The Person Who Should
Say It Is Not You.
Telling your team their work matters produces almost nothing. Letting the person it mattered to tell them changes behaviour for a month.
My recruiters never see a patient.
They sit in an office in Nebraska and fill roles at a facility that might be twelve hundred miles away. Somebody they placed is, at this moment, sitting with a family through the worst night of that family’s life. My team will never meet them, never hear about it, and never know it happened.
What they see is a requisition that got filled and a number that moved.
That distance is a real problem, and it is not unique to staffing. It exists in almost every organisation of any size. The person doing the work and the person the work is for have been separated by process, and one of them has no idea the other exists.
For years my instinct was to close that gap by telling people. Standing up and explaining that what we do matters, that there are real families on the other end of this. Saying it well, and meaning it.
It turns out there is research on exactly that approach, and it is not flattering.
The five minute experiment
Adam Grant studied fundraising callers at a university, a job with all the same features as mine. Phone, script, target, no contact whatsoever with anybody who benefited from the money.
He brought in a scholarship student named Will and had him speak to some of the callers. Five minutes. He told them what the scholarship had done for his life and that it would not have happened without their work.
Then Grant measured what happened over the following month.
The callers who spent five minutes with Will increased their weekly time on the phone by 142 percent and their weekly revenue by 171 percent. Same script, same desks, same targets. In a later version with a different student, average weekly revenue rose by more than 400 percent.
A second group read a letter from Will rather than meeting him. A third had no contact. Neither group changed at all.
And the finding leaders should sit with: when managers and leaders delivered the same information themselves, there was no significant change in behaviour. Nor when a former caller talked about what the job did for your career.
The effect appears to be specific to hearing, from the person themselves, how your work affected their life.
Grant replicated it several times. The size of the effect varied. The direction never did.
Read that middle finding again, because it is the uncomfortable one. The leader delivering the message produced nothing. Nothing at all.
When the leader delivered
the same message,
nothing measurable
happened at all.
Why you are the wrong messenger
This is not a comment on your sincerity. It is about who has standing.
When a leader says the work matters, everybody in the room can construct a reason you would say that whether or not it were true. You need them motivated. It is on the agenda. That is your job. The message arrives pre-discounted, and no amount of conviction fixes it, because the discount is structural rather than personal.
When the person who was actually affected says it, that reasoning is unavailable. They have nothing to gain. They are just telling you what happened to them.
Which means the most effective thing you can do about meaning at work is stop being the one who supplies it.
It works on clinical staff too
If you are thinking this sounds like something for call centres, the same research programme has a finding that lands closer to home.
Nurses assembling surgical kits were introduced to the healthcare practitioners who would actually use them. Compared with a control group who had no contact with the people downstream, they worked 64 percent more minutes, completed more than twice as many pieces, and made 15 percent fewer errors.
Fifteen percent fewer errors, on the same task, because somebody met the person on the other end of their work.
Nothing about the process changed. Nothing about the training changed. What changed was that the job stopped being a task and became a person.
What this means for a hard year
Here is why I think this matters more now than it did.
Most healthcare organisations are working short, and the pressure is not going down. By 2030 one in five Americans will be 65 or older, and it is not just volume. Around 93 percent of adults over 65 live with at least one chronic condition and nearly four in five manage two or more, which means more coordination, more communication and more weight on every person delivering care.
Buildings do not provide care. Technology does not provide care by itself. People do.
Which makes engagement a patient care strategy rather than an HR one. And in a stretch where you cannot offer more money, more staff or an easier week, the connection between somebody’s work and the person it reached is one of the very few levers still available to you.
It is also nearly free, which is why it bothers me how rarely it gets used.
The job stopped being
a task and became
a person.
Outsourcing the part you cannot do yourself
- Ask who is most affected by this work. Then ask who among them has the most compelling story. Grant’s point is that it is often not the obvious person, and the shy one sometimes lands harder than the polished one.
- Get them in the room, not on paper. The letter produced nothing. Five minutes of a real person produced a month of changed behaviour. Presence is doing the work here, not information.
- Route the thank you to the person who earned it. When a family writes in, that letter belongs in front of the staff who were named, read out, in person. Most of those messages die in an inbox two levels above the people they were about.
- Connect the invisible roles first. Billing, scheduling, supply, transport, recruiting. The further somebody sits from the bedside, the more this is worth, and the less likely it is anyone has ever done it for them.
What I changed
I stopped trying to be the source of meaning for my team, which was never going to work and was quietly a bit self-important anyway.
Now the job is different. It is to find the people on the other end of our work and get them in front of the people doing it. Not a slide about impact. The actual person, saying the actual thing, in five minutes.
Your team does not need you to tell them their work matters. They need you to arrange the introduction.
When it gets hard, nobody falls back on talent. They fall back on why they are doing it, and that has to come from somebody other than the person who signs the cheques.
Callers who spent five minutes with one scholarship recipient raised 171 percent more money over the following month. Those who read his letter, or heard the same message from managers, showed no change at all. Nurses who met the practitioners using their surgical kits made 15 percent fewer errors. You are the wrong messenger for meaning, not because you are insincere but because you have an obvious reason to say it. Your job is to arrange the introduction.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and speaks to companies, associations, and health systems on culture, retention, and building workplaces people do not want to leave.
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