Preparing for significant change throughout their organization, marketing and communications leaders at a 400-bed not-for-profit regional health system wanted to optimize their team’s service standards and behaviors for maximum performance. The team was strong, but saw the need to develop ground rules for superior performance and service with internal stakeholders.

We began with an interactive workshop for marketing and communications leaders to discuss bright spots, behaviors associated with top-performing teams and gaps and opportunities for improvement. From their feedback, we developed a set of service standards and behaviors underpinned by the organization’s mission and values. We also created service level agreements between team members and internal stakeholders to codify how they will work together to advance priorities. We then introduced both the service standards and agreements through department-level workshops hosted by each team lead. Critically, these behaviors were not presented in a prescriptive manner, but as a mission-oriented goal for the team to discuss and align with. Team members were asked to rank the behaviors and highlight those that the team were performing well, along with areas to improve and specific ways to apply the concepts in their day-to-day work.