HOW HUMAN IS YOUR HOSPITAL?
In other words, the workplace must enable people to think, to manage their egos and emotions, to listen and to emotionally engage with others in positive ways that result in high-quality collaboration
About 80 percent of medical executives say improving the patient experience is a top priority. And yet, many hospitals focus on the latest programs or initiatives that may produce short-term boosts that don’t last very long.
But as healthcare organizations face new challenges, more find they need to make a cultural transformation to improve performance and enhance the patient experience.
Patient centeredness must not be just a program or an initiative. It is the heart of a hospital’s operations, a culture of intention where every employee, from the front lines to the back offices, is aligned toward the same goals and can say with assurance this is how we do things here.
It’s more than just telling employees to be nicer to patients and to each other, particularly during this pandemic.
Google has studied what makes certain teams effective in the search for the ‘secret sauce’ of high performance.
As the digital age advances and technology takes over more jobs, workers must get better at those “human” skills computers can’t do. They must excel at critical thinking, innovative thinking, collaborating and emotionally engaging with others in the creation and delivery of products and services.
Most of all, one must excel at continuously learning... and unlearning… and relearning.
In other words, the workplace must enable people to think, to manage their egos and emotions, to listen and to emotionally engage with others in positive ways that result in high-quality collaboration. In the digital age, people need to bring their “best selves” to work.
This shift requires people to engage in constant learning. And that means your workplace must mitigate the two big individual inhibitors of learning: ego and fear. This can be highly challenging in healthcare.
Unfortunately, most workplaces are relics of the Industrial Revolution. The leadership model is command and control, and they achieve compliance through fear.
If your company is to survive, you’re going to have to humanize it. The old, fear- and ego-based ways of working and leading won’t survive in the digital age amid a pandemic that magnifies every kind of emotion particularly in the healthcare setting.
Research by cognitive, social and positive psychologists shows that positive emotions enable and enhance innovative thinking, learning and creativity, and they lead to better judgments and decision-making. Negative emotions like fear and anxiety squelch them.
There are simple things you can do at the start of a meeting to help people be in a positive mood. Just asking people to smile at each other or make eye contact makes a big difference. So does asking people questions that indicate you care about them as individuals. Truly listening to people is mission critical.
People will feel positive when they feel cared about as unique human beings, and when they trust their colleagues and managers or leaders. Work environments that make people feel like a machine or a cog in a giant wheel will not enable the needed human performance in the digital age.
Studies show that without psychological safety, people will not fully embrace the hard parts of thinking and innovating: giving and receiving constructive feedback; challenging the status quo; asking and being asked the hard questions; being non-defensive, open-minded and intellectually courageous; and having the courage to try new things and fail.
Google has studied what makes certain teams effective in the search for the “secret sauce” of high performance. The most important factor it discovered was psychological safety. The study further states that the precondition for feeling safe is trust — and while nobody is “against” trust, many leaders worry about the time it takes to build it. Another study indicates that intrinsic motivation occurs when three innate human needs are met: empowerment or autonomy, relatedness and competence. People feel empowered when they are given the opportunity to have input into how they do their job. Mutual respect for and reliance with others means an individual is connected or is related to another person or persons in the organization. Giving staff the tools and training for skillsets to be able to deliver excellence at optimally challenging tasks instills pride at their own competence to succeed. If employees feel that they have autonomy, relatedness and competence at work, they’re more likely to be highly engaged and thus more likely to perform at high levels.
It’s not easy to transform an organization. You can’t transform a workplace unless its leaders actually lead in transforming how they lead. They must behave in ways that enable the new desired behaviors, and they must role-model those behaviors. Leaders must be enablers, not commanders. They must liberate their employees to perform at their highest levels — cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally.
If your company is to survive, you’re going to have to humanize it. The old, fear- and ego-based ways of working and leading won’t survive in the digital age amidst a pandemic which magnifies every kind of emotion particularly in the healthcare setting.
When people are able to play to their strengths and develop themselves, they don’t just go through the motions or wish away the day. This is the kind of work we all long for.
By involving every team member, across all lines of the patient experience, and making them the architects responsible for developing a new organizational culture, they’ve not only created it, they own it. This authorship and ownership lead to mutual accountability, which means your team will police it every day at all levels … even when you’re not around.