We are currently working with a chain of hospitals that have been in existence for over 15 years, to help them bring about a desired shift in culture. They are a multi-specialty hospital with approximately 2,000 employees across their 6 units. Their vision is to be a leading hospital and deal with and overcome complex situations. They are involved in intensive research & development and work hard towards educating their patients. Their current focus is to enhance their overall customer experience by encouraging a cultural shift that is more patient centric in order to match the quality of service offered at top-class hospitals around the world.

Situation

With the modern-day healthcare and hospital systems undergoing major transformations. Increasing numbers of people are insisting on elevated patient experience. The industry is taking up hospitality even more seriously alongside delivering excellence in medical treatments.

This leading chain of hospitals in India realized the urgent need to improve patient experience so that they remain competitive in the changing business landscape. They realized they needed to align their service quality with patients’ expectations, improve productivity, lower costs, and create differentiated capabilities for care and empathy. They came to the conclusion that by upgrading their attitudes and values to be more service oriented and patient-centric, they could finally achieve an even more significant business transformation.

Action

We knew that to mobilize the company toward a more empowering culture, we first needed to work together to develop a compelling purpose to rally employees. We started by opening a dialogue with key stakeholders in the organization to assess the current culture and learn about employee aspirations for a future state culture. We conducted interviews and focus groups - hearing from more than 800 employees representing all demographics, regions, functions, and job levels. We engaged the executive leadership team in a spirited, iterative process to identify areas where they were already aligned and areas where they needed further discussion and alignment. This interactive and collaborative exercise gave the team the space to explore many diverse options for values, and it gave them permission to be open, excited, and moved by the work they do - which was the first key step in helping them create a more inspiring story.

Moving the organization from its current culture towards the desired culture required creating programs and practices to inspire leaders, managers, and employees to live their new values every day. We created a multi-tiered strategy to activate the desired culture:

• galvanize commitment by increasing awareness and understanding
• embed the desired culture aims as functional values in business-wide processes and policies, including people programs
• Strategize a new managerial wing to drive and cascade this culture through the organization
• Assimilate and train teams with required skills to reflect the new culture
• design, and implement a program to create high-performing teams, starting with critical teams responsible for key areas of business transformation.

We are currently working on the implementation of our process design to ensure this culture shift is completely adopted across all existing and future units of this hospital chain.

Outcome

The desired outcome of this engagement is

Through our holistic, people-centered approach we seek to build on organizational cultural strengths and make people part of the solution.

• To promote hands-on engagement and support from the CEO and executive leadership team to enable a cascading effect for the culture shift.
• Align policies, programs, and processes to the behaviors inherent in the new values and ensure that the correlation between culture work and business success is understood by all those affected by the culture change
• Enable managers and leaders to demonstrate the new values through their words and actions
• Ensure that all key stakeholders are equipped to deliver the desired patient experience across all units of their hospital.