Measuring and Tracking Employee Satisfaction

When looking to improve business operations, employee satisfaction and overall success of a business, organizations often don’t know where to begin. Businesses can commit a lot of time and money towards attempted improvements without understanding what the underlying issues are.  And without knowing the issues, it is impossible to truly address them.

In our previous post, we discussed the challenges associated with employee retention and explored some key ways to mitigate them. Some of the topics covered were employees’ increased expectations of workplace flexibility, employees' departure from the workforce and the resulting shortages, as well as the increased cost of living and rising minimum wage. We also introduced and explained four key areas of focus to improve staff retention – workplace culture, job satisfaction, development and advancement, and compensation.

One of the areas we highlighted previously was the concept of employee satisfaction surveys as a tool to engage your staff and action better insights. In this article, we will expand on the idea to give you a clearer understanding of how these surveys can help your organization.

A Practical Approach to an Employee Satisfaction Survey

To truly improve employee satisfaction and retention, there must be a benchmark of measurable information. Introducing regular employee satisfaction surveys as a standard business practice is a great way to get honest and anonymous feedback to identify issues and improve your business. These surveys should be implemented at regular intervals (for example, annually) and employees should be provided advance notice as to when the survey will be occurring. You should frame for your employees why this survey is taking place, and make sure that they understand it is a safe opportunity to provide feedback without any fear of repercussions. Organizations can retain help to draft and execute surveys and a third party or anonymous platform should always be used to ensure employee privacy is guaranteed.

It is important to ask questions that will elicit honest and unbiased responses that can help identify the areas that need to be addressed. Take the time to ask critical questions to uncover feedback in business areas, particularly where you struggle. Implementing a process like this demonstrates that you value your employee’s opinions and that their views are important to your success. Finally, providing your employees paid time to complete the survey will ensure that they do not rush through it with brief (uninformative) answers.

Benefits of an Employee Survey

Your employees see your operations with a different lens than you do, they likely have unique insight(s) about what works and what doesn’t. Something that you think benefits the organization could hamper your employee’s ability to do their jobs efficiently or significantly reduce their job satisfaction. A survey, you may find, will help you better understand how to tweak your approach or communication. It also provides a safe space for staff to suggest new ideas that might improve efficiency or process, that they don’t feel comfortable volunteering unsolicited.

It is important not to guess about what your employees want, but rather invest in what is valued and needed. Upon receiving the survey results, you can make guided changes to assure your employees that you have heard their concerns and suggestions. This not only saves you time but possibly also money as you are addressing what is most important to your employees, rather than investing in initiatives that don’t improve performance, productivity, or satisfaction. As an added benefit, surveys may help to reduce daily friction and shift the overall conversations from existing issues to potential solutions.

Surveys can also provide important benchmarks for your current state to help you better understand the effect of future programs and initiatives as they relate to employee satisfaction. For example, you’ll be able to track their satisfaction over time and see the impact of different initiatives that you implement during a given period.

Instilling a culture of feedback and information might also open other opportunities for you to explore that you hadn’t otherwise considered. For example, exit interviews or surveys can also provide key insights when employees leave your organization.

Challenges

Eliciting honest feedback is not always easy, questions need to be relevant but unbiased and designed with analysis and follow-through in mind. Surveys can provide invaluable information to managers of any business, but the information is only useful if managers will actually listen to it. If there is no intention to enact changes/adjustments, it is not a worthwhile exercise. Another risk with implementing a survey is that the feedback you get may not be what you wanted or expected to hear, or worse it may be related to an issue that can not be easily improved. Nevertheless,  this information is critical. Part of managing people is listening to their concerns and doing your best to address them, and a feedback platform is one of the best ways to collect information in this regard.

It is also important to note that not all concerns can be fully addressed to the satisfaction of everyone. There may be inefficiencies identified that cannot be improved, but you should still take the time to acknowledge what you have heard from your staff and talk openly about it. For example, if a pain point for your staff is dealing with difficult customers, you could address this by acknowledging that customer behaviour/tendencies are difficult to manage and encouraging collective discussions about effective ways to manage this as a team. This would also be a good time to talk about tools and resources to increase customer satisfaction.

