September 8, 2023 •Level Ten Healthcare Advisors
In our quest to simplify leadership and amplify the impact of healthcare leadership teams, we’ve built a leadership model called the Four Focuses of a Leader.
This framework gives health systems a powerfully distilled focus to allow them to make the greatest possible impact with their limited time and resources and ensure they’re achieving what’s most important to the organization as effectively as possible.
The first focus of a leader is instilling personal and team resilience, as building a strong foundation of health, vitality, and wellbeing as leaders is paramount to give us the strength we need to serve our patients and our teams.
Without that foundation, we’ll begin to overdraw our resilience reserve accounts leading to increased tensions among our teams, decreased performance, an increase in potentially life-threatening errors, and higher occurrences of employee burnout.
We must attend to our personal resilience to be able to bring our best gifts and talents to our role, find satisfaction in our work, and give our patients the high quality of care they most certainly deserve.
Once we’ve built up our resilience and have increased our capacity to adapt, respond, and lead well, we can begin to attend to the second focus of a leader: increasing employee engagement.
Increasing Employee Engagement + Improving the Bottom Line
Committing to increasing employee engagement encourages us to intentionally commit to designing a meaningful and fulfilling employee experience.
As leaders with a service-to-others focus, the importance of serving our employees through intentional experience design should be a given, but it’s also simply good for business to invest in our employees’ well-being.
Many HR executives will attest that recruitment to healthcare positions has been more challenging than ever and competition for talent has risen exponentially over the past several years.
Every staff member lost means additional time spent with positions unfilled, more time and cost needed to train new employees, less efficiency, more frustrations, and more strain on your department.
The best way to maintain morale and keep costs down is to keep the already trained, already established, already thriving employees we already have.
We need to coach, support, and nurture our existing teams to survive.
We Need Strong, Healthy Teams for Our Organization to Grow
The secret to growth comes down to happy employees. If we’re not investing in our employees and our team, we cannot grow as an organization.
Our success is rooted in how happy and engaged our employees are, and one of the best strategic moves we have in this competitive landscape is increasing employee retention.
To increase employee engagement and assist with retention, we need to invest in more than one-off pizza parties and staff events. We need a comprehensive and holistic approach to employee experience design that strategically builds engagement in each stage of the employee journey.
A Holistic Plan for Strategically Building Employee Engagement
The “Seven Stages of Employee Engagement” gives us a roadmap for building engagement through every major employee touchpoint: hiring, welcoming, connecting, balancing, rewarding, inspiring, and serving.
Let’s walk through each touchpoint and explore some of the key activities to build in each stage.
1. Hiring
First up is Hiring.
This includes everything the incoming employee experiences throughout the hiring process, such as recruitment ads, job descriptions, online applications, interactions with hiring managers, first impressions of your facility, all materials and messages you send, as well as what you say about the job opportunity and what it’s like to work for your organization during the interview process.
The hiring process is our opportunity to make a powerful first impression with potential recruits.
Every point of communication from hiring managers, the user experience of our career site, the ease of the application process, and subtle, environmental cues when candidates first enter our facility are either demonstrating our commitment to excellence or revealing our disorganization and indifference.
We can't take the small details for granted and must map out the hiring process and thoughtfully design each touchpoint. Our goal is to refine all messaging to communicate our employee value proposition, invite recruits to join the mission of our organization, and let our commitment to our employees truly shine.
2. Welcoming
The second stage of employee engagement is welcoming.
This stage covers everything to do with the onboarding process including communicating employee benefits, training, onboarding materials, orientations, and meeting the team.
In this stage, we must provide high-touch mentoring and training to ensure our new employees are set up for success and that we clearly communicate expectations, standards of behavior, and what it takes to win in their new role.
The work of communicating our commitment to our employees does not end with the hiring. These first 30, 60, and 90 days of our new employees' tenure are vital to retention.
As they get acquainted with our organization, new employees are seeing behind the curtain and learning if all of the promises and agreements made during the hiring process are supported by our culture and environment. If they aren't, we must build up our culture and become who we say we are to avoid losing great talent.
3. Connecting
Next, we have the third stage of connecting.
This is all about listening, aligning, communicating, and supporting the employee in their role.
Activities include establishing 1:1s meetings, communicating organizational change, encouraging employees to take part in events, providing regular and consistent feedback through multiple channels, employee rounding and reviews, and providing opportunities for the employees to engage and connect with the senior leadership team.
Our goal in this stage is to help deepen engagement and commitment to our organization. To do so, we must help our new employees foster connection, community, and belonging.
Coaching, rounding, and frequent communication will ensure our new employees are well-supported, mentored, and equipped to be their best and achieve personal and professional success.
In this stage, we can focus on integrating new employees into system-wide initiatives and aligning the work of their role with the greater mission of the organization. Creating opportunities for bonding with the team and participating in projects with broader work groups will also help deepen connection, attachment, and loyalty.
4. Balancing
The fourth stage of employee engagement is balancing and helping the employee adjust to their role and improve their overall health and well-being.
Opportunities for growth here include Employee Assistance Programs, stress management courses, connecting the employee to health and wellness programs that may be available at your organization and in the community, encouraging the employee to take time off–not just cash it out, assisting with time management, and offering hybrid or flexible work scheduling opportunities when possible.
Building their resilience and cultivating wellness is essential for our employees to stay fully engaged, committed to, and fulfilled in their jobs.
As their leaders, we must help our employees manage their time well, recover from busy seasons, and continually build their resilience reserves. While it’s great for our employees, it also will help our organization improve retention, decrease turnover, and prevent burnout.
Giving our employees the tools and resources they need to maintain their well-being will help them endure through challenging seasons and progress to the next stages of engagement where they’ll experience more reward, meaning, inspiration, and greater contribution.
5. Rewarding
Our next focal point in the employee journey is rewarding–everything we can do around recognition, benefits, and compensation.
This includes expressing appreciation, offering specialized recognition and personal connection from leadership, hosting family days and community events, enhancing benefit programs, providing financial planning services, and laying out a clear path for how the employee can grow and earn additional income within our health system.
Of course, pay is foundational to job satisfaction and doing everything we can to be competitive in the marketplace is essential for recruiting and retaining top talent. However, pay is not the only driving factor for what makes an employee stay at their organization and feel adequately valued.
Our employees are looking for a broad range of benefits to help them improve their professional, personal, family, and, yes, financial health. To lead them well, we must clearly demonstrate how they can advance their career, build a more fulfilling home life, and grow and develop as an individual while they're part of our team.
Additionally, we must intentionally and consistently celebrate our employees' accomplishments and provide ample praise and recognition to help them sustain their drive and motivation.
6. Inspiring
The sixth stage of employee engagement is inspiring. This is where the employee begins to connect to a bigger purpose, a deeper meaning, and they start to feel more rooted in the culture of the organization.
This is accomplished by infusing the company’s vision into all touchpoints, sharing the strategic plan with the employee, circulating stories of patient success and the impact of the employee’s work, offering opportunities to speak up and affect change and innovation, providing training, education and investment into the employee’s growth and development as a leader, and enacting solutions that come from within.
Having progressed through the stages of employee engagement, these seasoned vets are beginning to increase their commitment, involvement, and passion for the work they're doing at our organization. Therefore, in this stage, we must continue to fan those flames and help our employees find even more meaning, purpose, and significance in their work.
Creating opportunities for Leadership Development, professional growth, and participating in operational innovation initiatives will help these key players and achievers stay excited and engaged for the long-term.
Mentoring these employees to become leaders and giving them special projects and strategies to oversee will also allow them to build confidence and will strengthen your organization in return.
7. Serving
Finally, stage seven of building employee engagement is serving. This includes broadening our reach to the community, engaging in activism, and volunteering.
Activities might include training and support to embody servant leadership at the organization and in everyday life, hosting community events to offer education and access to the health system’s services, time off for employees to serve with non-profits and agencies of choice, training on important legislative and community issues, and serving the patients and their families at every touchpoint of care.
Once an employee reaches this seventh stage, they are usually highly engaged and believe they are becoming their best self and making their greatest contribution to the world through their role.
These stars are outwardly focused and looking for how they can better serve the organization, their patients and customers, and fellow employees and may begin to seek opportunities to innovate around recurring challenges, address systemic issues, and disrupt the entire industry.
Intentionality in this stage requires us to creatively leverage our employees' passion, drive, and desire for contribution. We must find ways for them to not only affect change within our organization but to provide value, service, and support to the greater community, too.
How Does Your Organization Rate at Each Stage of Employee Engagement?
Building robust employee engagement is possible and investing your energy to develop and strengthen your organization’s offerings in each stage will make it much easier to recruit and retain top talent.
Take some time to stop and review each of the seven stages:
- What is your organization currently doing well?
- Where are you falling short and have more room to build?
- What things can you advocate for organizationally?
- As a new employee, what was your experience like?
- How can you use this framework to improve the experience of your team?
Reach out to your team and ask for their feedback on each stage, too.
Getting insight from employees who are currently working in the organization is vital to building a program with deep resonance and lasting impact.
Staying Committed to Long-Term, Sustainable Change
Some of the solutions you brainstorm to increase employee engagement may seem overwhelming to tackle and far beyond your reach.
Building an impactful employee engagement program doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term strategy that will take great intentionality and focus from you, your fellow leaders, and your entire senior leadership team.
However, you wouldn’t have this job if you weren’t immensely talented and if you hadn’t demonstrated an ability to tackle tough challenges and implement big ideas.
So many of the tactics needed to build a successful employee engagement strategy are low-cost and simply require the coordination, effort, and communication of a dedicated leader.
You can be that leader. You can be the one to step up to tackle each stage of engagement, one small step at a time.
If you're ready to explore how to increase engagement at your organization, contact our team today.
