This is a study of organizational communication and culture in the Houston Methodist Hospital system. The study was conducted in the summer of 2024 by a research team from Southwestern University led by Bob Bednar, Professor of Communication Studies, and composed of 5 Communication Studies majors: Lauren Chisholm, Alexa Delenela, Tre Flores, Lauren Wise, and Justin Zamora. Four of us were rising seniors about to start our final year at Southwestern, and Justin was a graduating senior completing this as part of his last college class.

The field site, Houston Methodist Hospital, is a system of 8 hospitals: the flagship academic hospital in the Texas Medical Center in downtown Houston and 7 additional community hospitals spread around the Greater Houston Area (GHA). An additional community hospital is slated to open in the Cypress area in March 2025.

Houston Methodist is a complex system made up of complex systems, where communication within each node in the organization, among the different nodes of the organization, and from the organization to its multiple publics provided us with a productive case study to understand how organizations are managed internally and how they engage their external stakeholders.

To study the system, we did a week of intensive fieldwork in Houston from June 10-14, 2024, with 4 days embedded at Houston Methodist-Willowbrook (HMWB) in Northwest Houston and 1 day downtown at Houston Methodist Hospital (HMH) downtown--half the day touring the main administrative areas of HMH and the adjacent Houston Methodist Institute for Technology, Innovation, & Education (MITIE), and half the day meeting with Branding and Marketing managers at their nearby office building.

Because our main concern was less with communications between healthcare professionals and patients, and more with how the hospital operates as a whole organization behind the scenes, we focused mainly on non-clinical units within the organization. Therefore, we observed and/or interviewed people from the following different units at HMWB, HMH, or at both sites: Business Development, Capacity Command Center, Center for Performing Arts Medicine, Community Outreach, Environmental Services, Facilities, Guest Relations, IT, Legal Services, Marketing/Brand Management, MITIE Research Institute, Platinum Patients Services, Project Management, Safety, Security, Spiritual Life & Values Integration, Supply Chain, and Volunteer Services.

With such a large and intricate system employing over 30,000 people across multiple clinical and non-clinical units, we expected that it would be challenging to keep an organization like this aligned, but we found that not only are values consistently expressed throughout the organization, but they are also shown through consistent actions of their employees through their communication practices in both their internal and external communications, from digital display boards, daily "huddles" and "stand-up" meetings, standard e-mails, marketing campaigns, community engagement, and social media.

In our research, we witnessed two iconic representations of this dynamic, one of which we include here as an image and one that we have included in the title of our project. The phrase, "If You Get the Values Right, the Numbers Will Follow," comes from a customized message easel in the break room of the Marketing and Brand Development offices at Houston Methodist Willowbrook. The phrase, "the Margin meets the Mission," is an adaptation of something we heard Charles Millikan, the system-wide VP of Spiritual Life and Values Integration at Houston Methodist, say multiple times in different ways, but said most concisely as, "There's no mission without the margin, but there's also no margin without the mission." It was a kind of mantra for him, reflecting how he thought the economic realities and values of a mission-driven organization like Houston Methodist are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. It became a central concept for our study as well.

This website engages the interconnectedness of values and numbers and mission and margin throughout as we offer our overall analysis of the organizational culture of Houston Methodist. The website is divided into separate entries by the individual team members to highlight their distinctive perspectives while also being drawn together here to be more than the sum of the individual parts. We also include separate pages about the OrgComm course and a glossary of terms that show up in our work.