On June 11, we hosted "Old Habits, New Systems: What It Really Takes to Lead Change in Healthcare Workforce Management," a panel conversation with three people who live and breathe healthcare workforce transformation: Erin Landry-Baker, founder of Yellow Door Solutions and a 20-year change management consultant; Katie Mihovics, Integrated HR Director at Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital, Alexandra Hospital, and Rural Roads Health Services; and Tanya Tkach, Regional Manager for Scheduling at Interlake Regional Health Authority.
The conversation kept circling back to one idea: technology rarely fails because of the technology. It fails because of how people experience the change around it. Here are five takeaways every healthcare leader navigating a workforce management transformation should hold onto.
1. The technology is rarely the real barrier
When asked why transformation initiatives struggle, none of the panelists pointed to software limitations. Katie Mihovics framed it as a need for "breathing space" to pivot, because real adoption depends on understanding how different users — HR, frontline staff, managers — will actually use a tool day to day, not just how it's designed to work on paper. Erin Landry-Baker added that organizations need to read the room: what change fatigue already exists, what happened in a previous rollout, and what emotional residue staff are carrying before a new system ever gets introduced. The lesson is to diagnose organizational readiness before assuming a rocky launch is a product problem.
2. Honor the old system instead of shaming it
One of the more memorable moments of the panel was Erin's point about respecting legacy processes, even messy, manual ones. She noted that the people being asked to adopt new technology often built the systems being replaced, frequently under difficult conditions and with limited resources. Dismissing that work as outdated, rather than acknowledging the effort it took, breeds quiet resistance. Katie built on this by describing how staged, gated rollouts let teams retain small pieces of the old process so change doesn't feel like a total loss of control all at once.
3. Data builds trust faster than persuasion does
Tanya Tkach shared a particularly vivid comparison: explaining a policy change without data is like telling a child not to eat something without explaining the allergy. Once she gave staff the actual numbers behind a change, resistance dropped because people could see the reasoning for themselves. Katie echoed this from the business case side, describing how she tracked overtime spend, premium shift costs, grievance volume, and the hours staff spent on duplicate manual entry to build a case leadership couldn't easily dismiss. Tanya's own story of trimming long-call overtime scheduling at a Winnipeg hospital, which led to more than a million dollars in savings over eight months, became possible because the data made the inefficiency visible in the first place.
4. Different audiences need different proof, and different communication
A recurring theme was that no single message works for every stakeholder. Senior leadership wants to hear about risk, strategy, and return on investment. Frontline staff want reassurance and simplicity. Erin pointed out that even something as small as staff being excited about fewer paper cuts during a digital scheduling rollout can be a meaningful signal worth incorporating into communication. Katie's approach was to tailor every rollout to "the most common denominator," meaning the least tech-comfortable group, because the confident early adopters will always find their own way regardless of how much hand-holding is offered. That meant laminated click-by-click guides at nursing stations, demo environments staff could test before going live, and one-on-one support for people uncomfortable with smartphones or computers in general.
5. Communication has to be persistent, varied, and two-way
Tanya's rollout included posters, FAQs, training videos, and in-person sessions, but she emphasized that the in-person piece mattered most because people need someone to ask questions to, not just material to read. Katie's closing advice captured why: "in the absence of information, that vacuum gets filled by storytelling, and sometimes it's really negative." The panelists agreed that listening matters as much as broadcasting. When the same questions kept surfacing, that was a signal to issue a new FAQ, not evidence that staff weren't paying attention.
The bigger picture
As moderator Robert Weese summarized at the close of the session, successful transformation isn't a technology challenge alone. It's a trust-building, communication-heavy, operational challenge that touches every level of an organization, from the executives signing off on the investment to the frontline staff picking up a shift notification on their phone. Organizations that treat change management as seriously as they treat the technology itself are the ones who see results like Tanya's million-dollar overtime reduction or Katie's frictionless shift-filling rollout across two hospital sites.
If you missed the live session, reach out to our team for a recording, or to talk through what a readiness assessment and rollout plan could look like for your organization.
