In general, it has gone quite well!
The most recent Topol Digital Fellowship workshop day in Leeds made me reflect on some of the positives and negatives of large-scale digital change and where this will affect my project in the near future.
Change is difficult. Change in healthcare is difficult+++. We are lucky to have a great team who have worked very hard to move us to a new way of working. One of our discussions at the workshop yesterday with Public Digital (https://public.digital/) focused on ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in changing an organisation. One of the ‘soft’ powers was comms.
Throughout the changes our Comms team has been exemplary with keeping people up-to-date with the changes and ensuring the whole trust (of 11,000+ people!) knew what was going on. But since the changes, an overwhelming majoring of the people I have spoken to about ‘going Digital’ have said a similar thing: they don’t know why these changes are happening. All of us were taught to use the system a certain way, but not why.
It has made me understand more about what I will need to concentrate on with my project communications when I get to rolling it out – concentrate on why the changes are happening, and not just what is happening.
If I am to successfully show colleagues that using the system differently will improve their practice and release time to care; they will need to have the insight into the decisions taken, the reasons why the original way isn’t the best, and how this change can be a positive for them.
We would not do most things in life if we were told to “Just do it because I said so”. Why should organisational change be any different?
Now the post-Christmas lull has just about abated, the next stage of my project (re-doing the Time and Motion Study) has started and I am able to start creating the new way of working, the ‘To-Be’ model!