Keep asking questions
As much effort as you make to work with your team and include others in a project, you still need to make sure everybody else knows what you’ve been up to. Whether that’s the rest of your employees or, in Gabbe’s case, the employees, students and faculty at OSU, you need to share your story with the masses.
And you need to do it before you’ve carved it all in stone.
“You want to do it at a point in time when the plan remains open to change,” Gabbe says. “This is going to be the largest building we’ve ever built at Ohio State and it’s going to be something they are going to pass by or be in every day. They need to feel they had the opportunity to be part of the planning. That was a key question. We wanted to have enough information so they could react to the plan. We wanted to have enough time so we can respond to their constructive criticism.”
Don’t just rely on one meeting to present and wrap everything up. People need an opportunity to hear about what you’re doing, mull it over, and then come back and raise their concerns or ask questions.
“We presented to them the overall design, but we also presented to them a number of different options we had for the hospital plan,” Gabbe says. “‘Here’s how we could do it. Which of these options do you prefer? Here’s how we could do that. Which of those options do you prefer?’ They could come and they could hear the plan and they could participate in the audience response, they could participate in a question-and-answer session, and they could send us their comments to a website so we could review those, as well.”
You should also let people know how they will be affected and be thorough and thinking about the impact of your project on the business, aside from the project itself.
“For example, we know the construction on our campus has disrupted traffic and we know it has made parking more difficult,” Gabbe says. “We tried to do everything we could to get out in front of those plans and let people know why we were doing what we were doing.”
If people have concerns, go out of your way to address them and give the person everything you can to either allay their fears or show that you’re addressing the issue.
“It’s what people don’t know that can be the risk,” Gabbe says. “People then begin to imagine or project. It’s always best when people understand what the finances look like. It’s just very important. There were no secrets. If people said something was wrong or something wasn’t right, we worked together until we were convinced we had the right projections for the future.”
Gabbe and his team worked through the multitude of issues that needed to be addressed and met the challenge. Work on the new James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute is expected to be completed by 2014.
By 2015, the entire expansion to the OSU Medical Center is expected to add more than 10,000 full-time jobs in Ohio, in addition to the 5,000 construction jobs that will have been needed. The center takes in about $1.8 billion in operating revenue each year, but the expansion project is expected to create an additional economic impact of $1.7 billion by 2015.
“It was a great privilege and opportunity to be part of planning something that would make a difference in people’s lives every day for years and years to come,” Gabbe says.
He credits the openness and transparency of his team’s efforts for the successful outcome.
“The communication plan when you’re doing something as big and impactful as this is almost as important and maybe just as important as the plan for the new building itself,” Gabbe says.
How to reach: The Ohio State University Medical Center, (800) 293-5123 or http://medicalcenter.osu.edu.
