The healthcare environment can be a tricky one for employee communications. The hospital workplace, in particular, provides multiple overlapping difficulties — from the various physical realities of different job functions to the scattered geography of hospital locations.
Here are five common challenges in reaching and engaging hospital employees:
The people creating the patient experience in hospitals are not sitting in front of computers. Doctors, nurses, lab technicians, dietary aides, transporters and other frontline hospital staff are all on the move, and in many cases, moving quickly from one patient to the next. You can’t count on them stopping by a shared computer to check in on the latest news in internal communications.
In large healthcare systems, employees will be spread out across multiple locations. Many systems have also grown quickly by acquiring other hospitals and facilities. The culture of each location will be strongly influenced by its leadership, and those cultures deserve respect. At the same time, there are strong advantages to building collective pride in the overall brand.
Employees may feel their top executives don’t understand the realities of patient care. Those dealing with critical medical situations, or even minor patient issues, are living and breathing a very different work experience from those sitting in corporate offices. Frontline hospital employees might have an underlying mistrust of executive decisions that could impact their work.
Most hospital employees are there because they’re passionate about helping. When hospital systems introduce change management initiatives such as promoting cost cutting or standardizing care, employees are likely to be concerned about how that change will impact patient care. If you can, show how the change can improve patient outcomes or patient-centered care.
In any employee audience, internal communications are competing with everything else people have going on, from real life to social media. But in a hospital setting, we’re trying to get the attention of people who need to be focused on life and death situations. If you subject them to a fire hose of communications, they’ll tune it out. There’s a real need for disciplined cadence.
