Communication

Even minor changes can alarm a facility’s nursing staff, who often worry what the transition will mean for them. They may fear they could lose their jobs or that the organization will lower their salaries or increase their job duties. Communicating with nurses during change can ease their uncertainty, eliminate surprises and make them feel involved. Administrators should plan their communication strategies well in advance, designating nurse leaders to oversee the effort and determining when and how to alert nurses regarding key events. Health-care administrators can use communication strategies such as community meetings, e-mail and social media to stay connected to the nursing staff.

Education

Teaching nurses about the planned changes and their impact on the facility and nursing staff can eliminate some of the anxiety over organizational change. In addition, offering training to help nurses adjust to new policies or procedures can give them the skills they need to successfully navigate the change. It also encourages them to take a hands-on role in the transition. Seminars and workshops prepare nurses for the impending changes and ensure they’re implemented smoothly. For more intensive training, administrators can offer one-on-one coaching, assigning nurse leaders to teach nurses the skills and knowledge necessary for thriving in the new work environment.Change Implementation and Management Plan Paper

Encourage Teamwork

Enlisting nursing staff to offer input and assist in problem-solving can prevent resistance and offer insight from those closest to the issue. Managers can organize nurses into teams, asking them to brainstorm solutions for problems or offer recommendations for implementing the proposed changes. This can draw out valuable information from the people responsible for integrating the changes. It also demonstrates that the organization values the opinions of its nurses.

Explain Your Reasons

To the nursing staff, planned changes may seem arbitrary or confusing, but administrators who explain the motivations behind them can turn the nurses into their biggest supporters. If nurses know the changes will enhance patient care, make employee’s jobs easier or offer the facility significant financial benefits, they’re more likely to champion the new structure and do whatever it takes to ensure the plan’s success. It also shows them the facility’s leadership doesn’t expect them to accept the changes without understanding the reasons for and benefits of the new way of doing things.

The only constant in healthcare is change. To facilitate organizational change — leaders need to take a step back and realize where change really begins: your people.

As the CEO of a healthcare talent management solution provider, I regularly discuss organizational development and talent management strategies with healthcare leaders.  From these conversations, I’ve gathered the following six initiatives that healthcare organizations must adopt to manage the changes ahead:

1. Recruit for New Roles

New roles and skills requirements are emerging in an environment of HCAHPS, population health, ACOs, and the rapid growth of express retail and urgent care facilities. Healthcare organizations will need RNs who can effectively coordinate the provision of care post-hospitalization. You’ll need patient advocates who work with front-line staffers to promote patient satisfaction to drive HCAHPS scores. Organizations will need population health navigators with the clinical and communication skills to provide education through community outreach programs.

As many areas of forecast ed growth in healthcare are primarily occurring in “non-traditional care locations,” such as express care clinics, the demand for these new roles will be astronomically high. Hospitals and health systems will be competing head-to-head with the local pharmacy around the corner and suburban care clinics for qualified healthcare talent. Organizations will need to develop proactive HR strategies to recruit new talent to meet consumer demands or risk losing out on qualified applicants in the increasing competitive market.Change Implementation and Management Plan Paper

2. Train Existing Employees on Required Skills

Many critical skills that healthcare staffers need today are behavioral, such as teamwork, communication, flexibility, and critical thinking. While organizations must hire people with these inherent behavioral competencies, they also need professional development programs in place to build out these skill sets.  Healthcare organizations that are able to successfully adapt to the new paradigm are training staff on population health management, the importance of patient hand offs, discharges, and follow-ups, and diagnostic and treatment approaches associated with EMRs. These are just a couple of examples of change that require focused training and education for new hires and existing employees in healthcare.

3. Implement New Performance Goals

New employee performance goals are emerging and the traditional performance appraisal process is evolving. We’re moving beyond focusing solely on pillars, VBP, reducing HAIs and readmission’s; individual performance goals should now be focused on cross-care coordination and hand offs, the effectiveness of patient communication, the timeliness of access to care, and the reduction of inpatient utilization. On the other hand, organizational goals should focus on the wellness and health of whole populations, from employees to members of the community. Individual performance goals should always be top-of-mind for employees, as they should be the driving force behind every decision made and action taken.

Given the number of mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, and organizational changes in recent years, healthcare organizations must prepare to reevaluate and standardize talent management processes across the entire health system to ensure consistency. Most healthcare organizations are likely standardizing processes today for clinical protocols — why not for your talent acquisition and employee development initiatives? Despite the disruption of change, consistency is crucial.

Research shows that only 40% of hospital employees are considered “engaged.” So what negatively impacts employee engagement levels? You guessed it: Change.Change Implementation and Management Plan Paper

Healthcare leaders must proactively manage employee engagement by focusing on the known engagement drivers of executive actions, quality of care, promotion opportunities, stress management, communication, and recognition. The solution is not a mystery, the C-suite and executive team need to take ownership of employee engagement.  In this case, positive change starts at the top.

Having the right people in place at the top is more important than you may think.  In fact a recent study showed that even just a one percent decrease in “leadership effectiveness” correlated with a 33% decrease in revenue per bed. Poor leadership decisions, no matter how minimal they may seem, actually have significant impact on the bottom line. It starts with the right leadership selection and continues through ongoing assessment and development. In fact, having the right model and programs in place for leadership selection and development is an absolute necessity and the biggest lever for organizational success.

