Hospitals face challenges as they compete to attract and retain employees. It is no wonder employee satisfaction is one of the most challenging issues facing hospitals today.
RML Specialty Hospital is focused on the importance of employee satisfaction and retention and their role in providing high-quality patient care. We conduct a formal biannual employee opinion survey to evaluate employee perceptions of RML and address any issues discovered. For the 2006 survey, we partnered with the Jackson Organization (now Healthstream Research), one of the healthcare industry’s foremost research resources, to benchmark RML Specialty Hospital against their national database of more than 1,100 participating hospitals.
We are very proud to report the results. RML’s overall employee satisfaction level was 3.84 on a 5.0 scale, ranking RML at the 86th percentile-higher than six out of seven hospitals in the Healthstream database. This represents a statistically significant increase ofnearly 20 percentover our 2004 level of 3.65 (72nd percentile) and directly reflects our hospital-wide efforts to continuously improve our work environment.
We are equally proud of our survey participation rate. Eighty percent of our employees completed the survey, a tremendous turnout that not only signals our workforce’s commitment to excellence but also gives us extremely valid data on which to build action plans for improvement.
The details are as important as our overall score. Six of the 36 questions are top predictors of employee satisfaction, and in all six we scored higher than the database averages. For the following four questions, all of which underscore the relationship between employee satisfaction and the patient experience, RML ranked in the 99th percentile, making us one of the top ranking hospitals in these domains:
- Meeting the needs of our patients is the most important thing we do
- The top leadership is an excellent steward of the well-being of our employees and the mission of the hospital
- I would report a co-worker whom I found placing a patient, an employee, or him/herself at risk
- I would feel comfortable reporting a medical error
We are pleased that our rigorous attention to service excellence and employee satisfaction offers our employees a meaningful experience.
