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At Ragan’s Employee Communications and Culture Conference earlier this year, Elizabeth Whittington, senior director of executive communication for St. Jude Children’s Hospital, shared her insights about how comms pros can navigate major change and maintain organizational culture.
She referred to the many changes at St. Jude over several years, including major growth in employee numbers, a migration to a new medical records platform and the challenges of the COVID pandemic. In addition, Whittington mentioned that due to the company’s remote work policies during the height of COVID, many employees hadn’t set foot on the hospital campus despite 40% of workers coming aboard during the pandemic.
“We used to assume everyone interacted with patients every day,” she said. “Now? Some have never even been on campus.
She added that this created a situation in which St. Jude’s culture was thought of as a given by too many employees.
“We took our culture for granted,” Whittington said. “Then we realized that you can’t scale what you don’t define.”
She said that the only way to navigate through change and maintain culture is with careful attention paid not just to what the tenets of a culture is, but how it’s talked about and acted upon.
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