Summary

With current challenges in retaining and attracting talent, it is important to listen to the staff you already have and provide a safe, supportive environment where people feel satisfied with their contributions. Change driven by staff can help keep employees engaged and provide them with purpose above and beyond their regular job duties. Incremental process improvements can cultivate a culture of excellence which will further improve job satisfaction and morale. As we discussed at length in our previous article on staff retention, it is much more cost-efficient to retain staff and keep them happy than to deal with high attrition rates. Staff surveys are a proactive strategy that can empower you to improve your business practices through data. Your people are your greatest asset, and they have meaningful ideas, feedback, and insights to help you evolve your business.

Approaching Employee Retention in a Challenging Market

As we come to the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses are continuing to face challenges in employee retention. At the beginning of the pandemic, essential workers retained their jobs but faced tough working conditions which has, in many cases, correlated with increased employee attrition and burnout. This has led to a trend of employees yearning for more flexible work and higher wages, and in some cases, leaving their jobs in search of a better work-life balance. Businesses are facing numerous challenges in today’s market. Previously, employees often felt a need to adapt to the workplace to suit the employer but a shift in market conditions has reversed past dynamics and now employers are feeling the need to improve what they are offering employees in order to retain and recruit quality staff.

Challenges

Employees Leaving the Workforce

Over the last couple of years, employees have been burning out at an increasing rate. Pandemic related layoffs put excessive burdens on workers who remain, and these burdens have worn out good employees to the point of them wanting to leave. Furthermore, due to the strain that the pandemic has put on people’s professional and personal lives, people are placing more of an emphasis on the importance of a work-life balance. More and more often, people are quitting their jobs sometimes moving to a new organization, but in some cases not even to returning to the workforce. This shift in priorities in today’s workforce has been dubbed The Great Resignation and it has left a huge gap in the labor market. There are numerous reasons why employees decide to quit their jobs, but the fact is that they are leaving, and organizations need to find a way to retain them. Some industries are seeing workers slowly return to the workforce, but these workers are not the same people who previously left and their expectations of their jobs have changed drastically.

Expectations of Flexibility

One of the positives to come out of the pandemic was a proof of concept that a flexible workplace can be successful, provided that it is implemented correctly. Many organizations in a plethora of sectors have proven that a well-defined flexible work place can thrive, whether this is allowing employees to work from home full- or part-time, or allowing for flexible hours. The emergence of tele-health appointments is a good example of innovation in this area. However, success sometimes comes with drawbacks and for businesses, this has increased the demand for flexibility from existing employees and potential new hires. As the working world explores new ways to do their jobs, employees continue to expect flexibility from their jobs. Providing employees with a flexible work environment is a huge driver of employee retention that not only benefits the employees, but also the employers. By expanding the option for remote working possibilities, employers have access to more qualified workers not necessarily in the immediate vicinity. Furthermore, the space requirements for physical locations are not as taxing if remote work is supported. Finding ways to provide flexibility for your employees can be a big retaining factor but defining what flexibility means for your organization will depend on what you are able to offer. Does flexibility mean working from home, more time off or flexible hours?

Increased Cost of Living

Urban and sub-urban settings are seeing an increased cost of living, and this continues to rise year by year. It is no longer affordable to live and work in the city, and thus workers are searching for different jobs, even in different sectors, that will provide them the income and work-life balance that will make living in their desired area feasible. Businesses continue to be challenged to keep up with this increase and it is now presenting them with a different problem. A shortage in the workforce has led to administrative staff being elevated into higher roles in the urban market, leaving a significant challenge to fill the role of lower paying administrative positions

Rising Minimum Wages

The rising minimum wage is putting an upward pressure on wage and salary expectations both from current workers and potential new hires. These increases in wage costs for businesses can put a huge strain on the bottom line, but the alternative is to lose qualified employees and candidates to other organizations who are willing and able to pay a higher wage. For businesses with already narrow margins, rising staff costs can greatly stress profitability and sometimes the overall viability of the business.

