Each year in the spring, we survey ambulatory staff to better understand and improve the engagement of our workforce in our mission here at UTMB Health.
For the past three years, we have had increasing responses to the survey, which is sent out in late January. This year, we received 582 responses—up from 467 in 2022 and 455 in 2021.
This year’s number represents almost 50% of our staff, which is a remarkable and significant response rate. The increase in response itself is a testament to the engagement of our teams in elevating their voice. Perhaps most important is that we are stable and steadily improving our overall score, despite the pandemic and workforce challenges we’ve experienced.
Let’s look a bit closer at what this voice is expressing across various domains.
| Value | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2022-2023 | Overall Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teamwork | 3.41 | 3.58 | 4.15 | ^ 0.57 | ^ 0.74 |
| Management | 3.99 | 4.09 | 4.17 | ^ 0.08 | ^ 0.18 |
| Development | 3.82 | 3.82 | 3.96 | ^ 0.14 | ^ 0.15 |
| Engagement | 3.90 | 3.95 | 3.99 | ^ 0.05 | ^ 0.09 |
| Environment | 4.10 | 4.15 | 4.05 | -0.11 | -0.05 |
| Recognition | 3.84 | 3.96 | 3.66 | -0.30 | -0.30 |
| Total-AVG | 3.89 | 4.00 | 4.04 | ^ 0.04 | ^ 0.15 |
Teamwork saw the most improvement in this past year and has seen the biggest improvement overall for the past three years. I believe this teamwork foundation builds capability and momentum to achieve any objective we put forth.
The management domain, which includes statements like, “The person I report to treats me with respect,” has seen the second-largest improvement and represents our highest-scoring performance at 4.17 out of 5.
The development domain—e.g. “My job makes good use of my skills and abilities”— saw some movement upwards after two flat years.
Engagement—“Overall, I am a satisfied employee”—had a more modest improvement and is almost at a 4.0 response level, as is the development domain.
Two domains saw a decrease from improvements achieved last year. The environment domain—“I get the tools and resources I need to provide the best care/service for my customers/clients/patients— saw a small decrease but still rates over 4.0. Recognition saw a large decline between 2022 and 2023. This is disheartening because this was our specific area of intervention for the past two years and begs two questions: What does this mean and what are we going to do about it?
Clearly, rigorous interventions that we have used to improve recognition based on Press Ganey research are not achieving improvements, so we must deeper understand what the feedback means before we apply more possible solutions. We’ll go to focus groups, literature reviews and dialog with our staff and managers and come back at this with a new hypothesis to test.
There was much feedback contained within the comments that may shed some light on this. A frequent theme was the recognition for a good job in the form of compensation. This is not how we were thinking about our recognition improvements, which had more to do with celebrations and acknowledgement of a job well done. With humility, we are going to look more fully and ask more questions of what this really means.
There are several principles of excellence regarding leadership behaviors that are on our scorecard within our Lean Management System that can help guide us:
Regularly round where the work takes place.
Regularly review systems/processes for improvement.
Perhaps the most important one, in this case, is ensuring employees feel safe to raise a flag or stop the work.
The increasing participation in the survey and the candid expression that we don’t have recognition quite right are the voice of our people pointing us in the right direction.
Thank you.
Pete Gutierrez
Vice President, Ambulatory Operations