Looking To Improve Your Business? Listen To Your Team. By DPHA Fellow Jeffrey Valles, Colonial Bronze

It was mid May 2020 and I had just finished a webinar hosted by hospitals all over Canada and the US who were cleaning up after their first wave of Covid-19 patients. It had been a harrowing experience. Healthcare individuals went in knowing little to nothing, and now they had an understanding of what had worked and a vision of the future. The webinar’s panel consisted of the heads of Princeton and Stanford hospital divisions, the head of healthcare design at Gensler and the C.E.O of The Center for Health Design. It was a heavyweight group and they all agreed that when they accepted their first Covid-19 patients, they had no real plan and empowered their staff do whatever they thought best. Process was thrown aside and these top institutions were flying by the seat of their employee’s pants. One gentleman openly told us that he was completely overwhelmed and without the insight and inventiveness of his staff, the situation would have been much worse.

They all described amazing homemade protective outfits, industrious engineers utilizing four foot diameter tubing to re-route an entire floors airflow and new, effective triage processes that saved patients and employees lives. The nurses, engineers and custodial teams worked together to fabricate on-the-fly solutions to keep the spaces clean, the patients isolated and create safe accessibility to deliver exemplary healthcare.

These professionals were living in an entirely new situation. They leveraged their many years of experience to create solutions to situations the healthcare world had never seen. Management knew this and listened, acting to create the best situation for everyone’s success. If they asked for something, they got it. NO questions asked. This is a classic example of bottom up learning. Management trusted their employees and were rewarded with stellar results.

Your employees are every bit as talented at what they do, or they would not be your employee. They know their job and consistently deliver solid results. So why not heavily involve them in all your process decisions and give them the tools they request to improve their performance?

In many successful companies, management allows its employees the space to handle their day-to-day situations as they see fit. But rarely does management sit down with their individual team members to learn what company policies are getting in the way and what support tools are lacking. Every day your company has access to valuable information and in many companies all that insight remains locked inside your employee’s brains.

I suggest that you and your managers casually meet with each employee individually, listening to better understand their world and learn what they think is the best way for them to perform at a higher level.

These meetings must be one-on-one. If they are in a group, the loudest member of that team will drown out the more introspective people, and others will fear their ideas will be judged negatively by the group. When you meet with people privately, many people will be more comfortable and will find it easier to share their thoughts. With so much to gain, it is worth the extra time to meet privately.

For the best results, I suggest the meeting follow this simple process:

1. Let the employee know you value their work and you are trying to better understand their day-to-day situations and learn how to help them improve.
2. The first question is WHAT are the situations they dealing with?
3. When they describe a newly emerging issue, ask them how they handle it and what tools do they need. Here it is important to stay away from asking WHY you need that. WHY is this happening, A WHY question here can lead the discussion into personal feelings and that is not the reason for the discussion. You want to learn what is happening, how they are handling and what can be done to make it easier for them to succeed.

If you decide you are going to embark on this learning process, you cannot interview your employees and do nothing. They need to see their honest thoughts acted upon. If you talk with everyone and nothing happens, you have lost short term and long term opportunities to improve your business. Your employees will not trust the process the next time and you will have likely damaged your company’s culture.

Carrying out this process to its end will allow you to gain more insight into your company, increase your empathy for your employees, generate wonderful ways to support and improve your teams and enhance your company’s culture.

Remember: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Quotation attributed to the late business management guru Peter Drucker.