As any leader in the healthcare sector will tell you, getting engagement is one of the biggest challenges you face. With so many different stakeholders what can leaders do to try and improve engagement?
Get A Clear Picture Of Who Your Stakeholders Are
You can probably make a good stab at identifying the really obvious stakeholders. On the other hand is there a definitive list of all the stakeholders in your organisation?
Identify The Needs Of Different Stakeholders
Once you have created a list of stakeholders, the next step is to sit down and consider their needs. Chances are you will be able to identify the needs of employees pretty quickly. After all you are an employee yourself who happens to be in a leadership role. On the other hand what about the needs of stakeholders like patients’ relatives or even other healthcare partners?
Get Them Involved
10 years ago this might have been much more difficult than it is today. Back then you may well have been reliant on users of services creating paper based surveys. These days with advances in social media it is much easier to get stakeholders engaged.
Think About Keep In Touch Strategies
You may well be able to put communications into the payslips of employees. What about other stakeholders? How do you keep them informed? Perhaps it could be through a blog, an electronic newsletter or even a group on somewhere like LinkedIn or Facebook or even little updates via Twitter.
Actively Seek Their Views
Running surveys use to be expensive. These days it can be done online at a very low cost. Simply asking people for their e-mail when they use services could allow you to subsequently e-mail them with a survey to learn about their experiences and satisfaction. It can easily become part of your routine performance measurement.
The Bottom Line: The word engagement is banded around a lot these days and in many respects it is just another form of communicating. So what might you do to improve stakeholder engagement within your organisation?