How to Foster Effective Communications Between Managers and Frontline Healthcare Workers

Key Takeaways

Poor communication between managers and frontline healthcare workers is impeding daily operations, worsening morale, and putting patients at risk. To fix this problem, healthcare organizations must rebuild their communication practices and upskill their management teams. This requires a careful blend of strategic change, training, and technology.

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Communication gaps between leadership and staff are common in industries with frontline-heavy workforces. But, for healthcare organizations, this disconnect does more than just dampen morale and impede strategic alignment.

For your patients, poor communication can be life threatening. Especially during times of crisis and public health threats (PHTs).

In the UK, 48,000 patients die from sepsis every year because of misdiagnoses. According to Rob Behrens, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, this is due to “a reluctance to engage senior consultants because they are seen to be too important and their time is too precious.” And the picture isn’t much better in the USA. Across the pond, poor communication contributes to over 60% of all hospital adverse events.

This is why you cannot leave the communication gap between your managers and frontline teams to widen.

What’s causing the communication rift?

It’s not that your managers aren’t saying enough. It’s more that their communication methods aren’t resonating with frontline teams.

Their messages lean too heavily into strategy, admin, finances, and targets, with little consideration for staff wellbeing or workloads. This may seem harmless in isolation. But as messages accumulate, they can become cold and impersonal. Which can lead to frontline teams actively disengaging.

For instance, informing your staff of longer shift patterns, perhaps as a result of labor shortages, may be a smart move in regards to operational efficiency. But most frontline staff won’t meet this news with a smile. To them, more hours equates to more work, more stress, and more time away from their friends and family.

This isn’t the only reason behind the disconnect, however.

Further to this, top-down communications are often perceived as being entirely one-way. Managers communicate messages quickly and to-the-point, and leave no room for feedback or pushback. This permeates into daily operations and prevents staff from asking questions or seeking help. Indeed, in 2024, only 44% of staff felt their senior managers were approachable.

“Claromentis is a great way to stay connected. Our on-premise intranet is easy to use with a great support team available to help. Our remote teams feel more connected and empowered to communicate and collaborate better at scale.”

Alex

Executive Director of IT at Medcor

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How to strengthen communications between management and frontline healthcare teams

The question now is: how can you cure this seemingly systemic issue?

In the following 9 tips, we’ll help you pull apart your communications approach and rebuild your relationships with your frontline workforce.

1. Communicate strategy clearly and in a respectful way

Frontline healthcare workers want managers to be approachable and respectful. This has to feed into every line of communication — verbal or written, strategic or informal.

When writing news updates or messaging employees directly, ensure they follow the 7 Cs of communication:

• Clarity. Ensure every message is written clearly and with an obvious purpose.
• Conciseness. Keep text succinct. Use bullet points and headers to break up paragraphs if necessary.
• Concreteness. Be specific as possible, especially when instructing staff to take an action.
• Correctness. Only share information that is 100% accurate and truthful.
• Consideration. Be mindful of who you are communicating with, their frontline responsibilities, and their preferred method of communication.
• Completeness. Try to avoid communicating important strategic information in bits and pieces. Say all you need to say in one go, with all the details your frontline workers need.
• Courtesy. Be respectful, friendly, and kind in your communications — verbally or written.

If needed, harness generative AI to adjust the tone and language of your strategic messages. You might also benefit from implementing quick content approval checks. This can help you avoid any overly corporate-sounding sentences, as well as sense-check any AI-generated text for inaccuracies.

2. Avoid information overload

Don’t overwhelm your staff with endless documents and daily, text-heavy news bulletins. Share important communications when necessary and use the right format or channel for every message.

To ensure workers only see information that is 100% relevant to their role, consider personalizing your content experiences.

In Claromentis, this is as simple as setting granular user permissions across your content, apps, and users. When optimized correctly, staff will only see news articles, training, policies, pages, etc. that relate to their responsibilities. This has the added benefit of hiding your sensitive patient and bolstering your data privacy efforts, too.

3. Store important policies and SOPs in a centralized intranet

Communicating changes in service delivery, care best practices, and HR protocols via a mismatch of tools will only frustrate your frontline teams.

The last thing they need during a busy shift is to scroll through their inbox, locate the right document folder, or ring up someone in the office to locate the information they need. This is time that could be spent on treating patients.

So, instead of sharing communications via multiple platforms, use just one.

A centralized intranet consolidates all of your important policies, SOPs, and internal comms in a single, mobile-accessible hub. Making it easier for staff to find and revisit critical information when they need it.

