Tips for Building a Thriving Workplace Culture — Tips in Ten(ish) Minutes

0:00:07.6 Kirsten Lecky: Well, hi, Eric. So nice to have you here for today’s WG Content’s Tips in 10 Minutes.

0:00:14.0 Eric Steinberger: Thank you.

0:00:14.2 Kirsten Lecky: Eric Steinberger is the Chief Marketing Officer of Atlantic Health System. So we’re really excited to have him join us today. Welcome.

0:00:22.5 Eric Steinberger: It’s great to be here.

0:00:23.5 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. Thank you. What is so cool about Atlantic Health System, among the many things I’ve gotten to know your team over the years, is that you for the 15th year in a row have been recognized as a best place to work on Fortune Magazine. So, congratulations, that’s no easy feat. And I think what’s even probably cooler than that is not only are you on the list for the 15th year, but you’re number four in the healthcare list. So they do also segment out by industry and so you’re number four in the healthcare category. So that is really cool and congratulations.

0:00:56.5 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. No. It’s a really, it’s an achievement. The organization takes a lot of pride in the recognition and a lot of work and energy has to go into it every year to continue to build on what we’ve done in the past. So, it’s so important in healthcare. So a big area of focus for us.

0:01:15.4 Kirsten Lecky: Absolutely. And I feel like that’s what we’re just hearing more and more about is just the role and the relationship between marketing and human resources in building culture and helping with recruitment and retention. So talk a little bit about your role in supporting the culture and the work experience at Atlantic Health System, your role and your team’s role.

0:01:34.3 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely. So, as the chief marketing officer, I oversee all internal and external communications for the system. So, we have a dedicated internal communications team that has specialists to liaison with various different departments across the company. So we have an individual who is fully dedicated into HR, for instance. We also, in other departments, like our engineering and IT departments, as well as all of the different hospital presidents and other physician leaders across the system. Groups that have large populations that need to get communicated to, and we want to make sure that those messages are very clearly delivered across a mix of channels and mediums to ensure that there’s understanding and engagement and feedback loops. And so, having those individuals do that and have them as part of a dedicated team really helps through with standardization and leveraging best practices.

0:02:44.5 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. And so let’s talk about a little bit of those best practices. I mean, you guys have been at this for a long time. What are a few of the marketing or communication best practices that you’ve learned over the years that really support being the best place to work? Obviously, you talked about collaboration and the partnership, but what are some of maybe the practices or approaches or initiatives that you’ve taken that have really risen as best practices?

0:03:17.4 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. I guess I’d list a couple of things, and I’ll start sort of more at the strategic level and maybe starting and then get a little more tactical. But clearly many different avenues of listening and understanding are employees and the workforce and what are the things that are keeping them up at night, the areas that they think are going well, the way they see opportunities and what we need to improve, having that constant feedback loop and understanding is critically important. And I think from that, there are certain areas that we’ve chosen to focus on. We talk about a culture of reward and a culture of celebration, recognition, and putting in lots of different programs around that and focusing on that from a communication standpoint. I think we also have a culture of testing and learning and trying new things. I mean, there’s a million creative ideas, and not everything when it comes to driving employee engagement is, oh, I know if I spend X amount of dollars here, it’s going to directly translate into this.

0:04:22.8 Eric Steinberger: So we got to try a lot of different things. And so, there’s constant innovation, learning analysis, what works, stick with it, grow, expand on it, stuff that doesn’t work throw it to the side and try something new next year. And then when it actually gets down into the, where my team really plays a big role is on that communication itself. And so, it’s bringing in a lot of the best practices of marketing. I mean, what are the touch points? What is the creative elements? What’s the copy? How the simplicity, how it’s formatted, what are the things we want to call our attention to? How do we lay this out in as clear a way as possible so that people can understand and understand the implications because some things might be really simple, but others, a change in our benefit program or something about work shift hours or things like that, that can have huge implications and so we want to be able to manage through. And then obviously multi-channel over and over again, until there’s that breakthrough, because the workforce, especially in healthcare, we have whole departments, large numbers of employees that aren’t sitting in front of computers, eight hours a day waiting for an email to show up for them to open up and read. So, how do you reach all of these different audiences.

