By Kristin Bidwell, Director of Communications & Outreach, Valley Medical Center
Working in healthcare, we know the ways other companies reach their employees don’t work as well for us. We know most of our workforce are on their feet and away from their computers. And yet, sometimes it’s hard not to scream when our communications teams spent weeks blasting messaging across multiple platforms, only to hear, “No one told us about that!”
How do we improve our internal communications strategy so that all our employees, from nurses to housekeepers and surgeons to IT, feel informed and engaged? It’s important to remember that everyone in your organization has a stake in good communication—and you can leverage leadership at every level to find out how to best reach your staff.
Building a Communications Council
In June 2022, Valley Medical Center launched a cross-departmental Communications Council, focused on improving our organization’s internal communication. Our communications team identified a group of engaged leaders and employees who prioritized communication and asked them to participate. Many were owners of communications channels, including staff text alerts, phone systems, “huddle boards” for clinical areas, and various internal and external newsletters.
Leaning on this group, our initial discussions were a crucial first step to identify pain points in our organization and chart a path forward. Some of our key communications challenges included:
- Email fatigue and overload
- Not enough time to convey information (nursing huddles are three minutes!)
- Too many sources of information; lack of clarity on what’s most important
- Some leaders neglecting to cascade information
- Employees in many varied roles with different departmental processes for sharing information
- Staff members who rarely spend time on the computer
- Inability to target communications to different groups (e.g. hospital vs. clinics, clinical vs. support staff, providers, leaders, frontline, and others)
Find Out How Your Teams Prefer to Receive Communication
Once we’d identified these challenges, we worked with the Communications Council (with leadership from our communications team) to investigate ways to address them. We wanted to go directly to our frontline staff, trying to reach as many work areas as possible, to better understand how we could effectively communicate important messages.
We started with a five-question communications preference survey, shared with our Leadership Team and included in the staff newsletter over several weeks. Our Communications Council members served as ambassadors to get their teams and others to participate. We were pleased to receive 143 responses, though we realized our distribution channels meant that employees who spent time on computers were overrepresented in this group. We decided to dig deeper with a series of communications focus groups:
- The communications team reached out to multiple teams across the organization, who were either in groups considered hard to reach (not in front of computers, hybrid, varied shifts, etc.) or were led by “super communicators,” as identified by our Communications Council and HR.
- We spoke to leaders of these groups and, when possible, frontline staff.
- We attended team huddles and asked for examples of how leaders share communications.
- We used standardized questions for each team, asking about how they share information, which communications tools they use, and their communications pain points.
Communication Isn’t One-Size Fits All
We were trying to determine the most effective tool to reach our staff. We learned there isn’t just one.
One common thread stood out. Effective leaders know how their teams best receive information. They are intentional about how they communicate, use multiple communication channels, and huddle regularly with their teams. Other key findings:
- Employees rely on their leaders to make sure they’re informed. Many leaders gather and streamline relevant information for their teams, such as in weekly newsletters or huddle boards.
- Messages often need to be repeated a few times to sink in.
- Email is not the most effective channel in healthcare. We discovered some staff only check email a few times a year!
- Communications need to be simple, straightforward, and scannable. Images, icons, and other visuals are helpful.
Small Steps to Meaningful Change
Armed with valuable data, our Communications Council set about finding ways to make meaningful shifts in our communications strategy. The goal was to move the needle in the right direction between each meeting, without taking on an expensive or resource-heavy overhaul, which wasn’t necessary!.
We aimed to meet people where they are, building our internal communications systems to be accessible to the varied roles in our organization. There were valuable conversations about “push vs. pull,” thinking about what important communications needed to be pushed out to staff (and on how many channels) versus what is “nice to know” or more detailed information that we can pull employees to standardized, consistent channels to find in their own time.
Some of the changes we implemented:
- Launched Valley Vitals: We placed essential news that impacted many employees in a section at the top of our weekly newsletter, with a dedicated area of our intranet accessible by a button in our top menu.
- Increased use of Valley-branded emails and email addresses that felt more official on behalf of the organization to encourage opening.
- Worked to make email/newsletter messages shorter and more scannable, updating “digests” with new information for ongoing stories in SharePoint.
- Focused on ways to reach teams not in front of computers, such as tabling and attending team meetings.
- Worked to overtly direct leaders to share information, telling them to “please make sure to cascade this information to your teams,” in leadership messaging.
Ready to Get Started?
Just like communication isn’t one-size-fits-all, your organization’s approach to a Communications Council may not look like mine. The drum that I kept beating throughout this process was to focus on incremental, realistic steps to change. Bring together engaged leaders and employees who care about communication. Gather data to help chart a path forward. Listen to those on the frontlines and seek out voices you don’t usually hear. Good luck!