In a recent study of 282 healthcare workers, 80.14% reported experiencing medium or high stress. Additionally, one in four respondents reported that they had low life satisfaction.
These numbers highlight the need for employee engagement and wellness programs targeting healthcare workers.
Why? Because patient care quality and staff well-being hang in the balance.
In this article, we’ll outline the importance of employee engagement in healthcare, key drivers and challenges, and proven strategies to improve engagement.
Let’s get to it.
Why is Employee Engagement Important in Healthcare?
The healthcare industry is a high-stress environment due to the high stakes involved: patient safety and health. Failing to consider the holistic well-being of your physicians, nurses, medical assistants, and administrators negatively affects patient care, potentially leading to increased long-term mortality.
Here's what happens when healthcare workers are truly engaged:
- Improved Patient Care: Engaged healthcare workers are more likely to deliver compassionate care when they are not burned out or worried about their job security or financial well-being.
- Higher Retention Rates: Employees are more likely to stay at your facility year over year when they feel valued. This helps you retain your best talent and maintain your competitive edge over other facilities.
- Improved Collaboration: Generally, people are easier to work with when they are happy and motivated. Similarly, healthcare teams work better together when they are satisfied with their jobs and committed to the company’s mission and goals.
- Cultivates an Innovative Culture: Engaged employees are better able to tap into their strengths and generate out-of-the-box ideas that can drastically improve patient outcomes and research efforts.
- Attracts Talent: A workplace culture that values employee well-being fosters a positive reputation for the organization. This makes it easier to attract top talent in the job market, giving you an edge over your competitors.
SMART Goals for Employee Engagement in Healthcare
Avoid generic objectives such as "boost morale" or "increase satisfaction" when outlining your organization’s engagement goals.
Instead, use the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) framework.
These clearly defined goals provide a basis for tracking essential metrics to assess the short- and long-term effectiveness of your employee engagement plan.
Let’s explore some examples of SMART employee engagement goals you can set for your healthcare team:
- Cultivate a Listening Culture: You could aim to improve employees' sense of being heard by 15% within 12 months. One way to achieve this is to hold weekly meetings where members share their concerns or barriers to patient care.
- Promote Learning and Development: Encourage at least 40% of the workforce to enroll in a healthcare-related course in the next six months. You can facilitate participation by offering free or subsidized courses aligned with members’ career development goals.
- Invest in Leadership: Ensure senior management and middle management increase their interactions with employees by at least 10% every quarter. For example, you could encourage members to sign up for leadership courses or organize corporate wellness workshops where members interact one-on-one with thought leaders in their niche.
- Prioritize Recognition: Encourage peer-to-peer recognition and monthly wellness incentive programs to boost your team’s morale and job satisfaction by 20% over 12 months.
Key Drivers of Engagement in Healthcare Settings
Healthcare workers aren't asking for the impossible. The key drivers of engagement for your accounting team are likely the same for your nurses and physicians, with only a few exceptions.
For example, your healthcare team also wants to feel seen and their input valued, just as other employees in your organization.
Let’s take a deep dive into what can actually move the needle for your healthcare team:
- Workplace Safety: Your healthcare team faces physical, emotional, and psychological risks in their daily work. As such, they will likely be motivated when they see that you are committed to their well-being by establishing clear safety protocols, ensuring adequate staffing, and providing access to protective equipment.
- Career Advancement Opportunities: Offer training and mentorship programs to demonstrate your commitment to your healthcare team's career development. Such programs also show employees they are part of an organization's long-term plans.
- Work-Life Balance: Allow flexible working hours so that members can take breaks whenever they feel burned out. This helps them rest and unwind so they return rejuvenated and incentivized to work.
- Employee Empowerment: Give employees autonomy to make decisions in their roles, demonstrating that you trust their judgment and abilities. It also boosts their confidence and encourages them to turn their ideas into tangible outcomes.
- Employee Recognition: Introduce bonuses and wellness incentives to boost employee engagement and productivity. Such incentives boost their confidence and encourage them to overcome any challenges that may be hindering their progression and success.