Shortage in Workforce

We are seeing an overall shortage in talent and workforce across all sectors. People are finding new ways to make ends meet and unlike before, workers are no longer quitting jobs to rejoin a similar organization. Sometimes they are leaving the sector completely to try something non-traditional, head back to school, or start their own business. This is leading to a decline in qualified applications for positions across the country. Over 20% of Canadian workers are currently working in remote jobs, which accounts for over 5 million people. According to Statistics Canada, 40% of Canadian jobs could feasibly be done from home. Finally, roughly 30% of traditionally employed Canadians expect to transition to self-employment over the next 3 years. All of these trends are leading to an overall shortage in the workforce across a variety of sectors.

The Importance of Retaining your Talent

As discussed above, there are fewer qualified candidates looking for positions. Organizations need to recognize and acknowledge that the cost to recruit, hire and train new staff far outweighs the costs necessary to retain your current staff. While the monetary value in doing this can be seen in your budget, there are also intangible values that need to be recognized as well.

Institutional Knowledge – Your current staff have worked for you and are thus familiar with how your organization is run, what works well, and what does not. This knowledge does not have a monetary value but is critical for the smooth operations of your business. Constantly recycling staff, especially if the departure is sudden and unplanned, leads to spending time and money on ideas that have already been tried before but did not work. A lack of institutional memory and knowledge can waste time repeating historical mistakes.

Understanding of Communication and Training Preferences – Along with institutional knowledge comes an understanding of the best ways to communicate and to train. Communication in a fast-paced business is integral to success, and employees that have worked through issues to help iron out the best practices are very important. Not only that, but they are in the best position to train staff to ensure that new hires are brought up to speed quickly and able to hit the ground running.

Existing Relationships with Patients and Stakeholders – Current staff will have existing relationships with your clients or patients and their families. It takes time to build these relationships and high staff turnover will have a damaging effect on lasting and valuable relationships between your employees and your patients. Furthermore, long serving employees will also develop relationships with vendors and stakeholders, both contributing to the smooth operations of your clinic.

Lower Training and Onboarding Fees – As mentioned, keeping existing staff versus hiring new staff greatly decreases your training and onboarding fees. The amount of time that it takes to get a new employee up to the speed of a veteran employee far outweighs any difference in salary between the two.

Staff Retention Considerations

Considering the challenging recruitment market conditions, as well as the advantages associated with retaining staff, it is important for employers of all sizes to proactively improve their retention strategies. There are four key elements to staff retention, and all need to be focused on to maintain an effective strategy to keep your staff happy. At Hive Solutions, we approach retention from four distinct angles as outlined below.

Workplace Culture

Workplace culture, a set of shared values, principles and behaviors, is cultivated by the organization leadership to guide their employees in their interactions and behaviors with each other and with external stakeholders. The relationships that your employees have at work, as well as the working environment you provide for them, are two very important elements of retaining staff. In 2021, more than 40% of employees were considering leaving their jobs, with toxic culture being one of the largest drivers of attrition. Working in an unsuitable environment quickly creates resentful and bitter staff who will start to look for other employment, while also not working their best for your clinic. It is important to pay attention to whether your staff seem happy coming to work, whether they get along with their coworkers and whether they feel that their roles and responsibilities are clear to them.

Throughout the pandemic, there has been a shifting trend towards focusing on wellness and work-life balance and this is an important element of the workplace culture. Businesses with negative work-life balance culture, that regularly overwork their employees will suffer from employee burnout, but those that take a softer approach and value their employees’ health, both physically and mentally, will have lower turnovers. Employees that feel valued in this way will also report a higher level of job satisfaction. Some tangible examples of making employees feel valued could include extra sick days, personal days, vacation days, staff retreats and employee satisfaction surveys. Finding non-traditional ways to reward employees for their hard work and commitment can go a long way to improving morale.

Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction is an employee’s subjective perception of their role within their workplace. Employees want to see that their efforts matter and that they are making a difference. People want to be challenged in their work so they can feel accomplished, but it can’t be so challenging that they feel they can never succeed. When they do succeed, they usually want to be acknowledged for it. Whether your employees are fulfilled in their roles within your organization will go a long way in determining whether they want to stay or find different employment. If they feel respected and supported, they will continue to work hard. However, if they feel that their personal values are not aligning with the clinic, this is when their job satisfaction may decrease.

