Red e App recently published a whitepaper entitled “Strange Bedfellows: The Convergence of Innovation and Compliance in Long Term Care” – focused on the future of the long-term healthcare workforce, the role technology will play, and why compliance and innovation must coexist. This post is an excerpt from the full document, focusing on the primary considerations when maximizing communications, and is part of a series of blogs that will be released discussing various topics from the whitepaper.
There are two primary considerations when it comes to maximizing the impact of communications.
- What you are going to communicate – what is the content that is going to resonate most with the recipients and how do the needs of these stakeholder groups vary; and
- How are you going to communicate – not all message types or communication platforms are equal
We briefly touched on the importance of purpose in the blog on work trust, which speaks to the what.
To recap, Work trust is a behavioral outcome that results from an organization’s quantitative and qualitative investment in creating a culture of care that enables strong operational leadership and empowers the workforce.
Work trust most often exhibits itself in the form of a feeling of being supported, empowered, and part of a collective for the betterment of both the individual and the whole. Work trust is central to a healthy ecosystem whereby individuals, and by association, a company, can thrive. It’s also a critical driver for employee engagement. Qualitatively, the behaviors exhibited by leadership have a marked impact on work trust, which in turn can be measured by levels of employee engagement, performance, and retention.
In this section, we are focusing mostly on the how. Let’s start by understanding the four basic message types that are typically used in a work setting. These can be described as:
A. Broadcast messages are pushed out to everyone in an organization and are typically used for company-wide announcements, alerts, and updates. Those allowed to initiate this type of message are normally limited to a handful of individuals.
B. Team Messages are effective for group messaging that allows for ‘reply all’ to everyone in the group. Anyone in a pre-designated group can initiate or reply to a message.
C. Peer-to-Peer messages function effectively like personal, one-to-one, messages most commonly used with texting and other popular social applications. Frequently, this mode of messaging will include read receipts that cannot be disabled.
D. Notifier messages are broadcast messages sent out by operational leaders at all levels of an organization. Designed correctly, notifier messages can be sent to many, but allow for responses that thread one-to-one. This eliminates noise and provides a powerful mechanism for leaders to drive engagement with teams and individuals.
The perfect mix for use of various message types changes according to organizational needs. For most non-desk organizations, and for healthcare in particular, it is clear that leadership-centric operational infrastructure design is critical to effective communication. Red e App, a provider of operational communications infrastructure for industries that have the majority of non-desk workers, analyzed more than 30 million messages sent over its platform from January 2020 to early December 2020 and found that healthcare organizations utilized Notifier messages nearly 58% of the time, compared to only 17.5% across all other industries. Why? It comes back to the alignment between long-term care and servant leadership, which necessitates and prioritizes operational leader-led communication.
In our next post in the series, we will discuss caring for those who care.
In the meantime, read the entirety of “Strange Bedfellows: The Convergence of Innovation and Compliance in Long Term Care“, and visit us at Redeapp.com to learn more about connecting with your deskless workforce.
