Organizational Health – Change your Behavior, Increase your Quality

An important part of marketing your business starts from building solid procedures internally, starting by motivating employees and ending with making technological improvements. Often, we’ve seen pharmacies do a great job utilizing technology, building excellent customer service processes and leveraging the influence in their community to create more opportunities for their business. Yet, even these pharmacies have had a difficult time identifying potential bottlenecks, creating clear employee contribution paths or developing strategic growth plans. Ensuring a business is healthy can be a tricky undertaking, considering all the daily elements at play. Most pharmacists aren’t just business owners; they are the only pharmacist on staff, entire marketing team, IT person and general manager. Some pharmacists may make the excuse that running the day-to-day aspects of their business is far too demanding and important to be bothered with the general organization. We’ve all heard or said the “I’ll get to that later,” or “It’s on my list of things to do.” We’ve even heard the Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein comparison–two scientists who weren’t necessarily known for their keen attention to organization and yet managed to make key discoveries in their field of science. So, what’s the real value in revaluating a pharmacy’s organizational health?

Mckinsey and Company surveyed over 600,000 employees at more than 500 organizations internationally. The survey results found that companies with the highest organizational health index were 2.2 times more likely than their counterparts to have an above-median earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation amortization (EBITDA). These same companies were also 2 times more likely to have an above-median growth in enterprise value to book value, and 1.5 times more likely to have above-median growth in net incomes to sales.  The short and sweet version is organized companies perform more successfully.

Naturally, like in any study, correlation does not imply causation but it’s still a striking result, so Mckinsey then went further, questioning the integrity of their original hypothesis. Across several wildly different industries they tested their postulation by putting into service a sales simulation program, focusing on performance and organizational health. They found the same results.

These findings, coupled with a survey by Mckinsey of thousands of executives who have been through similar organizational change programs, ascertained why program initiatives that have not been evaluated for their organizational health aren’t as successful or even fail. Less than a third of these fail attributes consisted of inadequate resources, insufficient planning, simply not well thought out ideas or disruption by unforeseen outside events. Over 70% accounted for poor organizational health and were brought to light by unproductive management behavior, unconstructive employee moral or nonexistence directional clarity.

How to be more organizationally healthy? According to Mckinsey and Company, performance and health can be assessed by asking yourself and applying the following:

ASPIRE – This is the ambition one. Where do we want to go as a company? What vision can we inspire in our employees which is both deeply meaningful and purposeful? Determine what a healthy pharmacy looks like.

ASSESS – This is the self-discovery, diagnostic stage. Identify what your organization can do in order to achieve what it aspires to do. This is also a good opportunity to understand possible root causes that may be creating obstacles for you and your team.

ARCHITECT – Otherwise known as the “what” part. Here is where you create your plan from the vision and assessment steps you did before. How can you create a healthy pharmacy environment for your patients, employees and business prospects?

ACT – The plan created above should be sustainable and easy to act on. Ensure it is scalable and aims to create a positive journey to the businesses aspirations, as well as it does actually achieve this goal.

ADVANCE – Once you have done all the heavy lifting, there needs to be a permanent plan for continual advancement. It’s like diets. Most think diets are simply temporary changes in eating behaviors in order to fix current weight issues. Yet diets are consumption lifestyles and, like diets, these plans need consistency.

Implementation is the most difficult part for many pharmacies. It takes time, but this investment pays off and well in the long run. Employees, process, product, placement and organizational health return the highest value back to a business if done properly. These are always worth the time.

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