Get people talking
You need to find a way to tap into the hearts and minds of your employees when plotting a major change. They are the ones working in the trenches every day who understand how things get done in your business.
You can get the ball rolling by just being direct about what it is that you’re looking to do and what you want from them.
“This is what’s going on,” Linares says. “These are the areas that we need to improve on. This is the goal. Effective communication really goes a long way. Letting them know, ‘Hey, I need your help. I need your input.’”
But what if that’s not enough to get employees to open up to you? What if they can’t overcome the fear that you’ll hate their idea?
In that case, Linares suggests trying this approach.
“What’s been effective for me is basically telling them, ‘Look, we don’t have an open checkbook,” Linares says. “But if we had an open checkbook and if you could ask for anything, let’s list it.’ It’s being very up front. ‘Is this a must have? Is this really a necessity?’ You talk it out with the staff.”
By erasing that financial obstacle, at least for a moment, you can open the door to ideas that might otherwise never be mentioned.
“It’s a hypothetical situation,” Linares says. “But at least it will let us write everything down on a piece of paper. Then we can together say, ‘Look, we can’t do all 10 of these things because we can’t afford it. It’s not realistic. But guess what? We can do three of these things. So let’s agree on the three that are the most important for the success of this department or the success of this service area.’”
This approach helped Linares learn about a potential opportunity to help people suffering from diabetes. Fortunately for diabetics, this was a problem he could solve.
“We had an employee here that was diagnosed with onset diabetes,” Linares says. “We had talked to a lot of our medical staff and they said they were seeing more and more instances, particularly of onset diabetes. That kind of triggered our thought process to look at the demographics of our community. We said, ‘Perhaps we need to create a diabetes outpatient center for these new onset diabetic cases.’”
North Shore opened its diabetes treatment center in 2009, and it has proven to be quite successful, with a first-year 86 percent growth rate.
The key to getting this kind of useful feedback is for you to be open and let your employees dictate the tone of the conversation. If they seem to want to talk about something other than your primary topic, don’t be afraid to let it go off topic for a bit.
You can always bring it back to what you want to address, but don’t rush the conversation. Do what you can to help people feel comfortable and you can learn a lot from them.
“It’s talking to employees on a more personal basis, opening up a dialogue that’s more informal” Linares says. “Then, at that point, start to ask questions: ‘What’s going on in your area? What are the challenges that you had? What are some things we can do to make your job better?’
“I will make myself available to speak to an employee. That has provided very good feedback almost instantaneously about things that are going on in the hospital and things we can do to improve in the hospital.”
