Driving Engagement and Culture Change in Healthcare

A leading integrated healthcare system, encompassing multiple regional hospitals, had already achieved remarkable success in promoting equality, delivering exceptional patient experiences, and maintaining robust financial health. But to reach even greater heights of excellence, they recognized the need to fully engage the potential and enthusiasm of their entire 8,000-strong workforce.

Achieving a Unified Culture

To achieve its goal of workplace culture change, the healthcare system turned to DDI.

They used content from DDI’s Leadership Development Subscription to train both its leaders and individual contributors to communicate better with each other. With an Enterprise Subscription, they benefitted from unlimited seats and the most flexibility to integrate DDI content into development for their entire workforce.

Developing Employees from Individual Contributors to Senior Leaders

This healthcare organization knew they needed an approach to develop all employees—not just people leaders. To improve employee engagement, development had to span all levels of leadership.

One of the most important outcomes of the program was to establish a collaborative environment where everyone’s voice could be heard. That meant they prioritized equipping leaders to learn how to ask the right questions and listen, rather than tell, to nurture their reports. Individual contributors received the same training, which gave everyone a shared understanding of how to interact with one another.

Essential Skills for Positive Interactions

The organization knew how important it was for leaders to connect with others. DDI’s Key Principles and Interaction Essentials offer a framework to guide workplace interactions and help others feel understood, valued, involved, and supported.

Together, these models set a new expectation for interactions—engaging employees in their work and with each other to shift the culture. For example, guidelines for coaching taught managers how to empower their employees to better leverage their time while staff polished their ability to build meaningful relationships with their coworkers.

Because staff and leaders were trained with the same materials and concepts, they gained a common language to help them understand one another better and solve problems as a team. For example, if a staff member brought a challenging situation to their manager, both were quick to jump to their shared tools—like a discussion planner—to problem-solve together.

With an Enterprise Subscription, employees had access to a breadth of supportive tools such as microcourses, games, and other learning aids.

The Vice President of Learning pointed to the variety of tools as a great benefit to their team. The healthcare system leveraged the tools to get the best value from their investment—and to ensure that their employees retained their new knowledge.

Measuring Culture Change

To show the effectiveness of the program, the healthcare system needed to be able to measure actual behavior change. They leveraged engagement surveys to understand employees’ perceptions of the culture. They found that leaders were empowered to nurture their teams through conversation. This led to increased engagement throughout the company.

Within a short time after introducing DDI’s courses and tools, the Learning and Development team was already noticing positive changes. In fact, staff and leaders were having more effective conversations with one another leveraging essential concepts like the Key Principles. Not only that, but employees shared feedback that they used their new skills in their everyday personal lives.

They knew sweeping change wouldn’t happen overnight. But they started strong with a three-year plan. Of course, leadership development isn’t a set and forget responsibility. The healthcare system partnered with DDI to revisit their strategy regularly and evaluate necessary changes. This helped them continuously progress towards their goals.

Creating a Better Healthcare Experience

The results? They’re building stronger relationships and having better conversations. And when a conflict comes up, they have the common tools and language to solve the problem. Most of all, they’re well on their way to seeing measurable progress toward culture change.

What excites me the most is I believe we're making a difference in people's lives. When people come into work and they have skills and they have the energy they need to be able to work with their colleagues, the bottom line is that helps our patients and their family.

Vice President of Learning

And at the end of the day, the culture and relationships driven by these healthcare leaders create a better healthcare experience for their patients and their families.