The role of the employee is not the only consideration in whether the employee is satisfied with their job. It is becoming increasingly important to the workforce to have their values aligned with their employers’. They want to feel as though they are making a useful contribution to their community environment. Generation Z and Millennial workers are among the most likely to part ways with an employer that does not align with their values, and in some cases would be willing to take a lower-paying job if it meant a more positive societal contribution.

The emergence of remote work is also an important factor that cannot be overlooked in both culture and job satisfaction. It has proven itself to be a viable option for many businesses and it comes with benefits for clinics as well. Firstly, it protects employees to focus on certain tasks more effectively. Secondly, if used correctly, it can help clinics optimize use of space and accommodate other providers, activities and staff. As more employers move towards this, those that aren’t are immediately removing themselves from consideration from qualified job-seekers who deem this as an important aspect of a potential job.

Development and Advancement

Employees want to learn and they want to develop. No one wants to stay in the same position for years on end without any growth potential. Human beings as a whole want to be challenged, and your employees are no different. Recognizing your employees for their skills and efforts and rewarding them with advancement opportunities will create a tangible way to retain your employees. Providing regular training and development will help them learn new skills, sharpen their current ones and understand that their employer is interested and invested in supporting their goals and career path.

Compensation

While compensation is still an important part of retaining employees, you can see that it is not the only way to tackle this issue. Compensation, as well as a benefits package, will help you keep your employees long-term. They need to feel that their salary is competitive in the current job environment, as well as fair remuneration for their efforts and skills. Balancing compensation with a comprehensive benefits package will make employment with your business more desirable as a whole. Getting creative and finding new benefits for employees (not just the standard medical coverage) can show them that you care about their well-being and respect their efforts.

As you can see, there are numerous factors for employee retention that you need to be aware of. Compensation, while the easiest to gauge against your competitors, is not the only contributing factor. There is a current trend of employees leaving jobs for other opportunities with the same wage, and this is because of the other three factors above (Culture, Job Satisfaction and Development/Advancement). Coming up with a strategy to manage all four categories will provide the most reasons for your employees to stay with the clinic, and remain focused and engaged long-term.

Communication with Staff

Communicating often and efficiently with your staff might seem like a given, but its importance is often overlooked. By communicating with your staff consistently and on an ongoing basis, you will be collecting essential data for the seamless running of your business while also making your employees feel heard, valued and respected. This will go a long way to increasing their job satisfaction while providing them an outlet to share their career goals and earn more developmental opportunities. By having regular and recurring performance reviews, your staff can share their goals, highlight skills they’d like to develop, share any current pain points related to their duties and seek clarification on their roles and responsibilities, should they need to. By delivering performance reviews with no association to raises, employers can use this as a way to learn what the staff find helpful and challenging which can be invaluable information and help improve overall operations. In addition to performance reviews, staff satisfaction surveys can also be helpful to measure what is working and what can be improved upon. These surveys will help you measure possible improvement areas, provide a method to track feedback from staff and ultimately better understand what your workplace offers your team and where it is lacking.

Moving Forward

The new job market is challenging, but it is challenging for everyone. Instead of focusing on the difficulties, it is important to shift your attention to understand that the landscape has changed. Adjusting your recruitment and retention strategy will be integral to the success of your business going forward. Understanding that your staff is your biggest asset will help you prioritize their satisfaction which will lead to happier and more productive employees. The most important part of any business is the people, and finding ways to keep them happy and engaged will ultimately benefit your clinic in the long run. The workforce is evolving quickly, and in order to remain competitive in the labor market that already has a shortage, the only way to keep up is to change priorities. The employers that are able to understand and respond to their workforce will be better placed to compete for talented workers and retain their current staff.

Covid-19 Challenges Lead to Opportunities

Navigating the pandemic for the past two years has created a dramatic evolution in healthcare. Reflecting now on this longer-than-we thought adjustment to the new normal has provided challenges as well as opportunities. Innovation, adaptation, and collaboration have been key to our response.

Challenges

Physical Space Limitations

Lockdowns significantly limited the use of regular physical space. New workflow protocols were created to lower the risk of transmission, and in most clinics far fewer patient appointments could be scheduled in very expensive clinic space.

