CULTURE
Employee Involvement Is the Secret Sauce to One Health System’s Turnaround
In 2017, Summa Health faced a series of setbacks that damaged its reputation and financial bottom line. Leaders determined that, if they were going to right the ship, they must begin by focusing on physician and employee involvement. Two years later, their proactive action plan has enabled the health system to improve its market share, operating margin and physician and employee engagement scores.
How They Did It
To begin the healing process, Summa collected what it calls a “staff engagement snapshot,” which provided insights and identified opportunities for alignment across its workforce. This included interviews with both executives and clinicians, along with focus groups among frontline caregivers and middle management.
Gathering such qualitative data to complement the hard numbers from physician and employee engagement surveys helped give Summa a better sense of the emotional state of the organization, as leaders worked to foster supportive rather than toxic relationships, according to Benjamin Sutton, senior vice president of strategy and performance management.
From there, the health system launched an interactive, multidisciplinary process that involved 25 staff members including clinicians, from all levels of the organization below senior management. Participants were handpicked as “stars” of the staff, garnering high levels of respect and admiration among their peers.
“These were the professionals who represented what Summa Health was all about,” Sutton said. “In just one day, the team hashed out a list of six values that define Summa as a health system.”
They deemed that the essence of the organization is its commitment to:
- Serve with passion.
- