The priceless impact of investing in employee engagement
HCA Healthcare is committed to investing in an effective strategy for colleague engagement in 2023, and we’re not alone.
A new Gallup report suggests that engagement needs to be a top priority for all employers this year. According to national survey data, employee engagement has been trending up across the U.S. for nearly a decade, before seeing a drop in recent years, from 36% employee engagement in 2020, to 34% in 2021, and 32% in 2022. That’s a challenging trend for employers, especially in today’s complicated workforce landscape.
Contrary to the national patterns, HCA Healthcare’s employee engagement score is averaging about 40 points higher, and trending mostly in a positive direction. The score decreased from 75% in October 2021 to 74% in May of 2022 and then increased to 76% in October of 2022.
Participation is half the battle
HCA proudly boasts higher-than-average participation numbers in our bi-annual employee engagement survey, an important metric that should not be underestimated. A recent Forbes article notes that if employees are actively participating in the survey (84% in the case of HCA colleagues in our last pulse) then that is proof-positive of an engaged workforce. In fact, even in cases where employees give low scores on specific survey items (our lowest scored item last survey was “involvement” at 73%), Forbes senior contributor Mark Murphy says, “they're de facto telling leaders that they care enough about the company to try to make changes.” As Murphy notes, “When employee participation is below 60% on a survey, it's clear that a large swath of the workforce has given up even trying to improve the environment, and that's incredibly difficult to correct. “ Thanks to our continued employee engagement efforts, our survey participation increased from 56% in May of 2022 to 84% in October 2022.
Crucial conversations
One easy way that leaders can leverage the engagement survey results is to talk to their direct reports about the survey data as soon as the report is available. The leadership training and research firm Leadership IQ reports that only 29% of companies say that all of their managers share the survey results with their employees. This is a critical missed opportunity for leaders who want to do their part to increase employee engagement. The process of distributing the survey, filling it out and tabulating the results takes up far too much of the company’s time and resources for us to simply gather the information as a passive research project. As the experts at Leadership IQ definitively state, “the purpose of conducting a survey is to actually improve employee engagement.” Survey results should drive constructive conversations (and actions – we’ll get to that next) between managers and their reports.
HCA is delivering on our commitment to this type of engagement by investing in a retention training program for leaders, launched last year at 28 of our facilities, to coach leaders on how to build meaningful connections with colleagues. The pilot program is already yielding positive results, but there’s more work to do if we want to be successful in this mission. Last year we saw 79% of the facilities that received training have a decrease in turnover across all colleagues, and 93% of trained facilities improved retention in the nursing population, a core driver of our business. More than 3,660 leaders have been trained to help improve retention, and phase two is already underway at 16 more facilities. We’ll continue using the engagement survey to understand how frequently these crucial conversations are happening between managers and their reports, with questions including “I have meaningful conversations with my manager,” which yielded a 79% on our last survey, and “my manager is actively involved in helping me grow as a professional,” which had a score of 77%. This survey data allows us to measure real person-to-person connection between our colleagues and their managers, and see areas where we can continue to improve.
Actions speak louder than words
Another crucial step of improving employee engagement is turning survey results into actions. According to the report from Leadership IQ, only 42% of human resource executives say that their company is 100% willing to take action on every single question on their survey, meaning that 58% of companies (a majority) are not taking action based on the data from their employee engagement survey. HCA encourages all of our leaders to use the action planning tools at their disposal to help them better align their goals with employee engagement. For example, a Pulse question from our survey is “I have the resources I need to do my job well.” If a manger receives low survey scores on this item, their first step can and should be to speak with their reports and learn what supports and resources are needed to better enable our colleagues to do their jobs. After that, managers are empowered to build an action plan to bring solutions for their team. And a crucial, but often forgotten, last step is to close the loop and report out to their colleagues with a message that celebrates listening and acting on feedback.
Teamwork makes the dream work
As our above-average engagement scores demonstrate, we already have a lot to be proud of. Continued improvement for employee engagement needs to be a team effort company-wide, specifically for people leaders and managers. A common misconception is that employee engagement is an HR responsibility. But experts agree even the best employee engagement strategy won't work if managers at every level of the company are not fully invested in implementing the strategy within their own teams.
Keeping our best players on the roster
We know there is a strong correlation between employee engagement and retention, evidenced by the numbers in the latest ADP Research Institute Global Study of Engagement. Keeping our best players on the team is crucial to the continued success of our business. Experts say the cost of replacing an individual employee can range from half of the employee's annual salary to as much as double their annual pay. And a Gallup study says that U.S. businesses are losing a trillion dollars every single year due to voluntary employee turnover. The cost of investing in employee engagement is surely less than the cost of letting hundreds of thousands of dollars of talent walk out the doors of your business this year. And the data suggests this is a fixable problem. In fact, the Gallup study reveals that “fifty-two percent of voluntarily exiting employees say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job.” So, while the extra work of measuring employee engagement, investing in action planning and reporting results may feel like a lot for an already very busy workforce, we know from our research that the benefits will outweigh the cost and effort. It’s a worthy investment for any business, and especially at HCA when you consider the ripple effect of keeping our best players on the roster. Each healthcare worker helps thousands of people annually---imagine the generational impact of engaging with employees here and now.