- Team Solidarity: Encourage strong working relationships among staff to foster camaraderie and teamwork, integral to patient safety and satisfaction.
Common Challenges in Healthcare Employee Engagement
Even with the best intentions and wellness programs in place, keeping your healthcare team truly engaged isn’t easy. You might still encounter employees who remain disengaged or only partially committed to your company, indicating that your employee engagement strategies are not effective.
So, before implementing the next employee engagement program, here’s what to avoid:
- Lack of Incentives: Leaving out recognition and rewards often discourages employees from enrolling and participating in wellness programs. Provide wellness incentives that align with your company culture and support employees’ individual wellness needs.
- Limited Career Advancement Options: When employees realize they have few progression options, they tend to withdraw from the workplace and do the bare minimum to get by. They will also begin exploring advancement opportunities in other organizations. To remedy this, provide horizontal and vertical career paths for employees to pursue, keeping them committed to your company.
- Poor Communication: Without two-way communication, employees often feel like they are not a priority. Establishing a communication protocol across all levels of the organization bridges the gap between the healthcare team and senior management, helping address employee concerns and fostering engagement.
- Micromanagement: Healthcare professionals dislike working under extremely stringent oversight, as this stifles innovation and productivity. Micromanagement also makes employees feel disrespected and their skills underappreciated. Remedying this situation requires providing employees with the freedom to make choices.
- Leaders Don’t Show Up: When top-level managers don’t treat employee engagement programs as essential, the trickle-down effect affects the entire healthcare team. As such, encourage senior management to be the program ambassadors and provide role models for other members.
- Lack of Inclusivity: One-size-fits-all employee engagement programs make some members feel unseen and unwanted, hurting their motivation and job satisfaction. Align the engagement strategy with employees’ personal preferences to enhance participation.
How to Improve Employee Engagement in Healthcare
Employee engagement is not only about ensuring your staff are happy and satisfied in their workplaces. It is also about guaranteeing their commitment to the organization's mission and vision.
Discover ways to foster your healthcare team’s physical, emotional, and cognitive engagement:
1. Support Holistic Wellness
Implement corporate health and wellness programs to support your healthcare team’s lifestyle goals. The wellness programs should incorporate core components, including health assessments, fitness regimens, dietary management plans, and mental health support.
Make health and wellness programs fun to participate in by including goal-oriented wellness challenges, such as step tracking and leaderboards, to encourage healthy competition within the team.
2. Regular Employee Recognition
Establish employee appreciation events to celebrate healthcare workers who have been exemplary in their work. For example, you could publicly recognize nurses who receive the highest patient satisfaction scores each month by posting their banners on the facility's notice boards.
Additionally, we recommend thoughtful wellness gifts for employees to celebrate personal achievements, such as birthdays or promotions.
Download our ebook to learn how psychology-backed incentives can drive real engagement results for your team.
3. Open Communication Lines
Provide open lines of communication between management and all other levels of healthcare staff for multi-way information flow.
This shows employees that you value their feedback, encouraging them to be more proactive in identifying issues and recommending solutions. Additionally, elaborate communication channels foster collaboration among healthcare teams across departments.
4. Offer Mental Health Support
In a recent study, almost 25% of healthcare workers had struggled with compassion fatigue to the point of thinking about, planning, or attempting suicide. As a healthcare employer, you can help improve your team’s mental health by providing counseling services and introducing employee assistance programs to help members deal with personal and work-related issues.
We help healthcare companies introduce expert-led, live, and on-demand wellness webinars on guided meditation and other relaxation techniques to help members deal with stress and burnout.
5. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Programs
Create a workplace environment where employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of their demographics (age, gender, race, and nationality).
DEI programs provide a platform for minority healthcare workers to feel seen, respected, and valued as equal contributors to patient safety and well-being. Some practical strategies for enhancing DEI in healthcare settings include:
- Implementing fair hiring policies
- Removing systemic barriers to promotions and advancement to leadership roles
- Providing cultural competency training
6. Training and Development Opportunities
Ongoing clinical education and skill development improve employee engagement in two primary ways:
- Keeps healthcare professionals updated on evolving technologies and treatment methods, which boosts their confidence as they tend to patients.
