The Link Between Employee and Patient Satisfaction in the Healthcare Industry

by YVON MARTEL | Sep 29th, 2008 | Employee Engagement & Retention |

A few weeks ago I found an interesting article about employee satisfaction and employee retention efforts in the healthcare industry in the July – September issue of The Healthcare Manager Journal – “Employee Satisfaction and Employee Retention: Catalysts to Patient Satisfaction”. The article is a great read, packed with helpful information on industry trends.

To emphasize the importance of employee satisfaction, the authors started with a review of some extensive research that links employee satisfaction to patient satisfaction, identifying that: “Significant research indicates that focused efforts on employee satisfaction are worthwhile and they reflect on patient satisfaction, as employees with positive organizational perspectives relay that energy to other coworkers and patients.”

The authors conducted a survey of healthcare Human Resource managers and what they were doing to improve employee satisfaction. What’s interesting is that they found that the top four methods for improving employee satisfaction among technical employees, managers and executives were the same (ranked by priority):

  1. Professional Recognition
  2. Continuing Education
  3. Monetary Benefit
  4. Career Planning

As the challenge to retain skilled employees increases, we need to become more and more creative with our healthcare talent management programs so we can positively impact employee satisfaction. For example, by integrating competency assessments with development planning, you can give employees a context for continuing education and demonstrate that your organization cares about employees and their ongoing development. Another way could be to use online performance journals as a way to allow managers to track employee accomplishments for future professional recognition. Pay for performance programs that tie compensation and/or bonuses to measured performance are also becoming more widely used in the healthcare industry.

What creative talent management programs do you have in place to help increase employee satisfaction and retention?