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Our mission at Homewatch CareGivers (of Boise and Twin Falls) is to be the premier provider of home care services in southern Idaho.
The purpose of this article is to share with our clients, our community partners, and our friends the tools we use to provide the absolute best quality service to our community and clients.
Two sources that have helped us do this are “The E-Myth” by Michael E. Gerber, and “Traction” by Gino Wickman.
Applying the simple, but profound system presented in these books helps us every day put systems in place to provide our clients consistency, quality, and continuous improvement.
The E-Myth’s Impact on Our Clients Care
When I first read “The E-Myth” in 2010, the thing that impacted me most was the seemingly mundane tool of an organizational chart. Initially, it seemed difficult to see why a small company would need such a tool to illustrate to people what our organization looked like.
However, despite my initial inclination, we created an organizational chart with a General Manager, HR, Finance, Operations, and Sales/Marketing. Five boxes. That was it.
We then listed all the tasks and responsibilities we performed and placed each one in one of the five roles on our Organizational Chart.
The impact this had on the quality to our customers was difficult to overstate. Everyone had defined roles, and responsibilities, and everyone knew what each other’s roles were, including our community partners and customers.
These tools helped us grow and provide services to hundreds of clients in Idaho, but as many businesses do, we stagnated again and needed to reinvent our company to keep providing value to our clients. That’s when we discovered “Traction”.
Traction and EOS™’s Impact on Continuous Improvement
Somewhere around 2020, I discovered the book Traction.
To provide an overview of EOS™, Traction breaks a business into 6 components: Vision, Data, Process, Traction, Issues, and People.
Of the 18 tools provided by EOS™ at https://www.eosworldwide.com/eos-toolbox, some of the tools and ideas that most affect the quality of our care are Our Proven Process, our Core Processes, and our weekly IDS sessions in our meetings.
Our Proven Process is illustrated and our area managers take it with them whenever they are in the community and meeting with clients. It gives our customers a succinct overview of how we start services, what they can expect while receiving services, how we monitor quality, and how services come to an end when that time comes. The proven process is illustrated in the figure on this page.
Our core processes are simplified, documented and followed by everyone in our organization. Once again, this helps ensure each of our clients will receive consistency in their services. However, consistent services are not what customers want if poor quality is what is consistent. This leads to the IDS session.
IDS stands for “Identify, Discuss, Solve”. Throughout the week, when any staff member faces a challenge, issue, or problem, they place the matter on our “Issues List”. In each weekly meeting, we spend only 5 minutes per topic reporting progress on our goals, highlights, and action items. The bulk of each meeting is spent “IDS-ing our issues”, which means we state the issue faced by employees or clients, we discuss a solution, and then we solve it. The Japanese has a word KAIZEN which means, roughly interpreted, continuous improvement. That is what IDS provides our stakeholders.
This is only a few illustrative samples of the many simply powerful tools which help us deliver results to our clients and employees.
Conclusion
The purpose of this article is not to sell books, get you to subscribe to software, or promote other services.
The purpose is to make public to our community partners, our employees, and our clients how we are committed to providing premier home care services to all of you. Implementing these principles is not a quick fix, but it ensures we will continuously improve by small amounts which, in the end, makes a huge impact on everyone involved.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following for their support in our journey of continuous improvement:
Michael Gerber for writing the book, The E-Myth
Gino Wickman for writing the book, Traction
Our EOS Implementor™, Jennifer Derion https://www.eosworldwide.com/jennifer-deroin.
Ninety.io for their excellent web-based tool https://www.ninety.io/
