How to Protect Your Best Asset: The Caregivers
by Jeff Burger
Story Highlights
- You can improve the patient experience by investing in employees
- Employees who use their strengths provide a better patient experience
- The right metrics help you monitor and measure employee needs
When was your last ophthalmology visit? For some healthcare leaders, it's
time to correct their tunnel vision when it comes to patient satisfaction
metrics and data.
Vigilance with patient metrics is understandable, especially as healthcare
leaders juggle unrelenting changes to reimbursement and quality-of-care mandates.
But -- while prioritizing patients is critical -- Gallup suggests that
an alternative focus can do even
more to promote exceptional patient experiences.
Our data reveal that forward-thinking healthcare leaders have dramatically
improved the patient experience by first
investing in their employees.
That is, to drive patient outcomes, world-class healthcare organizations
focus on the big picture:
Healthcare is about human beings caring for human beings.
For example, one
clinic improved its ranking in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
(CMS) survey of patient satisfaction from about average to among the top
8% of hospitals after leaders recognized that engaged, satisfied caregivers
are essential for optimizing the patient experience while promoting safety
and quality.
Meeting employees' needs is even more important amid the nursing shortage
and the changing nature of work. Millennial employees
view work in markedly different ways than previous generations, craving strengths-based
development, purpose and meaning in their jobs.
With the ultimate goal of improving patient satisfaction, healthcare leaders
need to view their employees as internal customers and holistically invest
in employees' needs. Doing so can dramatically improve employee engagement
-- and, in turn,
HCAHPS scores.
Engaged employees are willing to go above and beyond the basic standards
of performance -- making them more likely to anticipate patients' needs and create
a positive patient experience.
Further, with a culture of engaged employees, healthcare organizations
can better
attract top talent and entice their star employees to stick around.
The following strategies can help healthcare organizations provide better
care for caregivers:
1. Improve internal communication.
As healthcare organizations strive to communicate effectively with patients,
it can be easy to overlook internal communication strategies. But effectively
conveying information to employees is essential for internal collaboration,
patient care, employee engagement and a culture of compliance.
To keep up with emerging technologies and shifting employee demands, healthcare
leaders need to discover how employees consume information and accommodate
their preferences and needs. For example, some teams might prefer written
communication -- such as emails or text messages -- over telephone and
face-to-face communication. Others might find that brief team meetings
at the start of shifts set the tone for optimal productivity.
Gallup finds that millennials expect
ongoing communication and consistent feedback in the workplace. However, just 19% of millennial employees report they
receive routine feedback, and just 17% of millennial employees say the
feedback they receive is meaningful. To optimize internal communication
and meet employees' need for feedback, healthcare managers should
facilitate authentic,
ongoing conversations with employees.
Further, managers in acute and non-acute care settings should use insights
from employee engagement surveys to have
meaningful conversations with employees. Measuring engagement is just the beginning; to improve
employee performance and quality of care, managers need to use engagement
data to establish goals and generate meaningful discussions.
Effective internal communication is also critical for keeping employees
aligned with an organization's mission.
Gallup finds that only about one-third of the U.S. workforce strongly agrees that the
mission or purpose of their company makes them feel their job is important. All too often, people are attracted
to the mission of medicine only to discover that margins affect their
day-to-day work more than the mission of their organization does.
To combat this problem, managers should consistently connect employees'
work with the big picture -- showcasing and supporting the organization's
purpose through both words and actions.
2. Adopt a strengths-based approach.
It's no secret that strong patient-provider connections promote patient
compliance and encourage an optimal patient experience. But for many healthcare
leaders, training employees to build emotional connections is far more
challenging than teaching technical skills.
Implementing a
strengths-based approach to managing and developing employees can help hospitals overcome this
challenge and tap into employees' innate potential. Gallup finds that
a strengths-based management approach helps healthcare teams meet performance
goals, interact with patients more effectively and coordinate responsibilities
to maximize a team's talents.
When employees understand their strengths -- and what their teammates bring
to the table -- they can provide more seamless patient experiences. Caregivers
with innate relationship-building strengths, for example, can partner
effectively with analytically minded individuals to promote holistic patient care.
To start, managers should discover each employee's unique talents,
identify the tasks and activities that each person does best and encourage
employees to apply and develop their strengths.
Managers should also infuse employee strengths in ongoing performance development
conversations. For example, managers should encourage employees to consider
how they can apply their strengths to better achieve their performance
goals. Gallup finds that frequent, strengths-based performance development
feedback can boost employee engagement
threefold.
3. Monitor, measure and manage employee needs using proven metrics.
Healthcare organizations have long recognized the importance of following
clinical practices and checklists that are statistically proven to improve
quality of care and reduce adverse clinical events. Healthcare leaders
should apply the same stringent criteria to employee initiatives -- ensuring
that employee practices are validated to drive business metrics and patient outcomes.
For example, Gallup meta-analytic research on 1.2 million employees reveals
that organizations that implemented a
strengths-based intervention of any magnitude had performance increases across myriad outcomes, including
26% to 72% lower turnover (at high-turnover organizations) and
22% to 59% fewer safety incidents.
Further, people who use their CliftonStrengths every day are
six times more likely to be engaged at work.
Amid unrelenting industry change, healthcare organizations need to protect
their investments more than ever. By sticking with validated, effective
employee interventions, healthcare leaders can better meet employee needs
-- and, in turn, improve patient outcomes.
Gallup can help you improve the employee experience with proven tactics:
Bailey Nelson contributed to the writing of this article.
Jeff Burger is a Managing Consultant at Gallup.