So how does a healthcare organization implement these talent management strategies? It takes leadership to get employees engaged and encouraged to contribute to the adoption of new initiatives through clear and consistent communication.  CEOs who leave talent management strategies to their Human Resources, Organizational Development, and Learning teams to handle, will not see results.  Additionally, it takes technology to manage and measure the results of the processes implemented. Talent management technology solutions should be core to the management and measurement of all organizational change strategies and implementation. Remember, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

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As a healthcare leader, you must take the initiative to be proactive with your talent management strategies in order to navigate through the roadblocks that come along with change by focusing on what really matters: your employees.

The playbook for hospital and healthcare leadership has fundamentally changed. Integrated hospital systems, academic medical centers, freestanding hospitals — no provider is immune from the need to transform its delivery model to align with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and broader industry reforms. CEOs and their executive teams are tasked with reinventing their organizations to meet the call for a more patient-eccentric, value-based approach while simultaneously managing traditional, volume-based models.

What’s the score? Are CEOs and other C-suite leaders successfully adapting to this unprecedented paradigm shift, or is it too early to judge? Are there accepted paths to successful enterprise-wide transformation? What new playbook “plays” or strategies are proving most effective?

To find answers to these and other questions, we recently held candid conversations with 20 CEOs across the U.S. from a diverse cross-section of healthcare delivery systems. We heard first-hand about changes they are making to transform their organizations, along with the myriad challenges they and their teams are facing along the way.Change Implementation and Management Plan Paper

Unilaterally, the CEOs’ sentiments echoed what we hear during our daily work with healthcare executives: The healthcare world with which they are accustomed has turned upside down. The primary purpose of hospitals has changed from providing care within their four walls to keeping patients healthy in and out of the hospital.

CEOs must define new strategies for their organizations to succeed. They must establish a cohesive system of care by engaging physicians and improving efficiencies, quality, safety and the patient experience. These demands are forcing them to address their senior talent, as each member must be invested in the process and capable of leading an integrated system.

Considering the CEOs’ perspectives and our insights gained from working directly with C-level executives, we posit the following five strategies as the core of the healthcare industry’s new playbook.

exist. Regardless of a healthcare system’s size or complexity, breaking through legacy silos and diminishing traditional fragmentation of care are key to creating a successful integrated and patient- centered delivery model. An initial step is defining “integration,” with the leadership team identifying the hurdles a system needs to overcome and defining an iterative change process.

Traditionally, senior leaders have been tasked with oversight of their respective business units and some system-wide decisions. Today’s playbook calls for a “team-at-the-top” demonstrating true integration, across vertical and horizontal boundaries of care, both within and well outside of the hospital structure. Moving in this direction calls for the team to develop a shared and clear strategic direction around provision of care. Wrestling with an array of complex issues, including infrastructure requirements, organizational structure, partnerships, efficiencies and culture is central to the job of architectonic a delivery system positioned for long-term viability.

2. The CEO is the primary agent of change. In the past, a CEO was lauded for being an excellent hospital administrator with strong financial and operational acumen. Today, expectations of the CEO are undergoing a material shift.

We’ve all heard the saying that “change is always good,” right? Wrong. Change is a constant at every organization, but employees have quickly become the number one opponent of change. There are several different reasons why employees have learned to resist change, but the primary reason is the bad management of change in the workplace.

Do you love change management? If so, you most likely also hate bad management of change. In companies, the managers and advisors are the ones who have to implement change, but that’s where the problem arises. When managers are just the messengers, they don’t possess the training and knowledge necessary to be a competent “agent of change,” which leads to poor communication between the C-suite and the general employee.Change Implementation and Management Plan Paper

Unfortunately, most employees won’t respond to change with the happiness and glee that is expected; companies need to understand that there is going to be resistance. Let’s face it: people prefer stability and comfort over change in both their personal and professional lives. Though it’s much easier to live inside the comfort of normal day-to-day life, change happens and is always going to be something that needs to be handled. Over the past few years, change has become a norm in the business world. Companies that can manage change with ease will have the upper hand over their competition.

Although change management decisions are normally made at the C-level, it’s still very important to have the rest of the employees bought in to the change. Having employees who are opposed to what is going to be changing from the start is a major setback and one that needs to be dealt with carefully in order to be successful with the change management.

Job loss is a major reason that employees resist change in the workplace. In any business, there are constantly going to be things moving and changing, whether it is due to the need for more efficiency, better turnaround times, or the need for the employees to work smarter. With all these needs comes the opportunity for the company to downsize or create new jobs, and this is where the fear of job loss comes into play.

Communication solves all ills. But a lack of it creates more of them. This is another crucial reason why employees oppose change. How the change process itself is communicated to the employees is very important because it determines how they react. If the process of what needs to be changed, how it needs to be changed and what success would look like cannot be communicated, then resistance should be expected. Employees need to understand why there is a need for change, because if they are just thrown the notion that what they have been used to for a long time is going to be completely renovated, with that will come much backlash.

Trust is a vital tool to have when running a successful business. In organizations where there is a lot of trust in management, there is lower resistance to change. Mutual mistrust between management and employees will lead to the company going into a downward spiral, so trust is a must.Change Implementation and Management Plan Paper

We already mentioned communication, and a lack of it causes employees to feel like they don’t know what’s going on. If companies are constantly experiencing times where the future is unknown, there is also a good possibility that employees won’t respond to change well. When the thought of change is brought up in this case, it would come as a surprise, leading to employees being caught off guard, which makes the situation much worse.

Implementation and Management Plan