Front-line healthcare managers use many different tools to collect data and keep in touch with their team members. One goal of this series was to identify what’s missing in these tools and outline key areas where advances can be made. Clearly, there is a wide gap that must be closed in order to truly, efficiently hear team members’ voices and use the data in a productive fashion.
So how is Laudio answering this challenge?
Laudio is currently advancing and integrating a new “forms technology” for our clients – InForms. These forms are being beta tested and will be available to all Laudio users in the new year. InForms is a launchpad for different capabilities that will allow managers to prioritize their actions based on the data they receive from 100 or more employees and increase effective feedback.
Take, for example, the survey. Surveys are used by managers in organizations around the globe in many different fields. For a healthcare manager running a massive team, the process of sending a survey to their employees, or even a specific subset of their employees, can take days. Email addresses must be culled, the survey must be designed, and responses must be tracked. By the time the responses are collected and dissected, perhaps weeks later, the survey loses its effect.
In addition to being able to easily identify how each employee wishes to be contacted, Laudio users will be able to quickly choose a target audience for their surveys leveraging InForms. Perhaps the survey only needs to reach day-shift nurses or floating nurses. Managers can design their survey questions, select an audience, and deliver the survey in a fraction of the time it would take using generic tools.
And when responses are received, they are attached to each team member’s Laudio profile, where they are stored permanently and can be easily referenced. Managers do not need to check read receipts or create spreadsheets for the answers to the questions. It’s nearly impossible to lose a response in the shuffle. The ease of executing a survey in the best way possible has far-reaching effects. Team members can see their voices are being heard, they are engaged, and they feel connected to their leaders.
Another advantage of Laudio’s new InForms is being able to automatically create nudges or reminders for managers that further engage their employees. Perhaps you already have sent a professional development survey to your team, and responses were given about progress being made toward degrees or certificates. Once the data is collected, Laudio will notify you when an employee has finished a degree or reached another milestone. You can then reach out with a message of congratulations.
Farther down the line, we want to give Laudio users the ability to “set and forget” certain workflows so there’s almost no effort required to collect important data. For example, each time a floating nurse completes a shift, they automatically receive a set of questions about the unit where they worked, their satisfaction level, and any issues that might have come up.
Their responses are sent back to their manager, who can create the appropriate nudges or check-in if necessary. This is yet another instance where the technology itself is fairly simple, but the way in which it is implemented has a profound impact on the employee and the manager at a time when their jobs are more important than ever.
And when it comes to best practices, Laudio’s InForms gives managers a significant head start. We are a front-line healthcare tool, and we have done the research to learn what processes are most important to leaders in this field. Our surveys and templates are direct products of this research, and while they can be tweaked by users to fit their institutions, they are leaps and bounds ahead of forms created by traditional tools.
In the second part of this series, we discussed five key use cases in which better data collection is needed. These use cases have been identified to us by healthcare leaders as the most impactful areas when it comes to communicating and engaging with staff members and hearing their voices. We have listened to these leaders and are connecting different tools together with good knowledge of the context and the problem to really deliver something special for our clients.
Laudio is creating a new suite of solutions nobody else is digitizing. We are delivering a scalable approach to solving a massive problem. At the end of the day, our InForms solutions are intuitive, integrated, and intelligent. They may look similar to solutions in other industries. But we’re using them better.