In August, 72% of all employees participated in the annual employee engagement survey. Thank you for sharing your candid feedback and unique perspective about team and leader relationships, communication, safety, and more.

We’re already translating this feedback into meaningful action, building a strong foundation for our future.

Over the past several weeks, your leader shared team-specific results for your area. This article reviews the key results for our system, and how that relates to team results.

Mission and opportunity

We scored a 4.07 out of 5 for overall engagement, a 0.07 year-over-year decrease for our system. Our engagement score is 0.06 higher than the national average for healthcare organizations, placing us at the 56th percentile.

The key strength we saw highlighted in the survey was that your connection to our organization’s mission and purpose remains high. This tells us you value the role both you and our system play in the health of our patients and community.

The survey also identified opportunities to improve. Two key themes arose from the data: safety and inclusivity.

Safety
We have opportunities to improve our culture of safety, specifically in learning from mistakes and fostering collaboration, communication, and teamwork between departments, units, and job roles.

Inclusivity
The survey underlined your desire to be more included in making decisions that impact your work. You also want to see the system show that it values diverse voices. Further, you expressed that you need to feel greater respect from the system, looking to improve ineffective processes, resolve team conflict, have more of a voice, see the impact of your work, and have more transparency.

When we understand our strengths and opportunities as an organization, we can understand the results specific to our team—and the relationship between the two.

Strong teams, strong leaders

An employee’s experience with their leader and their team sets the foundation for improvement in other areas like communication, safety, inclusion, and more. We’ve shifted our approach to action planning this year to intentionally focus on developing and maintaining strong teams with strong leaders, which are measured using Team Index and Leader Index.

Team Index helps us understand team readiness for improvement, while Leader Index helps us understand leader readiness for improvements and action planning.

All leaders were asked to partner with their teams in the development of an action plan. Action plans are an intentional effort to improve one to two key focus areas that arose from your team’s survey results.

Setting a strong foundation for our future requires involvement and commitment from every employee in every role in the organization.

What’s next

As mentioned, leaders shared team results like overall engagement and Team and Leader Indexes specific to your area. From there, you worked together as a team to set goals and create an action plan to help meet them.

Creating and submitting the action plan is just the first step in the journey to improvement. Our plans are only successful if we continue to refine them, identifying what’s working well and what still needs adjustment.

At the system level, we’re establishing 2024 goals and building resources to support leaders in ongoing team development work.

Together, we’ll move toward an environment of trust and transparency by listening to learn and communicating candidly. This work begins with our leaders, but we need commitment from our teams at every level of the organization to make the greatest impact.

Please know that your voice and perspective are vital to not only the development of action plans, but throughout their implementation. By collaborating with you, we can work toward creating the best employee experience for you.

Campus-specific results are being shared in person at Q4 Town Halls December 4-8 and in the virtual sessions in HealthStream, accessible until January 26.