How can non-profits adopt the best practices of productivity management from the for-profits?

The key for c-suite leaders is to focus on the desired results and to incent their front-line management team to accomplish these goals. Applying the benchmarks for productivity is the easiest part. For-profits generally look at two things daily: charges and payroll. That’s not charges from the backlog over last several days or the pay period ending payroll completed by an administrative assistant for processing. It is no more than yesterday’s charges and yesterday’s payroll. There is no credit given to what’s not billable (that’s the numerator) and no excuses accepted for not inputting actual payroll spent (that’s the denominator). The outcome of these two efforts is then applied to the standard. Variance from the benchmark is, at first, a discussion of “why”, but it quickly evolves into “what are you doing about it”. It becomes the front-line manager’s focus in specific detail to understand and articulate the volume (backlog of tests, waiting times for outpatient appointments, physician specific requests, patient  scheduling needs, etc) and to staff accordingly (not to budget or plan, but flexed to actual volume need, review all approved OT requests, pre-plan any agency or contract labor premium spend, etc). Daily flash tools should be easy to compile, widely distributed, and readily understood. Waiting for the month-end financials is a lost opportunity to improve an organization’s performance.