One of the things I have always loved about my job is that the industries we work in – healthcare, real estate, higher education, clean energy and others – are filled with creative, innovative and adaptable leaders. These are people who understand that their fields move fast and that staying competitive requires them to look to the future rather than remain mired in the way things have always been done.
What’s interesting is that their employees and teams don’t always agree. Or, more often, they don’t have access to the same information that has convinced their leaders that change is necessary. That can make change harder than it needs to be.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of our healthcare clients. Hospital systems, primary care practices, insurers and life sciences companies are all facing wildly complicated environments. Pressures exist on all sides: funding and reimbursement, financial stability, staffing, regulations, the expanding and contracting role of government and global competition.
It’s not the gentlest of comparisons, but these organizations are sometimes expected to operate like sharks: keep moving, adapt quickly or risk being overtaken by the environment around them.
At the same time, talent acquisition and retention are among the biggest challenge any business faces. In healthcare, that is true at almost every level. That makes thoughtful change management even more important.
Here’s my observation about what’s going wrong and how to improve it, with a caveat: Entire books have been written about change management. It is a well-studied field, and the experts know what they are talking about. And healthcare was clearly on my mind when I put this together, but the concepts are universal across almost every industry in which we work.
What follows is what I see through the lens of communications and the practical steps that can make doing hard things a little easier. The result may not be perfect, but it can be better.
WHAT’S GOING WRONG
Missing context: No leader enjoys being the harbinger of doom, talking about industry challenges, competitive pressures, changing regulations and the million other small things that make complex organizations difficult to run. It is much more satisfying to come to your team with solutions.
But without context, it is much harder to create momentum, understanding and support for difficult changes. Employees experience the decision without seeing the conditions that led to it. By the time leaders begin explaining the problem, employees may already be skeptical of the solution.
A universal top-down approach to change: I get it. Involve everyone in every decision at a large organization and you risk getting stuck in inertia. Leaders also often see the path forward – including the hard decisions it will require – more quickly and clearly than others.
Still, change lands like a ton of bricks when it drops from the sky.
Employee engagement does not mean that every decision needs to be made by consensus. It means being clear about what has already been decided and the rationale (both what determined where the problem lies and how best to fix it), what remains open to change, and where employees can contribute useful insight about implementation and impact.
Middle managers who are ill-equipped to be your messengers: Managers, and often even senior leaders, rise through organizations because they are outstanding at their jobs. That does not automatically make them great communicators, even under the best of circumstances.
Ask them to carry the water in sharing information about a major change, and they may opt out of what one of our clients calls “critical conversations.” A difficult situation becomes harder when managers contribute to an us, the team, versus them, the leadership, mentality or decline to share the larger context.
And the email you sent to explain everything and support your managers in doing the communications part of their job job? It was probably unopened amid the flood of messages employees feel they must address. That is especially true in healthcare, where email understandably pales in comparison with immediate patient care needs.
Change fatigue: Leaders also need to consider how many changes employees are being asked to absorb at once. Each initiative may make sense on its own. Collectively, they can create confusion, exhaustion and skepticism about whether this latest priority will last.
Both considering the sequencing (or bundling) of changes and acknowledging that cumulative burden is important. So does being honest about priorities, timing and what work may need to stop or change to make room for something new. All the better if you can also offer your team tools and resources to help them manage the change; it’s an investment in better long term functioning.
HOW TO IMPROVE IT
Thinking specifically about communications and organizational support, these are the strategies I see working.
Provide regular updates: In good times and bad, provide your team with an update roughly once a quarter about what is happening: the good, the bad and the uncertain. These should be meaningful opportunities to educate, set priorities, and look ahead.
Use a similar format every time so the information is predictable and understandable. This helps people begin to see the same patterns leaders are seeing, in real time.
It also gives employees the opportunity to ask questions along the way and perhaps identify possible solutions. That is far more useful than waiting until a worrying trend becomes a crisis, when there is less time and less opportunity to influence the outcome.
Engage employees meaningfully: If we work together, you have probably heard my rant about employee surveys: For the love of all that is good business practice, do not survey your employees if you do not plan to share the results and address the issues they raise.
That does not mean leaders must solve every problem identified in a survey. It means they need to acknowledge what they heard, explain what they can act on and be honest about what they cannot change and why.
Surveys can be a useful starting point for employee engagement, but they are only one tool. You do not have to engage every employee on every issue. Senior leaders should be, in healthcare parlance, rounding. They should ask what is working, what is not working and, “I see this challenge ahead. Do you have ideas about how we might solve it?”
You can also host smaller group meetings that bring together representatives from across departments to offer their perspectives on emerging challenges. Create committees or working groups focused on important topics such as managing difficult regulations, operating efficiently or improving recruitment and retention. Use those groups to pressure-test ideas before moving forward.
Yes, this is a lot of work. You may also create informed ambassadors for changes that otherwise would have been poorly received.
Use multiple communications channels well: With apologies for the communications jargon, organizations need to develop, invest in and consistently use effective tools. The overreliance on all-user emails MUST stop.
What does that mean?
Train your managers: Managers need clear, dedicated communications training. Broadly speaking, they need to understand the role the organization expects them to play in communicating company priorities, the skills required to do that well and the challenges they should be prepared to address.
This training should be holistic and available to every manager, rather than created only in response to a particular announcement. Develop a training series that runs quarterly for newly promoted or hired managers. Create a video library with short modules, practical examples and quizzes or other tools to make sure people are engaged. Use scenario-based exercises that allow managers to practice answering difficult questions. Give them guidance on when to answer, when to acknowledge that they do not know and when to elevate a concern.
This is the first step toward making communications cascades effective. Cascades are every corporate communications person’s favorite tool because they support personalized, two-way communication, but they are extraordinarily difficult to execute when managers have not been prepared for their role.
Build cascades that actually work: To that point, I have created no fewer than 3,451,234 communications grids over my nearly 30 years in this business. They all anticipate some version of a cascade: a senior leadership briefing, an advance email to managers with tools and talking points, an all-user email and follow-up conversations between managers and staff.
The number of times that sequence has worked effectively? Maybe 12.
The problem is usually that the organization does not have the structures in place to support it.
Measure understanding over time: A pulse survey, manager feedback, small-group discussions or questions submitted through employee channels can help leaders determine whether people understand what is changing and why. They can also reveal where additional communication or operational support is needed.
Change management is not completed when the announcement goes out. People need time to understand what a decision means, ask questions, hear consistent answers and see whether leadership follows through. The organizations that do this well create a stronger foundation for the next difficult change, because their employees have reason to trust both the information they receive and the people delivering it.