Hospitals

Why Mercy Health is working with Culture Amp to enhance the employee experience

To improve employee engagement and experience, Mercy Health decided to team up with Culture Amp, which has worked with entities like Lyft and Nike, in July 2017.

Though patients are at the center of the healthcare experience, a hospital can’t neglect the needs of its own people.

That’s why more than one year ago, Cincinnati, Ohio-based Mercy Health embarked on a journey to improve the experience and engagement of its employees.

“[W]e determined our capabilities with employee feedback were missing the mark and we weren’t fully engaging or having two-way conversations with employees,” Kyle Arnold, Mercy Health’s system director of people analytics and talent, said via email.

After researching possible options, Mercy decided to team up with Culture Amp, a company headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2017. To date, Culture Amp has worked with well-known entities like Lyft, Airbnb, Nike and Yelp.

The company’s technology helps organizations gather and analyze employee feedback. Its platform allows organizations to select questions for workers and better understand their answers. Leadership can view data based on the results and then craft any needed improvement strategies.

Mercy Health continues to work with Culture Amp today.

Arnold noted that the collaboration enables the health system to accomplish numerous goals. For one, the company’s platform lets Mercy more easily gather more employees’ thoughts and give immediate insight to executives.

“Secondly, Culture Amp has the data science capabilities to help us determine which employee opinions statistically correlate to ministry outcomes,” Arnold said. “By uncovering these parallels, our leadership will be able to predict the likelihood of events, simply based on changes in employee opinion.”

Since teaming up with Culture Amp, Mercy Health has overseen six employee experience surveys, Arnold added. Thus far, it has been able to get information from 60,000 employees, 94 percent of whom considered the Culture Amp experience positive. Based on the results, the health system has been able to make improvements in realms like benefit programs, medical residency and performance management.

Despite the prevalence of burnout in the medical field, Arnold said he doesn’t think healthcare organizations ignore the importance of company culture.

“With the ever-changing industry and struggles with margin, I truly believe most healthcare leaders are required to dedicate large resources to ensuring patients receive exceptional care, and their organization is making enough money to ‘keep the doors open,'” he said. “While Mercy Health experiences the same resource constraints that our competitors face, our leadership team does not view culture work as a detractor from other priorities. In fact, we feel our amazing culture supports other priorities, increasing the likelihood we achieve each goal.”

Photo: AndreyPopov, Getty Images

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