Environmental Services Leaders Collaborate to Scrub Out Inefficiency

Balancing these two objectives — speed and safety — is a shared challenge for Environmental Services teams across Mass General Brigham. But through the work of Sustain, a systemwide portfolio that is optimizing the way we work through resource stewardship and continual process improvement in alignment with our financial sustainability goal, each organization’s Environmental Services team is no longer trying to solve this on their own.

The work is part of an initiative within Sustain called Sustain Operations Excellence, which centers on empowering front-line leaders with data to make more informed decisions and collaborating with staff to understand where they see opportunities for improvement. The goal of the initiative is to enhance productivity in ways that are realistic, achievable and aligned with the actual needs of the teams and patients they serve.

That doesn’t mean doing more with less. Most often, it just means doing something differently — and breaking out of the “because this is the way we’ve always done it” mindset. Ultimately, Sustain Operations Excellence is about understanding what the right staffing levels are and recalibrating accordingly. In some areas, that may mean increasing the number of staff.

For the past year, Environmental Services leaders across the system have been meeting regularly to develop customized productivity goals and sustainable improvement plans for their organization. Each leader tracks their progress with a monthly scorecard.

“We’re trying to find ways to challenge people to be more efficient without setting impossible targets,” said Ed Raeke, vice president of Support Services at Massachusetts General Hospital, who leads the group. “If there’s a reason they can’t achieve their target, we come back to the table to talk about it. Sometimes that means troubleshooting an operational issue or better aligning staffing to demand, and sometimes it means adjusting the target to be more realistic. We also keep a close eye on whether people are way above their target because that could be a sign staff are being overworked, which we don’t want either.”

Leaders also meet regularly as a group to exchange best practices and help one another solve common challenges. For example, Environmental Services leadership at Brigham and Women’s Hospital shared lessons learned from their Cleaner and Greener Initiative, which adjusted cleaning procedures for administrative areas — allowing Environmental Services staff to dedicate more time to serving patient areas. The approach has since been adopted by several other teams across the system.

In addition to solving local issues, the group is working together to standardize Environmental Services procedures across the system so that every member organization uses the same cleaning products and methodologies. Not only will this be more cost-effective, but it will create a more seamless and consistent experience for patients and staff across all locations. Additionally, this lays the groundwork for the group’s next big goal: a centralized training program.

“Understanding the financial reality and why resource stewardship matters is key, but right now the biggest part of the success story is that we have teams that are driving themselves with system thinking,” Raeke said. “That is really the beauty of this process.”