Numerous Benefits of Culture Change

Network Infrastructure Engineer: My name is Preston Snyder. I’m the network infrastructure engineer for Esse Health.

Everyone included: I do I really think it’s super important that everyone’s included in there, in the process, and the teachings, mentoring sessions, really because if people all have the same tools, and they’ll realize what we’re trying to communicate, they’ll understand the tools, they’ll understand key concepts when we’re trying to communicate better.

The Unexpected: The thing that surprised me about myself is I found some challenges, more challenges than I did before, I found the material to make me think deeper into it. Because I’ve done it before, I had some preconceived notions that, “Hey, I’ve been through this; it’ll kind of be a little bit easier.” But really it made me think a lot deeper into myself, and really about helping others.

Biggest Aha: The biggest LifeWork Systems AHA is the fact that I realized that a lot of my, a lot of the relationship problems actually kind of stemmed from myself. So it’s kind of more of a humbling experience, just because of my mindset and how I view the world is way different than others. And, I have specific core values to myself that really don’t change amongst people a whole lot. They usually kind of stick with that throughout their life. And when you have someone that sees things differently, it’s a challenge to get over that. So, it was also challenging to figure out that I needed to work on myself way more than I thought. What surprised me about the culture process is, and it surprised me before at my last company, is the people who I didn’t think were going to embrace it, actually really ultimately embraced it. It was a challenge for them and just really seeing that happen was a huge surprise to me, because some people just are really, they don’t like change a whole lot, and the biggest thing is once they finally are taught the right way, maybe it’s not even in the training, maybe it’s just talking with a peer or something, they finally get it. They finally see that happening.

Greatest challenge: So, I had a really challenging relationship through the first year and a half that I worked here at Esse. It happened to be one of my peers that I worked with so it was just very challenging, just day-to-day operations and stuff were challenging. So, we have mentoring sessions and we get to rate where our relationships are, without saying names, without saying specifics. And I really – after a quite a few of those, and kind of talking about it, I really took time to reflect and drill down into the relationship. I used the redirecting negative behavior tool that we learned. I really learned that myself I was, I had quite a bit of negative behavior with it, so I learned how to change my mindset. I learned how to see value in the person, what they brought to the team, and really they were really capable and I just had to empower them. I had to give them a little responsibility and ask for a plan of action and for their help, and once I did that it really changed the relationship.

Personal improvements: So this has really helped to improve because I really had to learn, “What am I feeling? and What do I want?” at the moment, if it’s in a relationship or if it’s even a project that I’m working on. It’s really helped me learn that, and that’s helped me explain “What am I feeling?” and “What do I want?” really to my superiors to my peers, and really talk things out so. And really, before it was hard because I didn’t know where I was. I never really took that time, and once I really started feeling that, we’ve been able to communicate better.

Mentoring: What I like about the mentoring is we get to rate our relationships in a non-threatening environment. We also get to better understand what tools we have and which tools are best to approach the specific relationship based off of its needs.

Training sessions: I get a lot out of the training sessions so it’s kind of hard to specifically pick one but really the best thing that I get out of it is the interaction with the rest of the class; learning other people’s thoughts on specific tools that we’re talking about, just in the material in general. The interaction is really the best part.

Biggest challenge: The biggest challenge that I’ve had so far is really picking the right tool for the need, for the relationship, whatever is happening, because there’s so many tools that we learn, and I’m very analytical so I read into tools way too much so I usually find someone who there’s not so much of a green, maybe someone who’s more of what we’ve learned is a blue, more of a social person, to kind of really pick those, and kind of discuss it. So, just picking the right tool for the job.

Payoffs of mentoring: I’ve overcome that and really the tool that I use the most out of everything, is the redirecting negative behavior, because, it’s a self check of where I’m at. Until I can figure out where I’m at, I really can’t help better that relationship is what I found.

Trustworthiness: I firmly believe trust is the foundation of any relationship. That’s what I’ve always learned. That’s what I’ve really embraced. And, it’s really apparent that trust has been built from when I started working with Esse until now. Really people feel more comfortable talking with one another about situations that might have been more uncomfortable before, and also just myself, I’m able to communicate special things with my superiors, things that I would have found more challenging before.

Advice to rest of Esse: The thing that I wish all of Esse knew about LifeWork Systems is how great the tools are that we learn and how much better we communicate amongst everyone as a team. It’s really a huge – it’s a game-changer, especially for the companies. We get to use these tools outside of Esse. It’s just a big life-changing experience. So, this has been my second company that I’ve worked for that’s implemented something very similar to this. It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge from leaderships’ standpoint because it’s a big culture change. Really the benefit of it is that once people really start getting on board with the culture change, once the employees start embracing that, because without that is just a huge struggle from the top down. And really it’s super beneficial. It’s really – it helps drive people to work in a self-directed mode. They really feel empowered. They really take control and charge of their work, and they really feel part of a much bigger team.