{"id":105,"date":"2016-03-29T17:22:28","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T17:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/?p=105"},"modified":"2016-03-30T00:53:47","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T00:53:47","slug":"watch-your-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/?p=105","title":{"rendered":"Watch Your Language!"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re trying to understand\u2014or change\u2014 an organization\u2019s culture, one important leverage point is the institutional language.<\/strong> This is the array of words and phrases that appear consistently, although often unconsciously, when people in the organization make reference to its employees, leaders, customers, practices, etc. Institutional language is important because it is grounded in a set of values and beliefs which is then communicated throughout the organization when you use that language.<\/p>\n

When the challenge is to build a truly engaged enterprise, the language related to employees is particularly important. For example, I\u2019ve worked in organizations that referred to their employees as either \u201cprofessional staff\u201d or \u201cnon-professional\u201d staff. Whatever other purpose this distinction may have served, I\u2019m pretty sure that it didn\u2019t encourage the so-called \u201cnon-professionals\u201d to bring their A-game to work every day.<\/p>\n

And just think about those TV newscasts we\u2019ve all heard in which government officials, faced with a major weather event, announce that all \u201cnon-essential personnel\u201d have been told to stay home from work.\u00a0 Think about it: how would you feel about going to work every day for an organization that regards you as \u201cnon-essential?\u201d<\/p>\n

A public relations executive colleague of mine once told me, \u201cNever use internal language you wouldn\u2019t want your customers to discover, especially when you might be referring to them.\u201d It\u2019s interesting that we generally take great care to examine our \u201ccustomer-facing\u201d language, but rarely think much about how we talk about and to the people who serve those customers.<\/p>\n

Of course, you might be thinking that this is much ado about nothing. You might be asking, does the institutional language we use really matter all that much?\u00a0 While working on a journal article, I found an interesting article<\/a> by the CEO of the Arizona Girl Scouts organization that dealt with this question. After a survey revealed that many of the organization\u2019s volunteers felt that the organization did not trust them, the CEO took a hard look at its institutional vocabulary. \u00a0For example, in a 4-page brochure used to recruit volunteers, she found the words \u201cmust,\u201d \u201cmandatory,\u201d or \u201crequired\u201d used 84 times. Ultimately she concluded: \u201cIn our zeal to promote the health and safety of girls, we had unknowingly used command-and-control language that implicitly communicated that we did not trust our volunteers to make their own decisions in the best interests of the girls.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

Speaking more broadly, she then added: \u201c\u2026we discovered just how powerfully our own language had influenced and contributed to our organizational culture. We are still debating whether the language described or created the culture. Perhaps it did both.\u201d<\/p>\n

So yes, institutional language does matter.<\/p>\n

When Cleveland Clinic made the commitment to build a culture that fostered high levels of employee engagement, we made a number of changes to our own institutional vocabulary\u2014the most important of which was to substitute \u201ccaregiver\u201d for \u201cemployee\u201d in all of our communications.\u00a0 Our ID badges were changed to say \u201ccaregiver,\u201d and \u201cWe are all caregivers\u201d became our mantra, even appearing as the title of our annual report.<\/em><\/strong> The message was transmitted repeatedly on our internal communications media, and reinforced by managers at every level in their meetings and presentations.<\/p>\n

The rationale for the change was simply that everyone who worked at the Clinic had the potential to create a positive\u2014or negative\u2014experience for a patient, family member, or colleague. Not only the doctors and nurses, but also the people who delivered the patient\u2019s meals or cleaned their rooms or answered questions about a bill\u2014everyone had a role in creating a positive, or negative, experience for our patients and their families. The transporter who helped reassure a nervous patient on the way for a test procedure, the facilities worker who asked a family member who looked a little lost if they needed help, the admissions person who answered questions with patience\u2014all of these people were \u201cgiving care.\u201d \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

And this isn\u2019t just something that applies to hospitals and other non-profit organizations. Whether the organization provides a product or a service, everyone in the organization is important to living out its mission. Everyone has to see themselves in the value chain of serving a customer directly or serving someone who is an internal customer. When people see themselves this way, you have the starting point for a truly engaged enterprise. When they don\u2019t\u2026.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the thing: it\u2019s important, but not sufficient, to use the right language. As a leader, you have to go out every day and earn the right to use that language. You\u2019ve got to \u201cwalk the talk.\u201d If you want to make it clear that everyone in your organization matters and has a role to play in the organization\u2019s success, it\u2019s not enough to start referring to employees as \u201cassociates\u201d while continuing to treat them as replaceable cogs in a wheel.<\/p>\n

At Cleveland Clinic we took whatever steps we could to reinforce the idea of \u201cWe are all caregivers.\u201d We established a highly popular caregiver wellness program and a recognition program that celebrated the little things that our caregivers did every day. <\/em><\/strong>We created the Cleveland Clinic\u00a0Experience Program, in which we took all 43,000 caregivers off line over a nine month period to meet in small, cross-functional groups\u2014groups that included staff from every level and function, including physicians and senior executives \u2014 to talk explicitly about how each of their roles touched our patients. And when we were forced to close one of our community hospitals, we worked very hard to place 90% of the caregivers from that facility into other jobs within our system.<\/p>\n

The result? Our engagement surveys, and perhaps more importantly, our patient feedback, made it clear that our new institutional language did indeed resonate with our people, and did make a difference in how they felt about their work and how they actually performed that work.<\/p>\n

So once again, language does matter. As a professor of psychology at Stanford commented in an article<\/a> on the relationship between language and thinking: \u201c\u2026 it turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think.\u201d And changing how people think is the first step to changing how they act.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to you and your organization. Does your institutional language need to change? Does it encourage or discourage engagement? Is it as empowering as it could be? Are your employee handbook and policies loaded with command and control language\u2014\u201cmust,\u201d \u201crequired,\u201d \u201ccause for dismissal,\u201d etc.? What about the language you personally use every day at work?<\/p>\n

Let me know your thoughts and reactions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’re trying to understand—or change— an organization’s culture, one important leverage point is the institutional language. This is the array of words and phrases that appear consistently, although often unconsciously, when people in the organization make reference to its employees, leaders, customers, practices, etc. Institutional language is important because it is grounded in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}