How to Ensure Effective Communication of Process Improvement Initiatives to All Stakeholders

Learn how to ensure effective communication strategies for process improvement initiatives with stakeholders by conducting stakeholder analysis and implementing continuous optimization.

How to Ensure Effective Communication of Process Improvement Initiatives to All Stakeholders

When it comes to stakeholder communication, transparency, accuracy and communication are essential for success. To ensure this, it is important to identify stakeholders and interact with them at an early stage. This will help build trust between teams and their leaders. To do this, conduct a stakeholder analysis to determine the individual vision, needs, understanding, and desired outcomes for the strategy.

Represent each of the stakeholders on a map that includes whether they are influential people and the level of interest in the particular strategy. This will help prioritize encouraging the communication, commitment and participation of all stakeholders affected by the Quality Improvement (QI) process. It is also important to learn what is most important for the people who make up the microsystem and find ways to help them accept the changes and begin to take charge of them. Monitoring should compare the results of the improved process with the objectives identified at the start of the project.

For example, some health plans have improved their call center operations by sending staff to visit catalog houses, by mail, or brokerage firms. A useful way for health plans and medical groups to approach the improvement process is to think of the organization as a system, or more specifically, as a set of interrelated microsystems. You can also implement a methodology to address gaps in product characteristics compared to competition, improve profitability, and even address labor shortages. You should use the results obtained with this procedure as a sounding board to validate that the changes are actually an improvement. Additionally, consider having employee representatives from frontline teams be part of the planning process or becoming members of a steering committee. Because modifying a process can cause delays or increase costs in the short term while staff catches up with changes, it's best to test process improvements with a handful of participants before implementing them across the team or across the organization.

Health service delivery systems that work to improve the patient experience can face enormous challenges, reflecting the need to align changes in behavior and practices at multiple levels and areas of the organization. In turn, this will improve your overall relationship and help shape the goals and objectives of your project. Repeat this cycle of continuous optimization until you meet or exceed all the reference points of the process. Even before you can take steps to improve processes, you must first define a quantifiable objective or a set of results that you are aiming for. The difference is that a framework is implemented that makes process improvement a conscious part of the company's DNA. The more information you have about the origin of resistance, the more you can help them feel comfortable in a culture of continuous improvement.

You might even consider having employee representatives from frontline teams be part of the planning process or becoming members of a steering committee. If you want to learn more about how to effectively communicate with stakeholders, don't hesitate to contact Swift Digital. This optimization involves going backwards in the process improvement exercise, but the opportunities for additional improvement should be less than those of the first round of changes, which would allow subsequent iterations to advance rapidly.