Employee experience and patient experience and outcomes are closely interrelated. However, many hospitals and health systems are still struggling to implement the right strategies and methodologies to elicit feedback about employee experiences and improve employee engagement, which can serve as levers for improving patient experience and outcomes.
During a December Becker's Hospital Review podcast sponsored by NRC Health, Adam Tanner, senior director of product management at NRC Health, discussed employee experience strategies that enhance engagement and drive meaningful change.
Key themes from the podcast are summarized below.
To monitor employee experience, organizations are shifting from annual surveys to real-time feedback
For decades, healthcare organizations have sought to understand employee engagement via annual surveys. This method is not ideal because once-a-year engagement surveys do not necessarily resonate with employees or provide useful insights into their day-to-day experiences at work.
Realizing this, organizations have adopted other channels for soliciting feedback, such as pulse surveys, onboarding and exit surveys, town hall meetings, crowdsourced employee ideas and suggestion boxes.
Eventually, the goal is to collect continuous feedback in real time as a way to gain actionable insights into employee experience. "For many hospital systems, this is more around a culture transformation than simply [finding different ways to do] employee surveys," Mr. Tanner said.
Managers need specific digestible data on how to help employees have better experiences
Managers want to do right by their teams and improve their day-to-day experiences, but they do not always have the necessary training, tools or resources to do that. Organizations need to support them by providing them with specific data and insights that can help them improve the employee experience.
"There was a time when managers didn't get any data about their teams. We've now got to a place where we're giving managers lots of data about their teams — arguably too much. What managers need is simplified, digestible information around where their team is today, what they're doing well and where they have an opportunity to improve without overcomplicating things," Mr. Tanner explained.
Aligning employee and patient experiences is crucial to improving patient care and patient experience
Across industries, employee experience is strongly correlated with customer experience. In the healthcare service environment, this relationship is even more pronounced due to the close contact between employees and patients.
"We see these relationships all over the place in this ecosystem. What we're working with our partners on is understanding this relationship in a nuanced way and understanding what are the things that, if we improve for our employees, would have the greatest impact on our patients," Mr. Tanner said.
"If we can understand what is the patient outcome or the KPI we're trying to improve, we can work backwards to understand what are the drivers or dimensions of the employee experience that can help us move the needle [in that direction]."