Three Essential Pillars for Creating a Healthy Organizational Culture

One of our greatest responsibilities as healthcare leaders is setting the tone for our organizational culture. Culture is the air we breathe at work—the shared attitudes and beliefs of our employees, the environment we create for our team and our patients, the expectations we set, the standards we hold, the values that drive us, and the feelings we experience in the workplace.

Culture is the baseline for everything at our health systems and we must intentionally strive to create a healthy culture to preserve the integrity of our organization, build trust with our patients, and drive our organizational mission forward.

The Importance of a Healthy Organizational Culture

When we fail to uphold a culture of excellence, openness, and consistency, we lose the respect of key stakeholders and confidence in our organizational brand begins to erode.

If the promises we make in our marketing and messaging do not match up with what’s actually experienced in practical interactions, patients will eventually begin to doubt our credibility as providers. If the real, lived experience of working at our organization doesn’t match what an employee was sold in the hiring stage, they’ll also begin to lose faith in our organization and seek alternative employment.

We need to get our culture right and creating an authentic, transparent, and human-centric environment where everyone feels welcomed, supported, and able to thrive doesn’t happen by default. It must happen by design.

The Three Pillars for Building a Healthy Organizational Culture

So how exactly do we begin to build a healthy organizational culture? We need to invest our time, energy, and resources into three essential pillars:

1. Engagement:

Building engagement must be a key focus as we build a healthy organizational culture, because without happy, healthy, and thriving employees, every initiative we attempt as an organization will falter.

If employees do not feel supported, encouraged, well-resourced, and inspired by their work, they’ll bring a shell of themselves to each task. When they’re not engaged, they won’t be motivated to give their very best, to go the extra mile, or to offer greater service and compassionate care to our patients.

We need our employees to be fully engaged so they can bring their best ideas to bear, share their creativity and passions, and help our organizations to continually improve. Any investment in improving the wellbeing of our team will pay dividends as our employees are our greatest strategic asset in implementing positive organizational change.

2. Experience:

When our patients and customers have increasingly more options for how to meet their healthcare needs, the experience they have while receiving care becomes even more vital.

We can no longer get by on a transactional model of service, simply meeting the need before us and moving right on to the next. We must now offer a highly attentive, personalized, and deeply connected experience that offers a transformational result to those we serve.

The rise of consumerism, the ubiquity of technology, and the power of choice are not a threat to our hospitals, but rather, a gift. These changes are calling us higher and challenging us to a new level of greatness.

Through experience design and touchpoint communication mapping, we can actively engage with every individual who seeks us out to receive care and leave them surprised, delighted, and deeply cared for, creating passionate brand ambassadors who refer other patients to our health system and themselves remain loyal for years to come.

3. Innovation:

Innovation is an essential pillar for a healthy organizational culture because it challenges us to be constantly improving, pushing our limits, and implementing new methods and treatments to provide best-in-class care.

Without an attention to innovation, our health system will gain a reputation for being stale, stalling out, and lacking relevance. We’ll continue to lose patients and employees to the competition and our hope for impact and service to the community will be diminished.

We must keep innovation at the forefront and constantly strive to streamline our processes, improve quality, provide more attentive service, and increase access to essential care in order to remain the provider of choice for consumers with increasingly more options.

A Strong Foundation and Streamlined Approach

Engagement, experience, and innovation are foundational to building a healthy culture.

Supporting our employees, wowing our patients, and staying on the cutting edge will help us ensure our organization is healthy, attractive, supportive, and competitive long into the future.

Streamlining our approach with strategies built around these three pillars allows us to deeply attend to what matters most. Keeping our focus on systematically improving each of these areas will ensure we’re making the right investments at the right time to get the results that we need.

Using Engagement, Experience, and Innovation to Build a Healthy Culture

As we work with health systems to put these three essential pillars into practice, we like to address the work as chapters in a book.

We know each of these projects is essential to writing a great organizational story, and each will build upon the others as we deepen our commitment to crafting a healthy culture and begin to increase our influence, relevance, and impact.

Let’s take a look at the key initiatives and project sprints we recommend to help you craft a healthy organizational culture:

1. Mission, Vision, Values: The Heartbeat of Your Culture

Engagement + Experience

This strategy involves defining the heart of the organization and communicating which values, attitudes, and behaviors are necessary to win as an employee and serve our patients well.

Crafting these statements from scratch or revisiting and revamping them to meet our next stage of evolution is essential to building both engagement and experience.

Our Mission, Vision, and Values provide our employees with a clear roadmap for how to succeed in our organization, give them a rallying cry to motivate them, and paint an aspirational vision to work toward that can help them connect to deeper purpose, job satisfaction, and personal fulfillment.

They also help improve patient experience because they offer a consistent set of behaviors and attitudes to guide caregivers in every interaction—ensuring patients are getting the best possible care each and every visit.

2. DEIB Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Perspectives

Engagement + Experience

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging strategies can help with building morale and sustainability by designing a culture that represents a broad spectrum of diverse and unique perspectives, removes historical barriers to service, and feels welcoming and inclusive for all.

DEIB initiatives help improve employee engagement by creating an environment where employees feel they can truly be themselves; have a community that feels representative of who they are and what they’ve experienced; allows them to feel wholeheartedly welcomed, embraced, and celebrated; and where they have every opportunity imaginable to reach their full potential. When employees feel supported, resourced, inspired, and comfortable at our organizations, they’ll stay committed and loyal and won’t be looking to leave.