- Shows members that you consider them an essential part of the company’s future, fostering a sense of purpose and long-term commitment.
7. Meaningful Work
Create opportunities for your healthcare team to experience how their work impacts the real world. For example, you could host events where the healthcare team meets families of cancer survivors who have been under their care.
Such experiences help renew the team’s sense of purpose and foster job satisfaction, increasing members’ ownership of the company’s vision and goals.
Employee engagement in healthcare comes down to making your team feel valued by recognizing their achievements, providing career development opportunities, and supporting decision autonomy. Also, you should provide mental health support to help your healthcare team deal with stress and burnout associated with patient care.
The best way to drive real engagement for your healthcare team is to partner with a wellness provider to implement employee engagement programs tailored to their individual needs.
At SoHookd, we offer the only wellness-focused incentives marketplace that enables you to provide thoughtful gifts to recognize and celebrate your healthcare team.
Book a live demo for a hands-on experience of our wellness marketplace.
How to Measure Employee Engagement In Healthcare
Measuring employee engagement is more than asking your healthcare team whether they are happy at work. It’s about tracking the right metrics and listening to staff feedback.
Here’s how to determine what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus efforts for meaningful improvement:
- Targeted Interviews: These are private and personalized interviews where healthcare employees disclose issues affecting their personal well-being and goals. It is also an opportunity for managers to provide feedback about individual performance and ways to improve it.
- Regular Surveys: Conduct annual surveys to determine employees’ self-reported job satisfaction, morale, and net promoter scores. This helps you establish how happy your healthcare team is and provides context for your retention/turnover rate.
- Pulse Surveys: These are short questionnaires consisting of 5-10 yes-or-no questions that provide insights into members’ perception of the employee engagement programs. Regular pulse surveys help you identify and address dissatisfaction quickly before it progresses into disengagement.
- Exit Interviews: Debrief healthcare professionals who resign from the company to uncover issues that prompted them to leave. Over time, you could establish patterns contributing to high turnover, such as limited career development opportunities.
- 360-Degree Feedback Reviews: These reviews ask employees to share their opinions about specific individuals, such as managers and colleagues. They enable employers to gauge how healthcare professionals interact with each other and measure factors such as collaboration, identifying issues that affect team cohesion.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Below are answers to some common questions concerning employee engagement in the healthcare industry:
What is Employee Engagement Software for Healthcare?
Employee engagement software is a tool that enables healthcare facilities to monitor and measure factors such as employee performance, employee retention, patient experience, and DEI initiatives.
The software allows leaders to enhance workplace cultures by identifying areas for improvement, such as communication and performance recognition.
How is Employee Engagement Different From Employee Satisfaction?
Employee engagement is a holistic approach that measures the active involvement of employees in the workplace. It determines how enthusiastic and passionate employees are about their work.
On the other hand, employee satisfaction is a measure of how content employees feel about job-related expectations, such as pay and working conditions.
How Do Recognition Programs Boost Employee Engagement in Healthcare?
Recognition programs in healthcare make employees feel valued and appreciated by their employers for their hard work.
This increases their job satisfaction and motivation, encouraging healthcare employees to put more effort into enhancing patient experiences.
Conclusion
Improving employee engagement in healthcare is one of the most effective ways to build a thriving work environment. Without employee engagement, healthcare organizations experience high turnover, which, in turn, affects patient care in the long term.
However, with the right strategy, you can keep your healthcare team happy and motivated, so that members always feel connected to your company's goals.
The best way to get it right? Partnering with a corporate wellness company.
At SoHookd, we have nearly 10 years of experience providing flexible healthcare employee engagement programs that companies can customize and launch within 2 weeks. Even better, our employee engagement programs include dedicated support to reduce your HR team’s administrative workload.
Schedule a personalized call to discover how our employee engagement plans can help you create an environment where your healthcare team thrives.
