model, and since then, "it continues to grow with the things we learned from our [Baldrige performance excellence] journey," said Cary Hill, controller/director of administration.

"Baldrige took all the stuff that we do and wrapped it up. It gave us the framework and the discipline; it helped us see the integration, and we became great," said Hill. He added that doing Baldrige is how we run our business. Doing Baldrige has helped lead MESA into the future, to become "a sustainable, enduring company."

Hill says he continues to serve as a Baldrige examiner, and as an examiner, he can bring the Criteria back to MESA and help identify gaps on where the company needs to improve. "This is what [Baldrige] is all about."

Rob Marchalonis, CEO of Stoner, a manufacturing and sales company of cleaners, lubricants, coatings, car care products, and a premium glass cleaner called Invisible Glass, which is the #1 glass cleaner in dollars in the United States and the #1 glass cleaner brand in the auto category, said the Baldrige Criteria forced the company to look at its methods, processes, and customer and employee satisfaction and engagement. Before Baldrige, Marchalonis said the 2005 Baldrige Award recipient focused entirely on its financial and product outcomes, but Baldrige helped it to improve its overall system by differentiating operational efficiencies and conducting lots of benchmarking.

Baldrige has provided a framework for Stoner to more effectively integrate its acquisitions and to evaluate the business potential of acquisitions, he said. Marchalonis added that being named a Baldrige Award recipient helped give Stoner performance excellence credentials, and the owners/founders of its acquisitions often become Stoner's best salespeople.

So what has the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence framework done for these small business? I think the results speak for themselves.