Culture Before Metrics: AHE Exchange26 Speakers Rethink High-Performing EVS

Environmental services leaders are routinely asked to improve efficiency, control costs, support patient safety, and deliver a better patient experience. But achieving those goals requires more than another metric or process improvement initiative.

At the Exchange26: AHE Education & Solutions Summit in New Orleans, presenters David Green and Donald Sipp, Jr, MBA, RESE, CHESP, CHTI-2, CMIP, PMP, emphasized 2 interconnected ideas: build the right culture first, then create systems that allow people to perform at their best.

Green, CEO and founder of Rediscover Clean, presented “Rock Performance Scissors,” an unconventional take on the familiar game of rock-paper-scissors. His framework uses “rock” to represent organizational culture and foundation, “performance” to represent what patients and customers actually experience, and “scissors” to represent the elimination of waste.

The presentation even incorporates music, with bass guitar and drums representing the foundation, guitar representing performance, and keyboards accompanying the waste-reduction component. At the end, the individual tracks come together as a single song.

Behind the creative presentation is a serious operational message. “You can’t have a successful operation if you don’t have the foundation or have the culture truly instilled within your group,” Green said.

That culture can reflect an organization’s existing mission and values or be developed at the departmental level. What matters, Green said, is establishing it before expecting employees to consistently deliver excellent performance or identify waste.

“The team has to feel empowered. They’ve got to feel like they’re respected,” he said. “It’s just so crucial.”

When Beds Don’t Move

Sipp, senior director with Ruck-Shockey Associates, Inc, founder of Impact Training Company, and author of WHEN BEDS DON’T MOVE: How Flow Physics Reveals the Hidden Breakdowns Costing Hospitals Millions, approached EVS performance from another direction: patient throughput.

His AHE Exchange26 presentation “Accelerating Patient Throughput Through High-Performing EVS Operations” examined how environmental services can help hospitals address persistent bed-capacity constraints.

“You want to make sure that you are operating at peak efficiency to make sure that your environmental services (EVS) department is efficiently turning around beds,” Sipp said.

For patients waiting in emergency departments, post-anesthesia care units, or other areas, a bed that is physically present but not ready for occupancy is effectively unavailable. EVS, therefore, occupies a critical position in patient flow.

Sipp presented with Alison Manger-Weikel, MHA, director of system nutrition and environmental services for Riverside Health, using a real-world case study to demonstrate what operational improvement can accomplish.

According to Sipp, the department had once experienced bed turnaround times approaching 2 hours. At peak performance, that time fell to less than an hour.

“It’s not just theory what we’re talking about,” Sipp said. “It’s really how to put things in practice.”

That systems-based thinking also forms the basis of Sipp’s book, in which hospital throughput is described as a series of interconnected “engines.” The process begins with what he calls Engine Zero: linen readiness. EVS is Engine One, followed by patient transport and the other departments necessary to keep patients moving through the hospital.

The concept underscores an important reality for EVS leaders: No department controls patient throughput independently. A delay at one point can create downstream consequences throughout the organization.

Cutting Waste Without Cutting People

Together, the presentations illustrate why operational efficiency cannot simply mean asking EVS technicians to work faster.

Green’s “scissors,” for example, are deliberately not about eliminating employees.

“It’s not about cutting people,” he explained. “It’s about cutting the waste that you have in your organization.”

That distinction is particularly important in an environment where EVS departments may already face staffing challenges and increasing expectations. Improving turnaround time while maintaining cleaning quality requires leaders to identify unnecessary steps, communication failures, workflow bottlenecks, supply problems, and other sources of wasted time rather than sacrificing cleaning practices.

Culture and efficiency consequently become connected. Employees who feel respected and empowered may be better positioned to identify the operational problems that leaders cannot see from an office or dashboard.

The ultimate measure of performance, Green noted, is what other people actually experience. His framework includes courtesy, appearance, and quality because operational success is not simply an internal metric. It becomes visible to patients, families, clinical colleagues, and customers.

EVS Leaders Do Not Have to Solve Problems Alone

Both Green and Sipp also emphasized another benefit of AHE Exchange: discovering that many of the operational challenges facing individual EVS departments are shared across health care.

Green, who has more than 3 decades of experience in environmental services and luxury hotel housekeeping, described AHE as one of the most valuable conferences he attends for its combination of education, networking, and idea sharing.

Sipp pointed to the tendency for individual hospitals to believe their challenges are unique. “Every hospital thinks they work in a silo,” he said. “They think that they’re the only ones experiencing the issues that they’re experiencing.”

Bringing EVS professionals together changes that perspective.

“Coming to events like this helps you understand that you’re not alone,” Sipp said. “You have people who experience similar issues as you. You can learn from each other. You can grow together.”

Those connections can extend well beyond a conference session, creating networks that leaders can turn to when confronting staffing problems, throughput challenges, quality concerns, or other operational pressures.

For EVS professionals, the combined message from Green and Sipp is deceptively simple. Performance does not begin with a stopwatch measuring how quickly a room is turned over. It begins with the organizational foundation supporting the people responsible for that room.

Build the culture. Empower the workforce. Identify and remove waste. Measure what matters. Understand how EVS connects with the larger patient-flow system.

When those pieces work together, faster bed turnaround and better operational performance become more than goals on a dashboard. They result from a stronger system.