Coming Together

In 2001, 505-bed Crouse Hospital in Syracuse, N.Y. went into bankruptcy. Jackie DeCecco, director of nutritional services, said the troubling financial times caused employee morale in the foodservice department to drop to an all-time low. Now, the department and hospital are back on track both financially and emotionally.

“We went through a situation where we were in an alliance with another facility. When you start putting two facilities together that have different cultures, sizes, opinions and variety of employees, I think it ends up being a very difficult situation. We never really got through that alliance. It only lasted for three years and then it dissolved. When we dissolved we went into bankruptcy and that was certainly not a morale booster. It was a terrible time for us. It was a very difficult time with our vendors. It was just really miserable.

As we came out of bankruptcy we had a very strong hospital. We are probably one of the few hospitals, as I understand, that has gone into bankruptcy and come out. Many hospitals in bankruptcy don’t survive.

Part of the reason we were able to come out so strong was based on the development of a mission, vision and values. There is a team called Simply the Best that is made up of management staff and chief supervisors. There are about 35 of us. I am on the team. We started talking about the mission, vision and values.

The values are an acronym for CROUSE (Community, Respect, Open and honest communication, Undivided commitment to quality, Service to our patients, physicians and ourselves, and Excellence through innovation and creativity). We started truly living by the values and we started embedding those values into everything that we do, including disciplines. It’s very important that when an employee comes into the office and I need to discipline them, I say to them, ‘How do your actions support the values.’ And they say to me, ‘Well, they don’t.’

The values start right at the interview and application process. New employee orientation is two full days. The employees have six-month reunions. We’ve seen our turnover, our employee sick days and our compensation problems for the hospital and department drop.

Our employee satisfaction for our department has improved. We look at how the other departments feel we are doing, and all of our numbers have improved during the past four years. So we are doing better today than four years ago as far as the way other departments view us.

I learned that a culture needs to be developed by the entire institution that employees and management can truly live by. In our case, the culture surrounded our mission, vision and values. We live those every day; it’s not just something that is in a drawer or on a wall. They truly shape our decisions and how we treat each other.

My advice for others in a similar situation is that the hospital needs to have a plan. It can’t just be one department. The plan needs to start with administration, but once the plan is in a formative stage, then you need to engage employees.”