Are your employees really important?

I once sat through a (painful) presentation at a veterinary hospital that kept referring to the employees as the hospital's number one customer. The powerpoint presentation (which constantly used 'loose' instead of 'lose' (!!!)) seemed determined to instill in the new hires being bludgeoned by it that employees come first.

I remember thinking, "I think he doth protests too much."

And lo and behold within days the hospital's true colors shone through in agonizing detail. Doctors said things out loud to one another and to staff, things a teenage girl would think twice about writing in even the nastiest note. Morale was in the tank, all staff members blamed all other staff members for failures (which were endemic) and turnover was insanely high.

But they had talked about their employees being their most important clients. How can this be? Most hospitals barely talk about employee interaction at all and are able to remain civil day in and day out. Here, this hospital had put together a Powerpoint saying just how important employees were and yet treated each other almost as bad as rival gangs, what was going on here?

So, what, no doubt, happened was at one point this very large hospital brought in a consultant to fix up the place, and that consultant took one look around, charged them five figures and said, "you need to treat your employees with more respect." I'm sure there was a lot of other consultant-speak and jargon, but in the end that's what it came down to.

So management had a meeting and they all said, "We need to treat the employees better." And so everyone agreed, and they had a few more meetings where everyone said, "Sure, we need to treat everyone better, " put together their spelling-impaired Powerpoint and called it a day.

But the culture of meaness and ugliness where doctors did whatever they pleased still reigned. And if you cannot even get your doctors to treat one another with respect, you have zero chance of anyone else doing so.

We've been here before and we'll be here again; if your company has an issue always look up, not down. Leaders lead, staff follows. As long as anyone in your hospital is allowed to treat anyone else in your hospital in a disrespectful manner your employees will never come first.

And if you believe, for even one-second, that these things do not matter, you are mistaken, clients in the hospital referenced in this post (the real ones, with pets on leashes) were treated as the enemy and with hardly more respect than the employees got from the doctors. The hospital is large, and it does 24 hour emergency, so it may believe that cultivating long-term relationships is not necessary, but unless you're the only game in town, you have a great deal to lose if you don't practice what you preach.