0:05:51.6 Kirsten Lecky: So, I love you talk about celebration and recognition. You talk about learning and iterating and getting that feedback and all the… Meeting your associates and your employees where they are through all the different communication channels. Can you give us like, I love the celebrating one because one of our core values here too, is fun. Like there is so much value in just creating a fun workplace and one that you celebrate each other. So, can you give us one example of something that you feel like let’s just even say over the past year that like, this is a really popular thing that we do in our organization that is celebrating, maybe you’ve heard from your employees that it’s something they really enjoy and appreciate. What are some of those things that come up for you?

0:06:31.9 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. Well, I’ll give you two examples because I can’t settle on just one. So, one is, we have a formal structured HR program around award and recognition, a point based program, and we have a budget and we really put a tremendous amount of emphasis around that. And from a communication standpoint, it’s really hitting up all the leaders in the organization and saying, hey, you have a point balance, you have to make sure you use all your points, think about people you need to recognize. Here are templates of just quick emails that you can copy and paste if you’re someone who struggles with coming up with the nice words to reward or recognize an employee. So, a lot of those programs exist, but it’s the activation and the structure around that program that I think makes a difference in really driving the engagement and people just love to get little pats on the back. The other tool that we have that we really encourage a lot of engagement in is a tool we call Workplace, which is really a social, it’s like a Facebook, but Facebook just for the employee base. So different departments can create different friend groups or other groups within there and leaders are highly encouraged, you could just do a quick video and post it up there.

0:07:48.7 Kirsten Lecky: Oh, that’s nice.

0:07:50.7 Eric Steinberger: Or throw pictures up of, you know, this department won a particular reward and let’s celebrate it and then everyone can comment and like and do other normal stuff you could do around social media.

0:08:02.1 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. And that’s called Workplace?

0:08:03.5 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. It’s actually a tool developed by Meta, although they’re shutting it down. So, we’re moving over to, there’s a million tools out there, Viva Engage is one that is very popular, it’s a Microsoft tool that…

0:08:21.3 Kirsten Lecky: Has the same sort of application?

0:08:24.7 Eric Steinberger: It has all those sort of engagements. And what’s great about tools like that also are they’re mobile-first.

0:08:32.3 Kirsten Lecky: Right. Yeah.

0:08:32.4 Eric Steinberger: And, again, when you talk about a workforce and… We’re meeting them where they’re at.

0:08:39.1 Kirsten Lecky: Right. Right. Yeah. Well, I always think too, I mean, you have a very large organization and it’s geographically across several markets and locations and any opportunity you have to make that big world a little bit smaller, and create kind of the smaller communities, whether that’s online or in-person, I think that’s gonna pay off. And so, do you have to monitor that in any sort of way? Or is that… I mean, does anyone kind of own that in terms of monitoring like whatever happens?

0:09:03.5 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. Yeah. My team actually owns it. My team owns it. There is monitoring…

0:09:10.5 Kirsten Lecky: So your team owns that plat? Okay.

0:09:12.4 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. We manage that platform. And we help drive engagement on that platform. And then we do… There are certain things like if there’s a big internal meeting or conference that we’re doing and an exec is speaking, sometimes we’ll live stream it across the platform, stuff like that. So it’s a tool that really, unlike a lot of the historical, traditional communication tools, which are one email blasts or big posters you put up on the walls, this is more of a way to form… It’s a way of communication.

0:09:49.8 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of a live… Yeah. In real time. And is it integrated with your intranet then and it’s easily accessible?

0:09:55.4 Eric Steinberger: Not as deeply as it will be, but that’s why we’re moving away and…

0:10:01.1 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. I love that.

0:10:01.9 Eric Steinberger: Project because…

0:10:02.3 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:10:03.0 Eric Steinberger: And that’s where, I mean, look, everyone has different, we’re a team, it’s Microsoft Teams.

0:10:08.9 Kirsten Lecky: Sure. Yeah.

0:10:09.9 Eric Steinberger: You can get in there and shop and then this is their social tool, it’s called Viva Engage.

0:10:16.2 Kirsten Lecky: Okay. So, I would imagine that that’s one tool that you have to really actively listen to your workforce. I know in marketing, we have access to so many tools to understand, intent and behaviors and all of those things, pathways and care pathways and stuff. But as it relates to really actively listening to your employees, I would imagine that’s a great one because they might be posting questions in real time. What other things, what are some other tools that you use to really, I mean employee surveys is a great example, but anything else that’s on all the time for you to really hear what your employees have to say?

