Few Healthcare Workers Say Organizations Deliver on Employee Experience and Satisfaction

• New Eagle Hill Consulting Healthcare Employee Survey Finds More Than a Quarter of Healthcare Workers Plan to Find New Employer

A new national survey of US healthcare workers from Eagle Hill Consulting finds that less than one quarter (24 percent) say that their organization has taken greater action to improve the employee experience, yet 64 percent took steps to improve the customer experience. The research also finds that more than a quarter (28 percent) of healthcare workers plan to seek work with a new employer in the next 12 months.

This research comes as healthcare workers continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, with the delta variant putting hospitals back in crisis mode. Hospitals and healthcare workers across country are struggling to respond to the fourth surge of infections, driven largely by the unvaccinated.

The Eagle Hill Consulting Healthcare Employees Experience Survey 2021 was conducted online by Ipsos and included 505 respondents from a random sample of healthcare industry employees across the U.S. Read more here.

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“The direct path to creating the best patient experience is improving the experience for employees of provider organizations,” says Sridhar Karimanal, Industry Lead for Health & Life Sciences at Eagle Hill Consulting. “But employees say that isn’t happening at many healthcare providers. By a margin of three and a half to one, employees we surveyed say their organization weighed customer experience as more important than employee experience for delivering on the organizational mission.”

“It’s more important than ever for healthcare providers to take action. Healthcare workers are near the breaking point after 18 months of serving on the frontlines of the pandemic. Failure to prioritize the employee experience will result in higher rates of burnout, more attrition, and will ultimately harm patient satisfaction,” Karimanal said.

The research finds that:

• Fewer than half say (42 percent) their organization places a great deal of importance on employee experience/satisfaction. Nearly one in five say their organization places little or no importance on employee experience/satisfaction
• Less than a quarter (24 percent) say their organization has taken greater action to improve the employee experience.
• More than a quarter (28 percent) of healthcare workers plan to seek work with a new employer in the next 12 months.
• 88% and 79% respectively said their immediate department and supervisor have the highest impact on the day-to-day work experience. But, less than half (46%) say their supervisor demonstrates care/concern about their interactions and relationships with department members.
• Factors that healthcare workers ranked that they value most in their day-to-day work experiences include purposeful work (50 percent), work-life balance (44 percent), productive work (29 percent), and team collaboration (15 percent).

Recommendations for improving both the employee and customer experience include:

• Consider the holistic employee experience. Leaders often focus too narrowly on onboarding and performance management instead of thinking about the overall experience employees desire and need to be productive, engaged, and successful. A holistic employee experience considers four dimensions – interpersonal, technological, occupational and physical – and how each can improve or diminish how employees think and feel at work.
• Tie employee metrics to patient metrics. The first step is listening to employees and collecting data on the voice of the employee. Then, the analysis of employee data should be reviewed with key patient experience/satisfaction performance indicators side-by-side in a joint dashboard. Shifts in employee experience like satisfaction and turnover could be leading indicators for performance on patience experience.
• Emphasize the role of supervisors in driving departmental cohesion. As post-COVID working models expand to include more in-person department opportunities, supervisors can take a strong hand in strengthening connections across their departments.

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