Rapid and Forced Change

Clinical providers immediately created, learned, and adapted to virtual and telehealth technologies. Daily, physicians and offices had to interpret and manage changing rules, restrictions, and mandates often without notice. As a result, there was dramatic and widespread adoption of technologies in traditionally static settings where innovation and change had been previously resisted.

Increased Pressure

Physicians who own clinics/facilities simultaneously managed the ‘business owner’ stress such as reduced revenues, increased expenses, staff shortages, etc. as well as the strains and stress of caring for their patients using new technologies.

Workforce change

Many medical administrative staff geographically relocated their homes, seeking a more affordable cost of living, or left the industry entirely as a result of the stress of the pandemic.  Increased inflation and a more competitive job market continue to increase staff expenses and attrition.

Healthcare System Response

Despite the myriad of challenges, the healthcare system responded quickly and collaboratively to solve problems in real time. PPE was in short demand as clinics rushed to ensure their patients, staff and providers were protected while interacting in close proximity, all in the midst of a global supply shortage.

The Ministry of Health expanded virtual and telehealth fee codes to quickly increase safe access for patients to meet with their providers. Prior to this there had been decades of hesitation and resistance to the use of these types of codes. Virtual health technologies quickly pivoted and became the norm for virtual health visits while ensuring patient privacy standards.

From the early days, the BCCDC and Provincial Health Services Authority understood the need to keep the population informed and up to date by providing the Covid-19 Dashboard and maintaining its accuracy.

Opportunities

Covid-19 accelerated acceptance of these system responses and as a result provide great opportunities for the year ahead, even during the Omicron surge.

• The speed of change over the last two years has disrupted long standing attitudes about change processes and integrating technology in medical practices. The pandemic has been a catalyst to shift attitudes in health care to consider non-traditional innovation and technology adaptation.  For example, a physician who had a previously paper-only office can now adapt to offer virtual appointments to a home-bound patient through their iPad where appropriate.

• All industries have proven that people (both providers and staff) can work effectively virtually. Early fears that a virtual/remote workforce couldn’t be productive have largely been dispelled. Although, there may be need to find the right balance, there are opportunities to explore the administrative functions that might benefit from being off-site or employing team members who may not live in the same city.

• Primary and specialist care has been historically ceilinged by the (expensive) physical infrastructure where the business operates. Virtual care opportunities and administrative staff working remotely have caused us to rethink how to optimize the physical space, while being complimented by virtual visits where appropriate. The days of one physician using multiple exam rooms at once will soon be behind us, but further gains can be achieved by unpacking the physical space optimization equation and rethinking the constraints previously thought to be concrete.

• The entire pandemic experience has highlighted the importance of wellness and mental health. From an employer perspective, prioritizing the well-being of our people should be considered a priority, as it is people who fundamentally deliver health care. The pandemic normalized and highlighted the importance of self-care and mental health and has encouraged a healthier approach to work-life balance.

Moving Forward

Covid-19 has opened our eyes to new possibilities to how we operate, as forced experimentation with alternative systems have shown success under certain settings.

The healthcare industry now has a tremendous opportunity to leverage business principals to further optimize processes, technology and influence the newly flexed adaptability and appetite for change in the industry. We can be more innovative with how we use physical space and adapt to administrative staff working remotely to increase access to qualified and affordable workforce. With effective communication and tools, leveraging this shift can make room in extremely expensive clinic space, and allow those in high density centers to take advantage of employing workers in potentially less competitive wage markets in sub-urban or rural communities.

People are the heart of businesses, and their dedication, hard work and resiliency is largely the reason we’ve managed the pandemic thus far. In the future, proactively investing in retention will be a much more fruitful and inexpensive approach compared to reactively managing high levels of attrition.

Organizations and teams can invest in and prioritize wellness programs and work life balance to attract and retain staff. There are many ways we can re-evaluate meetings, prioritize our time, and better set boundaries to prevent burnout. Perhaps a New Year’s resolution for business owners and health industry stakeholders should be to consider which practices and habits can be adjusted to ensure employees have a healthier and more supported relationship in their role.