Best Places to Work in Healthcare help employees excel

Healthcare is a service industry. As in every service industry, whether organizations succeed or fail depends almost entirely on the quality and performance of its staff.

In healthcare, that includes everyone from the administrators in the C-suite to the doctors, nurses, home health aides, coders and insurance claims processors that do the hands-on work of helping sick people get well.

The only way to maintain high-quality service in healthcare is to create a workplace environment where employees are trusted and valued, where communications is constant and clear, and morale is high. That's a tall order in an industry that is rapidly changing and under intense financial pressure.

Yet some organizations manage year after year to make it onto Modern Healthcare's 100 Best Places to Work list. This year, there are only 30 first-time winners. Fully 56 of the healthcare establishments on the list have been there three or more times in the seven years Modern Healthcare has run the program.

Two hospitals have made the list every time: Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Southlake and Woman's Hospital in Baton Rouge, La. “Today's healthcare employers can't rely on the old satisfiers, like compensation and benefits, to drive engagement,” Donna Bodin, vice president of employee and wellness services at Woman's Hospital, told Modern Healthcare. Employees need to understand the strategic direction and have a voice, she said.

The competition was fairly stiff this year as it has been in years past. Two-hundred seventy-one organizations entered the competition, with nominations accepted from Feb. 24 through May 30.

We deeply appreciate our collaboration with the Best Companies Group. Their process is transparent. They first survey those employers about their company policies and practices, their benefits and the demographics of their workforce.

Then, the firms' employees are given an in-depth questionnaire. The Best Companies Group uses the answers to analyze their leadership, culture, working environment, training and other factors. Employees are also asked to judge their overall satisfaction with their workplace.

Every strategy employed by the Best Places to Work winners is different. St. Martin Hospital in Breaux Bridge, La., emphasizes mutual respect among its 125 employees. They believe that annual commitment to respect and support one another creates a culture of competence and a happy workplace. The 2,400 employees at the Advisory Board Co. are given 10 paid hours to volunteer at local organizations. That builds morale, its leaders say, by allowing employees to do for their own communities what they do for their healthcare partners.

I encourage you to read all the profiles in this special supplement. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the Best Places to Work in Healthcare.

Follow Merrill Goozner on Twitter: @MHgoozner