As healthcare organizations face a talent shortage and caregivers report high levels of burnout, creating a culture where employees are engaged, listened to, and see opportunities to advance is crucial to retention.
A recent analysis from McKinsey demonstrates this, with the nurses surveyed reporting that not feeling listened to or supported at work were among the strongest drivers of intent to leave their jobs.
There is also evidence that a more engaged hospital workforce is linked to lower costs, greater treatment effectiveness and reduced patient infection rates.
The key to employee engagement? Intelligent listening
But how do healthcare leaders accurately understand how employees are feeling about their workplace and their level of engagement? The traditional method to get this information—employee engagement surveys—leaves much to be desired. Typically, these surveys happen only once a year, are time consuming, and ask employees generic questions with little opportunity for detailed feedback. Additionally, the outcome of these surveys are quantitative data, pointing managers to the problems rather than the solutions. In fact, only 20% of employees believe their managers will act on survey results.
Intelligent listening is an alternative to the traditional engagement survey. Rooted in gathering relevant and continuous feedback, intelligent listening encourages a two-way conversation between leaders and employees. This tailored approach asks the right question, to the right person, at the right time, helping organizations track the root causes of disengagement and empowering managers with recommendations to take immediate action.
“Intelligent listening makes it very easy for both people leaders and human resources to slice and dice the data, drilling down on priority topics or job categories where we have high risk of turnover or other concerns. Then it allows us to implement additional resources to address those issues, whether that’s leadership development or organizational effectiveness,” said Ashley Wenger-Slaba, vice president of employee experience at South Dakota-based Sanford Health.
How Sanford Health is leveraging intelligent listening
Sanford Health, a large rural health system with about 47,700 employees, was looking for an employee engage-ment platform that would offer detailed information about how employees were feeling about working at Sanford and their roles. Sanford hadn’t formally surveyed its employees in about a decade. But the pandemic elevated the importance for Sanford to understand employee engagement amid burnout and turnover, Wenger-Slaba said.
Sanford selected Workday Peakon Employee Voice, an employee engagement platform that uses intelligent listening to drive employee engagement and improve organizational performance. The solution boasts many unique features, including the detailed information it offers to leaders through dashboards. Managers can see how their teams responded to specific questions or topics and receive analysis on trends in the data, such as vulnerability to turnover. The tool also offers managers educational materials for them to improve as leaders based on their teams’ data. For instance, if the data shows many team members don’t feel recognized for their work, Workday Peakon Employee Voice will offer suggested actions to managers to improve in that area.
“Peakon has provided greater engagement for our leaders —everybody has a role in employee experience now. It doesn’t feel like something that only lives in the HR department,” Wenger-Slaba said.
Sanford has implemented changes organization-wide based on the data it has received from employees through Workday Peakon Employee Voice. After receiving feedback from employees that they’d like more flexibility, Sanford has implemented a policy that allows for hybrid or remote schedules for people leaders as well as clinical and non-clinical staff. Sanford also plans to modify benefits in 2023 to include a paid caregiver leave offering based on employee comments.
“We are letting our employees know that we are listening and taking action based on the results,” Wenger-Slaba said.
It is worth noting, Sanford has seen a decline in employee turnover during the past year—a key indicator that their engagement efforts are having an impact.
Going forward, one focus area for Sanford is working to decrease burnout. Feedback from employees shows burnout is prevalent. Wenger-Slaba said the data from Workday Peakon Employee Voice helps her team make the business case to leadership that continued investment in well-being is needed.
Benefits of intelligent listening for health systems
Improving employee engagement is an important strategy for healthcare organizations as they cope with high levels of employee burnout and workforce shortages. As with any effort, a data-driven approach will only be as effective as the ability to surface timely, actionable insights from the data to the leaders who are accountable for the results—in this case, improved employee engagement, well-being, and satisfaction. An intelligent listening platform that captures employee sentiment in real-time, facilitates ongoing feedback from managers, and offers recommendations for action, is an effective solution.
Healthcare organizations that use Workday Peakon Employee Voice for intelligent listening are able to achieve three key benefits that are fundamental to a successful engagement and retention program:
- Track engagement: Healthcare organizations can take a targeted approach to employee experience by asking unique questions tailored by department or role. The platform then allows managers to track how engagement changes throughout each stage of the employee experience while identifying the driving forces behind unwanted employee turnover. Additionally, the data provided includes global industry-based benchmarks based on a database of over 200 million employee responses.
- Drive people initiatives: Managers are empowered to improve the performance of their teams through confidential two-way conversations with employees, as well as suggested actions.
- Transform culture: Leadership can leverage insights from Workday Peakon Employee Voice to establish a connection between employee engagement and KPIs such as patient satisfaction and opportunities for growth. And because reporting is automated, it eliminates the need to manually map and update an organization’s hierarchy. That means leaders can spend more time improving the employee experience, which impacts bottom-line results.
To learn more about how Workday Peakon Employee Voice can help your healthcare organization improve organizational performance through enhanced employee engagement, visit workday.com/employee-voice.
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