Hospital Span of Control: FAQ
Why should I do a Span of Control Analysis or measure the flatness of my organization?
You measure your financial and clinical performance regularly to ensure your hospital is running smoothly. Why shouldn’t you measure the managerial capacity and decision-making ability of your leadership structures, too? HMC’s Span of Control Analysis gives you an objective view of your current organization, along with future options to serve you for the long term. Streamlining your leadership structures means faster and more coordinated decisions. Excessive layers of management can inhibit efficient operations, decision making, and can get in the way of your true mission. Innovation can be suffocated and frustrate care-givers from too much oversight in the chain of command. Having an objective view of your current structure and a goal for improvement ensures that you won’t waste your managerial capacity, that you’ll be able to develop reasonable succession plans and retain your top talent, and that you can improve your ratio of direct care-givers to overhead.
How does HMC’s Span of Control Analysis work?
As with all HMC products, we streamline data submission and report turn-around so that you can take action instead of wasting valuable time compiling data or waiting for results. You submit your organization charts or an employee control file detailing the reporting chain for your staff. HMC’s Span of Control assigns each employee to a level based on their managerial responsibility within the organization, not on their title. HMC then validates results with your HR department and your VPs/C-suite for accuracy. The Span of Control defines your hospital’s supervisory and managerial requirements based on targets developed from HMC’s extensive databases. The targets reflect the degree of managerial or supervisory difficulty for various functions – a nursing unit manager has a far larger managerial span than the Director of Accounting, for example. The targets are applied to your organization, clearly showing the difference between required vs. actual managers/supervisors, so you can see where you need to streamline or enhance managerial support. The Span of Control product lets you view the results by department, systemically, or by VP – the variety of perspectives helps you understand your current structure with greater depth.
What will I learn from HMC’s Span of Control Analysis?
- Where you have too many or too few supervisors
- Where you have too many or too few managers
- Which department/chain of command structures are too fragmented
- Whether your VPs and directors have sufficient managerial responsibility and are properly supported
- The Smallest Practical Organization (SPOM) for your hospital
- Various scenarios (by department, top down, etc.) to implement changes
How hard is it to implement changes to my organizational structure?
Changes in leadership positions are often difficult, even when it’s understood to be for the good for the organization. HMC helps mitigate this by quantifying the reality of your current state and showing you a more streamlined leadership structure. HMC’s Span of Control Analysis allows you to objectively look at your structures from the top down, by department or by functional area. Once you have the destination in sight, our “what-if” modeler can help you stage decisions based on your hospital’s talent pool and juggle various scenarios to plan the right sequence and timing of your reorganization implementations.
HMC is a hospital performance management company that provides hospitals with value-focused tools to monitor and improve financial, operational and clinical performance. We believe that sustainable and tangible improvement must come from within the organization; therefore our suite of products supports hospitals achieving results through internal, self-directed efforts.
To get started, please contact us at (781) 449-5287, or by using our online contact form. Once we hear from you, we can discuss pricing and implementation, and then begin with the data submission process.