Committing to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment in our health system also helps improve the patient experience by allowing each individual to feel truly welcomed and supported throughout their entire care journey.

When we’ve intentionally built a strong foundation in each of these initiatives, our patients will have the right messaging, resources, treatments, and avenues of support they need to ensure they are sincerely cared for and their particular health journey, life experiences, and hopes for the future are being elevated to new levels of health and wellbeing while under our care.

3. Leadership Strategy: Empowering the Architects of Change

Engagement + Experience

In a Leadership Development strategy, we’re equipping and empowering all leaders with the knowledge, tools, and resources necessary to increase employee engagement, improve patient experience, and inspire operational innovation.

We build a strong foundation on these three culture pillars, adding ‘building personal resilience’ to their Four Focuses of a Leader, to ensure leaders are investing their valuable time and resources on the initiatives that will have the most powerful impact throughout the whole organization and that the leaders will continue to have the strength, health, and stamina they need to continue to thrive in their roles.

A Leadership Development initiative is foundational to increasing employee engagement as great leaders must create the conditions for each team member to be supported, encouraged, and inspired to be their best. Without a clear leadership strategy and intentional focus on creating a rich and meaningful employee experience, employee attrition skyrockets. Great leaders are key to retaining great employees.

By molding and guiding their employees, leaders can also have a deep impact on improving the patient experience. Visionary leaders can help redesign the patient encounter and create standards of behavior that allow their teams how to take each interaction from simply transactional to transformational.

Engaging leaders at all levels is the most effective means of implementing organizational transformation.

4. Employee Engagement Strategy: Nurturing Growth + Fulfillment

Engagement + Innovation

To create our employee engagement strategy, we’ll develop a master plan around each of the Seven Stages of Employee Engagement to deliver custom experiences at each touchpoint, set clear expectations, and build an environment for employees to thrive.

The Seven Stages of Employee Engagement gives senior leaders a comprehensive approach to increasing employee engagement —a major improvement from one-off strategies like a quarterly pizza party or discounted swag from the employee store.

Holistically recreating and redesigning the employee experience—and making a plan to thoughtfully build engagement as the employee grows and evolves throughout their career—will require us to be innovative and continue to push our edge.

We’ll have to remain adaptable and receptive, listening to our employees’ feedback, staying in touch with shifting cultural demands, and getting creative with opportunities to provide greater compensation, recognition, growth, and opportunities to serve, to help them stay connected, inspired, and fulfilled in their role.

5. Recruitment Strategy: Attracting + Retaining TOp Talent

Engagement + Innovation

While redesigning our recruitment strategy, we’ll be defining a robust employer brand identity, communicating value to current employees, prospects, and the larger community, and deploying targeted marketing and engagement strategies to maximize our recruitment efforts.

The touchpoints of Hiring and Welcoming within the recruiting process are our first and most potent opportunities to build employee engagement, setting a strong impression for what to expect and how to find fulfillment while working within our organization.

The recruiting process is also a fertile ground for innovation, as the new labor market demands that we modify our approach and methods of engagement—improving our communication styles and employing evolving best practices for next generation job seekers.

We’ll also have to get creative redesigning strategies that are no longer working—moving from a squeaky wheel approach to strategic recruitment, a model that leverages key partnerships and deploys a strong employer brand identity to attract top talent that will be a better cultural fit.

6. Innovation Strategy: Cultivating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Innovation + Experience

With an innovation strategy, we’ll work to build a culture of innovation where employees look for opportunities for improvement and are empowered and incentivized to bring forth solutions. Then, we’ll create systems and tools that support the strategic growth and evolution of your entire organization.

A commitment to innovation will allow us to improve both the employee and patient experience.

Innovation in healthcare is always at the service of improving the quality, service, access, and outcomes of the care experience for our patients. Through innovation initiatives, we can improve access to information and caregivers, offer new methods of care delivery, improve convenience and comfort, and provide cutting-edge, world-class treatments.

Every step toward innovation also challenges our employees to grow and evolve and will continue to inspire them toward greater engagement and fulfillment in their roles at our organization. Their experience will be enriched as they embrace these new avenues of service and care delivery and grow into their next level of contribution.

7. Patient Experience Strategy: Elevating Care to New Heights

Innovation + Experience

With a patient experience strategy, we’ll be redesigning key touchpoints and interactions to deliver transformational experiences—improving access and reimagining delivery to increase convenience, connection, and quality of care.

A patient experience strategy is all about innovating our approach to each stage of the patient’s experience and challenging ourselves to get more creative, compassionate, and cutting-edge in all that we do.

We can recreate the patient experience through by adopting new conversation models, improving our bedside manner, adjusting environmental factors, adopting evolving best practices, deploying new treatments, using digital tools and AI to decrease friction and allow for seamless access to care, etc.

There is truly no limit to how we can innovate to better connect and care for our patients.

Writing Your Culture Book

Undertaking organizational transformation may seem incredibly daunting at first, but adopting this simplified and streamlined approach and focusing on the three pillars of engagement, experience, and innovation will ensure that every step toward transformation is hitting a high-impact, mission critical area and getting you maximum results from your efforts.

Just as a great author writes their novel one chapter at a time, you can work toward substantial organizational transformation one initiative and strategy at a time. You can write your culture book step-by-step by deploying targeted strategy sprints to help you stay on track and gaining real traction on your goals.

To figure out where to start and how to begin building a healthy culture with these three pillars, schedule a free consult with our team.