Team Collaboration and Communication: Engaging Non-Clinical Employees Who Don’t Deal Directly with Patients

A focus on team collaboration and communication is crucial to our patient care missions, commitment to quality, HCAHPS, Value-Based Purchasing, data transparency and professional pride. Most organizations are stepping up efforts to enhance the patient experience and create a culture of patient-centered care. Wanting to mobilize and engage ALL employees to focus on the people they ultimately serve, most patient experience champions want to include all employ­ees, not only direct caregivers, but also non-clinical employees, in their improvement initiatives. But walk into a workshop room, face a mixed group of the people who provide direct patient care and the ones who don't, and you'll quickly hear from the ones who don't, “Why am I here? I don't deal directly with patients!” That's the hue and cry of many healthcare employees from Finance, Computer Services, Market­ing, Human Resources, Materials Management, Building and Grounds, Maintenance and numerous other departments that make a healthcare organization work, albeit behind-the-scenes. In response, the workshop facilitators voice their deeply held beliefs about team collaboration and communication, especially:

• “Everyone has an impact on patient care. And the more you see the impact you have, the more you will feel good about your work and your contribution.”
• “We either serve patients or we serve the people who do. We all have INTERNAL CUSTOMERS who rely on us to provide direct service to patients. That's why how we collaborate and communicate with each other matters so much.”

While these excellent points convince some employees, many remain unconvinced of the importance of team collaboration and make no effort to improve how they communicate with their coworkers, with people in other departments or with patients, visitors and coworkers in hallways, elevators and the cafeteria. They just feel disconnected from the ultimate patient care mission.

What to Do?

In workshops, we can incorporate more examples of skills applied to situations among coworkers and between departments—internal customer scenarios of team collaboration and communication. We can include exercises that require partici­pants to apply the skills to the specific situations they face in their jobs. But that will not be enough, because I believe many of our leadership teams have failed to build a service-oriented mindset and culture among employees who don't provide direct pa­tient care. We have defined the job around the technical skills needed to perform the tasks of the job. We have not defined the job to include effective communication and cooperation with every person with whom we interact. Workshops can't fix this. Leaders need to fix this. MANY factors influence a non-clinical employee's openness to communication skill-building and performance improvement.

Do an Audit:  Are the Drivers in Place in Your Organization?

I took a stab at creating a chart that shows some of the many influences on top drivers of a customer orienta­tion on the part of your support employees. Which are in place? Which can you strengthen to enhance the customer focus and openness to team collaboration and communication skills improvements in your IT, Marketing, HR, Finance, Mate­rials Management, and other support departments?

• Manager as Role Model:  Does the manager communicate with caring and respect in interactions with their own team members, people from other departments and the public? Or does the manager create a silo of activity that remains disconnected from the mission of the organization?
• Department Mission: Is there a department mission that makes it clear that the department exists not only to perform the technical tasks of the job, but also to support everyone in the organization, since all together everything we do impacts the patient?
• Hiring: Does your hiring process include behavioral interview questions that reveal an applicant's com­munication skills and service orientation? Can the applicant answer a question about how their job con­tributes to patient care?
• Alignment Discussion: Does the manager engage their team in discussion of how they contribute to pa­tient care---the chain of interactions starting with them that ultimately affects the patient? Ask: “How does your job connect to our mission of providing high quality, compassionate healthcare to pa­tients and their families?”  Click here for a leadership meeting activity that helps managers of support departments that operate behind the scenes design and articulate a compelling case why their employees need excellent communication skills.
• Job Description and Expectations: What are the elements in people's job descriptions? Just the tasks of the job? If so, of course people will dismiss the need to sharpen their communication skills with coworkers and other departments. Each person's job description and job expectations need to connect the person's job to the patient! Consider bricklayers. Some define their job as laying bricks. Others define their job as building cathedrals. Does the manager define the job as “laying bricks” or “building cathedrals”? The person who sees the job as laying bricks is not going to see their relevance to the ca­thedral. The person whose job it is to help build a cathedral will be much more likely to embrace the importance of their role to the ultimate mission. Click here for five concrete examples.
• Feedback and Coaching: Does the manager ever survey their department's internal customers to ASK them what's working and what isn't between them? Do managers take note of team collaboration and communication with people from other departments and intervene to provide feedback, suggestions and coaching?
• Recognition:  Do certain staff members make a point of communicating with caring to the other employ­ees they serve or support—to their internal customers? Does the manager recognize this behavior both privately and publicly to call attention to what's working?
• Consequences/Accountability:  Do managers watch and listen for times when their employees are taking shortcuts on team collaboration or communicating in a disrespectful or even lackluster way? When certain employees become the focus of complaints from their internal customers in other departments, is there a consequence?
• Skill-Building: And finally, do leaders provide communication skill training to support (or technically-oriented) employees or include them in housewide training? Or does the leader say, “It's not relevant to my staff, and we don't have time”? And if they DO include their employees in communication skill train­ing, do they do the necessary follow-up to ensure that their team members apply the skills to their spe­cific jobs even if the skills might have been demonstrated with mostly patient care examples?  Click here for concrete communication situations involving support employees.

The Language of Caring for Staff® teaches the Heart-Head-Heart™ Model and seven skills for communicating with heart. I find it alarming to hear people say that support employees don't need these skills. They do! And they need their leaders to help them apply them to THEIR roles so they enhance their contribution to the organization's patient care mission.