0:10:56.1 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. I think I would say a couple of things. So yeah. We have a pretty rigorous survey process. So everyone does employee surveys, but I think there’s a level of depth of analysis that you can go to at different department levels or slicing and dicing in different ways. And building, if you set those surveys up the right way, and what really are the underlying drivers. So that’s a big piece. We do a lot of analytics on all of the employee communications that we do.

0:11:25.1 Kirsten Lecky: Okay. Sure.

0:11:26.8 Eric Steinberger: So, we built… We know sending a certain communications to certain audiences, vastly different open rates, click-through rates, engagement, subject line testing, all sorts of stuff like that, that is same stuff we do with consumers that makes meaningful difference in making sure the messages get through and also helps us undercover insights as to not just how to communicate certain things, but what are the things that are driving engagement. Similar to creative testing, when we’re working on, there’s lots of messaging. Here’s an example, masking protocols coming out of COVID, COVID is high, COVID is low. Are we masking? Are we not masking? Who is doing what? Those can get really complicated across the whole system, building simple tools, and simple communication ways to just make that easy. And then, I think the last thing I would say, and it’s much more informal, but again, culture be it strategy, again, instead of seven days a week it is… That really just hammering of the function of the line leadership or… Myself at the executive level, but then, all the way through middle and frontline leadership is the one-on-one communication with the people on the team and the cohort.

0:12:51.5 Kirsten Lecky: Right. Yeah.

0:12:52.9 Eric Steinberger: At the end of the day, we’ve all seen all the studies, whatever, the 60% of employee happiness is about your direct relationship with your boss. So, we could do all the great programs in the world, but if they’re not being internalized by leadership day to day that’s not going to happen. So we spent a lot of time and energy on development, work around frontline leadership and such. You know, it can really be…

0:13:21.5 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. We can spend hours talking about that very thing. I mean, that whole idea of cascading, messaging throughout the organization, and equipping those leaders with the right, not like scripts, but the right messaging to communicate to those employees, it’s a little bit of an art and science. And it’s a very thoughtful process.

0:13:46.0 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. And even the choice of what we’re going to emphasize, because there’s always a million things that are going on. So, I have, on all staff meeting once a month, and it’s an hour. So, if I choose to take 10 minutes to talk about some A, B, C, then that’s sending a message about its importance versus other things that I might not choose to talk about.

0:14:08.8 Kirsten Lecky: Right. Right. Yeah. Well, this has been, I feel like we can talk about this forever. We’ve already, I think we’re past the 10 minutes. So, with that, I will say, thank you again for joining us. And maybe in closing, if we were to walk the campus and walk the hallways of your organization, what would people say? Here’s why I love working at Atlantic Health system. What do you think you would hear? What would be the reoccurring message?

0:14:33.7 Eric Steinberger: So, first I would say, thank you for having me and it’s always…

0:14:36.9 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. It has been a pleasure.

0:14:37.0 Eric Steinberger: A pleasure to be able to participate in these kinds of things. And then to your question about, what people would say. And it’s also I think what I love about Atlantic Health is nice people. I know it sounds really silly, but it’s an organization, even from the day I walked in the door to interview people, say good morning, hello, a smile on their face. Generally want to know how your day was. That caring culture that exists in healthcare to bring the patients is also felt by the employees at Atlantic Health.

0:15:13.0 Kirsten Lecky: Absolutely. Yeah.

0:15:14.2 Eric Steinberger: I think we all get this sort of points in our career where just being around nice people is a big part about what can make a day good or bad.

0:15:23.7 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. I feel like we work in the same kind of work culture because that’s a lot of like what our CEO says too, and so, I appreciate that. And we appreciate you and your team. So, thank you again.

0:15:35.0 Eric Steinberger: That’s great.

0:15:36.4 Kirsten Lecky: And if anyone has any questions or comments or needs, maybe Eric are you comfortable with us including your contact information?

0:15:44.2 Eric Steinberger: Yeah. Absolutely. I’m always happy to.

0:15:44.3 Kirsten Lecky: Okay. Because I love these ideas and I’m sure people will want to hear more from you. So, thank you again.

0:15:50.0 Eric Steinberger: Great. Thanks Kirsten.

0:15:50.4 Kirsten Lecky: Bye.