Even though the people in your unit are overstretched, scarred by the budget ax, and sick to death of change, you’re about to present them with a wrenching new challenge.
It’s your job to get them excited about it. What’s your plan?
I have a story about just such a situation, and, oddly enough, a dress made out of birdseed figures prominently in it. But before I get into that, consider how prevalent this situation is—how often you’ve had to go to your change-weary employees and ask them to dig deep yet again.
Motivating people is difficult under the best of circumstances: As Gallup’s latest State of the American Workplace survey showed, 70% of U.S. employees aren’t engaged at work, a statistic that has not budged much in a decade. Regardless of your industry, if you poll your team, you’ll likely find that they’re feeling overtaxed, and that their “joy quotient” at work is seriously down. But it gets even harder when employees have already faced a series of crises, as is the case with so many workers today (those lucky enough to still have jobs). Just as they’re getting used to doing more with less, you have to motivate them to throw themselves heart and soul into a critically important new initiative.
I keep thinking of the health-care IT professionals I’ve worked with for much of my career and how they must be dreading the long, rough road that lies ahead for them. After years of cutbacks, the latest incarnation of health-care reform is putting intense new financial pressures on hospitals throughout the U.S. These organizations must make new investments, projected to be in the tens of billions of dollars, to implement electronic health records—and they have to find ways to save money at the same time. A lot of this will fall on the IT people.
