Leaders of a regional health system were centralizing operations when they realized employee engagement was low. They decided to address the problem by searching for gaps in their internal communications efforts. Quickly recognizing they needed more resources to do the research, they brought us on board to conduct a thorough audit.

We began by polling employees and interviewing managers about their communications styles, knowledge and use of tools.

Results from those efforts were clear: Employees were receiving information that wasn’t relevant to their work, didn’t connect with the system’s mission and came from a variety of sources. Managers, meanwhile, varied markedly in their comfort and ability to communicate.

To address this, we built a plan to flip the organization’s top-down communications into a two-way relationship between employer and employees.

Elements included:

• A new protocol that drastically reduced “All-Staff” emails, ensured that content was relevant to specific employee populations and was properly curated with the most vital information at the top
• Creation of a new intranet portal to serve as a single, easily accessible, updated source of truth
• Development of a training program for managers to help them communicate clearly to their teams