Health & Medical
Richard Daniels
President and CEO, McCullough-Hyde Memorial Hospital
By Erik Cassano
Smart Business Cincinnati | October 2007
There is a difference between what you think you’re communicating and what other people think you’re communicating. Richard Daniels
first read that message years ago, and it has stuck with him to this day. The president and CEO of McCullough-Hyde Memorial Hospital
in Oxford, which posted 2006 revenue of $48 million, says that internal communication isn’t a simple matter of verbal pitch-and-catch
between a business leader and his or her employees. Instead, it’s a sometimes-complicated process that takes a good deal of maintenance
to keep working. Daniels says good communication takes many forms, both written and spoken. And if you want to truly engage your
employees, keeping them informed and reinforcing your company’s vision and values, then, he says, communication is something you
have to tackle every day. Smart Business spoke with Daniels about how to use communication to empower your work force.
Communicate in many different ways.
Communication is a hard thing to measure. You might think you’re doing a good
job, but you don’t realize it until you get
feedback.
The big issue is how to have some
objectives and evaluation by others as to
whether there is good communication.
The methods we’ve used have been all
sorts of things, everything from direct
working with the managers, the managers working with the staff, attending
meetings within the departments so you
have the direct interaction with your
front-line people.
Every employee gets something in
writing, so there’s not a possibility of distributing it differently or a possibility
that some may read it and some may not.
We try to get things directly into people’s
hands. So it’s all the traditional stuff,
things on bulletin boards that we have
throughout the facility. There really is no
one way to communicate that is more or
less successful than another way.
However, you need to communicate
through different means because some
people are visual people and some are
not. Some people understand communication best verbally. Some understand
better if they have a chance to read it
and think on it. People have different
levels of understanding of the organization or the issues in particular areas.
Particularly in health care, we have
everything from on-the-job training to clerical or environmental services to nutrition
services. Some might not have Ph.D.s but
are people who are very well-educated and
very knowledgeable in very specific areas.
So people have different levels of capabilities in terms of understanding and appreciating the information.
Take an employee’s perspective. I don’t
know who said it first, I read it a long
time ago, but someone said, ‘When you are communicating, there is what you
want to communicate and what you
actually do communicate.’
It’s what the recipient of the communication heard, so there are many factors
that go into how things are communicated and how things are understood. To
expect that one way or method, even if
it’s repetitive, will be successful, that
might not necessarily be the case.
You can never be totally sure that people are hearing what you are saying. You
try to get feedback by directly asking
people or through asking the front-line
managers, ‘How are the people in your
area reacting to the information? Are
you getting questions from people?’ But
it’s still subjective and iffy at best.
Get your best players on the field. The
biggest thing with communicating your
vision would be to set the base, which
would be the values that go with mission
and vision of the organization.
That tends to happen when you get the
core group that has been a part of the
organization for 10, 20 and 30 years involved. They are kind of the base
around which a lot of other people come
and go over time. The longer-term people have kind of internalized in a general
sense the direction of the organization,
the philosophy.
A certain amount of that rubs off on the
other people. That occurs, and the other
part of that is, periodically, you try to
reinforce that with more formal education or training programs or other ways
to get the point across differently.
Recognize your employees. You try to recognize people on a personal basis, by
saying, ‘thank you,’ face-to-face. One of
the advantages of e-mail is that you can
hit a whole bunch of people very quickly
when there is a particular success.
One of the things we started doing several years ago is budget $50 for each
employee in a department, so the department manager has money set aside for
however they want to use it. They can
buy a $10 gift card to give to a person as
a measure of thanks for extra effort.
The point is to give the recognition.
Even though it’s not a big deal in terms
of dollars and cents, it’s a big deal to the
recipient, no matter how large or small it
is. It’s the process of the recognition, not
necessarily the value of the reward itself.
Keep it real. You try to be straightforward
with whatever is going on, so that there
isn’t any hidden information or hidden
agendas. People trust what you are
doing, and you try to be fair and consistent and reasonable with how you go
about change. Things are always bound
to change, and there will always be new
challenges you have to face, which
means you need to have a philosophy
about how you do it.
HOW TO REACH: McCullough-Hyde Memorial Hospital,
www.mhmh.org or (513) 523-2111
