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Health Care system culture enriched with the help of CultureScan™
A large and integrated health system embarked on a major culture change initiative, with the stated goals of re-energizing its workforce, increasing employee morale/satisfaction, improving effectiveness in recruiting and retaining talent, increasing customer satisfaction, and thereby ultimately improving individual and business performance. It wanted to implement an effective employee survey process throughout the system to help guide its culture change initiative and measure progress against these goals.
The health system adopted Gantz Wiley Research’s CultureScan survey as the common measurement tool to be used. Individual hospitals and business units were allowed to add up to five supplemental questions and could administer the survey every 1–2 years at times of their own choosing. The survey was conducted in paper-and-pencil form during group sessions whenever possible. This method achieved very high response rates – often 90% or higher.
The first unit within the health system to conduct the survey was a moderately large urban hospital. It surveyed its employees initially in the fall of 2002, with subsequent surveys in the fall of 2003 and 2004.
The hospital’s initial survey results were quite low. Only one of the ten themes measured in CultureScan scored as a strength, and the results were well below Gantz Wiley Research’s norms for the Healthcare Services industry. With the help of their Gantz Wiley consultant, the hospital’s senior leadership team selected Recognition/reward and Employee involvement as its two areas of focus for improvement efforts over the next year.
A cross-functional employee survey steering team, composed primarily of non-management employees, was established and given overall responsibility for survey follow-up activities. This team coordinated their efforts with Service Excellence teams, which were already in place, to clarify causes of employee dissatisfaction in the two focus areas and to recommend and implement corrective actions. These efforts clearly paid off.
The hospital’s second survey a year later showed dramatic improvement. Nine of the ten CultureScan themes showed significant gains, and the Employee involvement theme had improved by an impressive 13 percentage points in just one year. The deficit compared to industry norms had been overcome, and the hospital’s scores were now just above the norm on average. Encouraged by this strong validation, the hospital’s senior leaders decided to continue to focus their improvement efforts in the same two areas over the course of the next year. The survey steering team and service excellence teams re-doubled their efforts to find ways to more fully involve employees in solving workplace problems/issues, and to more frequently and meaningfully recognize and reward employees for their contributions and achievements.
The 2004 survey revealed further dramatic improvement. From a start of only one Strength and three Opportunities in 2002, the overall profile of ten survey themes now showed eight Strengths and only one Opportunity. The cumulative improvement across all the CultureScan survey items was over 15 percentage points. Moreover, the hospital had gone from scoring well below the norm to consistently exceeding the Healthcare Services industry norm by an average of more than ten percentage points in just two years.
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