Employee Engagement: Make It Meaningful

Make employee engagement more than a buzzword by offering tangible, measurable benefits and creating meaningful interactions that really earn employee loyalty.

Free pizza, delivered to nurses' stations. Dessert carts wheeled by C-level executives. Mid-day dance breaks. The HR world is rife with "fun" suggestions for improving team morale and keeping your employees satisfied, engaged, and not actively plotting their escape.

Whether these initiatives actually accomplish anything beneficial helpful has long been debated. But there is one measure by which they do seem to be paying off: Higher levels of employee engagement lead to improved HCAHPS scores and those scores translate into improved patient experience.

"You can't do one without the other," says Kevin Gwin, vice president of patient experience and communications at Ardent Health Services, a nationwide provider of hospital and healthcare services. "You just can't generate loyalty among patients without loyalty among your employees."

Patty McKay, senior director of learning and talent development at AMN Healthcare, a staffing, recruitment and HR consulting firm, agrees. "Disengaged employees will often have lower productivity and increased errors in their work products, which can ultimately lead to unwanted turnover," she says. "Additionally, the negative attitude of disengaged employees often has the potential to spread among their peers."

Measuring Happiness
Both Gwin and McKay both say their organizations use surveys as metrics to measure the engagement and satisfaction of their employees.

"We do two surveys a year," says Gwin. "We measure employee engagement toward their job and their facility. We ask them about their feelings toward their immediate supervisor and upper management… and we benchmark [based on the responses]."

Ardent Health's surveys are anonymous, identified only by team. Gwin believes that surveys, however, should only be a small piece of the engagement puzzle. The best measure of engagement, he says, is knowing your team, their personalities, and the issues and barriers they are facing.

"People know people in their workgroups. They know who has a good attitude, who is open to feedback. [It's] that intuitive knowing your group." Most managers have a pretty good idea what the survey results are going to look like before they get them, says Gwin—they simply confirm what they already knew or provide further insight into the details of the situation.

Ardent Health also uses Net Promoter Score to measure employee loyalty. The more likely an employee is to recommend working within their organization to a family member or friend, the engaged they probably are.

AMN Healthcare also conducts internal inventories of employee satisfaction, says McKay, including a yearly employee engagement survey "to get a big-picture understanding of employee sentiment," and separate "pulse" surveys every four months. "Company leaders are then required to create tailored action plans based on the resulting data for their respective teams," says McKay.

Meaningful Interactions = Engaged Employees
So, where do employee appreciation events and initiatives fit in to the employee engagement picture?

"I like employee events—we have an opportunity to learn something about each other that's not in a work environment, but in a more social setting," says Gwin. "Because if we get to know each other, and there's some trust there, they're going to really tell me how things are going. They're going to confide in me about a compliance issue, or something that should have been reported anyway, or they're going to let me know how we can help them. That's how you move morale."

In addition to building trust, it's incredibly moving to many employees to have higher-ups recognize them in the hallways or the cafeteria and remember details about them and their families.

Remembering that they have a son who plays football or a daughter who is heading off to college soon, or asking about aging parents are meaningful interactions for hospital leadership to have with employees.

Additionally, says Gwin, the gimmicky stuff—wheeling dessert carts by the desks of the employees or personally delivering pizza—can be very powerful, if leadership involves themselves in the right way.

"When the CEO pushes the ice cream cart around and hands [staff] ice cream, it gives us an opportunity to serve them and to let them know how much we appreciate them. They can actually see us saying the words, looking them in the eye and serving them. I think there's a lot of value in that… any time we have an opportunity where leadership can serve frontline staff, we need to take full advantage of it."

But, adds Gwin, the interaction must be genuine. "It's on us to really believe it. You can't fake this stuff. It's got to be real."

But appreciating your employees isn't just about dance breaks or pizza. It's about listening to your staff, caring about their problems, and removing barriers to doing their jobs. Both Gwin and McKay speak of the importance of ensuring employees have competitive pay, benefits, paid time off and opportunities for advancement.

If you choose to use surveys to measure employee engagement within your organization, it is paramount that you use them to find what obstacles your employees face daily. Is their equipment modern? Does it work? Does their supervisor have a positive attitude, and is he or she fair? This is an opportunity for honest feedback you won't get every day, so use it to its full potential.

"I love the gimmicks, but I don't want to just do the gimmicks," says Gwin. "We need to be available to them when they've got a problem. Employees want to know—how are you going to support me when I have an issue?"