In the fast-changing world of healthcare there’s never been a greater need for employees to adapt their behaviour, enabling them to work in new ways, learn new skills, and have new types of conversations. With the stakes so high and the margin for error so small we need a more science-based and data-driven approach to engaging and empowering healthcare employees to change and excel.
‘Physician heal thyself’ aptly captures the need for precise and rigorous employee engagement and change strategies within healthcare. As an industry we are focused on helping patients live their best lives, yet we are at risk of diminishing the very asset that enables us to deliver on this promise.
Precise and rigorous strategies start with enlightening insights into how your teams function, how they’d like to function and the environment they need in which to thrive. It’s as much about the social as it is the psychological, with an elaborate interplay between individual, group and organisational culture.
Looking through a behavioural science lens enables us to pinpoint the real human motivations and barriers, so we can deliver more meaningful and lasting impact from investments in communications, engagement and change programmes. And by applying proven techniques from the world of behavioural science we can choose precisely the right kinds of tactical interventions to really influence behaviours.
Well, maybe not, but experience tells us that it’s simply not enough in the context of a rapidly changing industry and workplace, to focus on content and experiences. We need to recognise the critical importance of orienting and sensitising individuals and teams to the more visible aspects of an engagement strategy.
Want to have teams draw on a new content library?
Need frontline teams to use a new framework for customer discussions?
Aspire to have teams be more creative?
In each case, the principles of behavioural science enable us to not only deliver that initial change in attitudes, behaviours and performance, but to also systematically put in place structures and processes that maintain these changes to form new long-term behaviours and lasting impact across the business.