(Management Case Study) Increase Your Employee Engagement by Engaging Your Employees!

Purpose: With increasing stress and staffing shortages impacting today’s healthcare system, hospitals are searching for ways to improve employee engagement. Engaged employees are enthusiastic and yield positive actions to move the organization forward as well as improved patient outcomes. Disengaged employees are usually low performers and can damage organizational trust among co-workers. This presentation describes methods used to engage department employees.

Methods: Many facilities use employee engagement surveys on a set cadence with which to evaluate employee engagement. Survey platforms include action plans with pre-set examples or ideas for survey result gap enhancement. By thinking outside the box, our pharmacy department was able to turn around low employee engagement scores. Example inner-department surveys (outside of the employee engagement survey), developing a department employee engagement committee, and the department "strive for five" document will be shared. These strategies were all used without our pharmacy department and yielded positive results.

Results: Attendees will gain an understanding of the importance of engaged employees, discuss categories within an employee engagement survey and learn strategies to increase engagement. This presentation will feature our department’s specific journey to increase employee satisfaction within a hospital pharmacy department. By implementing our tactics (inner-department survey, development of employee engagement committee, set monthly meetings, and "strive for five" document), our department was able to increase employee engagement scores by 20% in a 6 month time period.

Conclusion: As healthcare organizations are experiencing increasing strain and staffing shortages, there is momentum to focus on employee engagement. Engaged employees are high performers and contribute a positive impact towards organizational success and positive patient outcomes. This presentation will describe the importance of highly engaged employees as well as the strategies utilized and processes implemented to increase employee engagement in a tertiary community hospital pharmacy department. By implementing our tactics, our department was able to increase employee engagement scores by 20% in a 6 month time period. Those score increased results are the WOW factor for this presentation.