How To Implement a Peer Review Process

Some of us from our hospital’s administration and management team had just attended a Quint Studer workshop.

As we walked to dinner afterwards, our vice president wondered, “What are the barriers to setting up a peer review employee interview system like the one Studer was talking about?”

Studer’s view is that such systems make for more successful employee hires and orientations as well as more “ownership” of the hiring decision by others on the team.

Later, as I thought about the question, my first thought was that one constraint would be the increased time it would require. But as we considered it further, I realized it should eventually reduce our hiring time commitments because it would likely reduce employee turnover.

In retrospect, after more than 100 hires using the peer review system we now have in place, retention has not only improved but we’ve found it also helped us reduce the time spent working with low performers.

When you let staff choose their co-workers, it changes the culture of the department. It improves the satisfaction and engagement of existing employees because they feel they have more of a voice in decision making.  

For example, we see more people taking new co-workers under their wings, helping them to be successful in the critical first weeks of a new job. We also found that it encourages employees to more often bring us their ideas, because they gain a sense that we value their input.

Here’s a summary of how our peer interview standard process works:

All candidates are first screened by our hospital's HR department.

A foodservice manager always conducts a preliminary interview, inviting back only candidates they would consider hiring.  Managers do not express any judgments about the candidate to the committee ahead of time.  

Only high performers from our staff are invited to participate in the peer interview process. But everyone from the dishwasher to the dietitian has participated.