With the right solution, users can:

• Access up-to-date, version controlled documents, communications, and knowledge at any time.
• Quickly locate the right page or document with intent-based AI search, and receive accurate, cited answers to their queries.
• Message colleagues and team leaders directly, via in-system messaging, project management spaces, and discussion forums.

4. Take the complexity out of strategic communications

Policies, SOPs, and jargon-filled news updates can be difficult to read and understand at the best of times. When your frontline staff have little time to spare, this becomes even more of a challenge.

To ensure your employees read and understand every critical message, adopt AI chatbots that:

• Ingest documents and policies in isolation
• Anticipate and suggest relevant questions
• Provide clear, easy to understand summaries
• Answer questions succinctly and accurately
• Highlight applicable passages of text

We’d also advise localizing/translating your important pages, news articles, and in-system messages where possible. This will ensure nothing gets lost in translation when communicating with your diverse workforce.

5. Create opportunities for two-way communication

Two-way communication doesn’t just improve morale and productivity. It can strengthen relationships between frontline staff and their team leaders, too.

In fact, staff are more likely to rate managers highly when they’re consulted during decision-making processes.

Outside of in-person 1:1 meetings and town halls, build digital communication channels that facilitate ongoing collaboration. Discussion rooms, one-to-one direct messages, and blog channels with interactive comment threads give staff the opportunity to raise concerns and respond to news in real time. In turn, reducing stress and building trust — especially during PHTs.

6. Simplify support requests

When frontline staff feel as if management are unapproachable, they’re less likely to ask for help.

To resolve this, create digital e-forms where employees can request support and/or escalate patient cases. These self service channels reduce anxiety and bring accountability to your healthcare services. Integrated SLA timers, workflow logic, and statuses ensure staff respond to urgent requests within a reasonable timeframe.

7. Recognize and reward hard work

A recent UK-based survey found that “recognition for work” is the strongest factor associated with above-average line managers in the NHS.

Employees that feel genuinely valued are more likely to stay. They’re also more likely to listen to and comply with your strategic communications.

So try to balance out formal strategic messaging with informal, celebratory communications:

• Share blog updates celebrating team successes, such as KPI wins and patient success stories.
• Write public thank you messages to show your team members how much you appreciate them.
• Reward frontline staff with skills-based badges, displayed proudly on their user profile.

8. Develop manager communication skills

Interpersonal skills are in high demand across the healthcare industry. But effective communication, emotional intelligence, and empathy aren’t always innate. You need to teach your managers these qualities and ingrain them in your organization’s culture.

Create and distribute standardized, trackable e-learning courses centered around empathetic communications, conflict resolution, and active listening. And complement these learning experiences with in-person training events and workshops, where communication experts can provide more hands-on support.

9. Measure and monitor employee morale

The best way to monitor the progress of your comms improvements, and identify any problems, is to get direct feedback from your frontline workers.

Use anonymous employee engagement surveys to gather qualitative and quantitative data. Ask staff to rate the effectiveness, frequency, and delivery of strategic communications, as well as the openness, approachability, and responsiveness of their team leaders. And give them opportunities to write detailed feedback. What is and isn’t working? How would they change the state of communications if they had the opportunity?

A bandaid won’t fix your healthcare comms. But Claromentis can.

Communication is the thread that ties your healthcare organization together.

When this thread is severed, the impact is felt well beyond your management and frontline teams. It trickles down into your daily operations. One missed communication about a local meningitis outbreak could prevent healthcare workers from diagnosing cases at speed. One inauthentic message could cause a valued employee to call off sick or resign. And the list goes on.

Fixing the communication divide between managers and frontline healthcare workers requires more than technology. But technology can help.

Robust digital workplace solutions like Claromentis:

• Consolidate all of your strategic documents, communications, and updates in one, mobile-accessible hub.
• Ensure content is up-to-date and compliant, thanks to automatic version control.
• Help staff find answers and documents quickly using intent-based AI search.
• Provide two-way communication channels between managers and frontline teams.
• Simplify and automate support requests and case escalations.
• Improve information dissemination and understanding via AI overviews and chatbots.
• Reduce information overload with personalized content experiences.
• Enable you to upskill managers with trackable e-learning courses and development pathways.

And so much more.

To find out how our secure, HIPAA compliant digital workplace can strengthen relationships, enhance communications, and improve patient outcomes in your healthcare organization, get in touch with one of our experts.

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