From the article:
Massachusetts General Hospital wanted its 22,000 employees to watch an 11-minute video teaching the basics of customer service. But executives felt it would send a strange message to make niceness training mandatory — and then penalize staff for not participating.
So instead, they offered employees a $250 bonus to view the video, an approach common in other industries and that proved to be an overwhelming success for the hospital.
A total of 5.5 MILLION to get their 22,000 employees to watch this 11 minute video.. and we wonder why hospital charges are so high…
Filed under: General Problems
I have often wondered what the ‘big deal’ is about videos? Instead of paying these employees and spending money to have a video made, why didn’t they just send each employee a 1 page letter about customer service? At Wal-Mart, we have lots of CBL’s and 90% of them are either goofy or could be done by sending us a form to sign. Once we had a video on customer service. Yes, we were shown a video of an employee in the garden center helping a lady pick out a garden hose. They treat us highly educated pharmacists like we are minimum wage high school dropouts when it comes to these CBL’s. One time I had a CBL on folding towels. Don’t laugh…it is true! Seems like these big corporations want to turn their employees into robots. It will probably not be long before each employee is required to have ‘plastic’ surgery where they put a permanent smile on the employees face.
A few days ago, I stayed one hour after shutting down the pharmacy to assist a mother with her 17 year old son that was lying in the pharmacy isle at Wal-Mart and having an epileptic seizure. He not only had a seizure but had another one before fully recovering from the first one. I knew how to help. I knew that the one thing to do was let him lay there until he recovered. So, I had a worker get a pillow and another worker to clean up where he had vomited. When he was able, I helped the mother get him in a wheelchair, to the car, and into the car. The point I wanted to make is that I did not have a CBL on what to do. I had enough sense to know what to do and did not need some corporate MBA trying to make a video or policy or procedure on what to do. I know that it will come as a shock to these corporate idiots that they actually have some employees with some common sense and can handle all sorts of problems. They have employees that know more about how to provide good customer service than they do. They have employees that know the difference between an idiotic corporate idea and a smart one. They have employees that would not spend money to paint one wall in the pharmacy one color, while the other walls are another color; but, would instead send each store a nice electric stapler. For years Wal-Mart would not provide their pharmacies with a cashier. We lost business because people would come to the register and have to wait on a tech to break away from what she was doing to wait on them. It was ridiculous. People coming to the cash register and no one to wait on them. At one point, I argued with the head of the pharmacy division over the need for a person to operate the cash register. He said, “It ain’t gonna happen.” Well, about a decade after he told me that, they decided we needed a cash register person. I once argued with someone at the home office about the need for a good electric stapler at every pharmacy. He said, “Can you imagine how much that would cost for over 2000 stores?” I asked him about worker comp claims by all the dainty female pharmacists that were having wrist problems because of heavy use of the large bulky staplers. But, he was still not convinced. I am still waiting on the electric stapler. But, we cannot have them because corporate decided one wall should be painted blue. They can throw away money on something unimportant to us, but not spend a dime when it comes something that is important to us.
I am constantly on a rant about the changes, which I perceive, should be made to pharmacy. So many things have not changed over the decades. Improvements in pharmacy have not come in so many years. You would think that there would actually be improvements in pharmacy….improvements in the way we do things…improvements in the design of the pharmacy….taking into account ergonomics…reducing pharmacy hours….increasing tech education and pay…removal of the people that are trying to provide accurate prescription fills from all the noise and interruptions. We need a total revision in the way we do things and a completely new design of the pharmacy. We are still operating in an over 100 year old pharmacy design concept. These chains that think pharmacists can be everything to everyone are idiots. CVS is leading the way in idiocy and the errors being made by their pharmacies is outstripping all the other pharmacies combined. When children are getting Tamoxifen instead of flouride tablets, something is bad…very very bad wrong! It is time for the US gov’t to shut down their stores until they leave their employees alone to do what they know how to do.
I think the idea is wonderful. Instead of threatening employees with suspension if certain courses are not completed, reward them with perhaps an extra 20% added to the employee discount for a week. I am all for it!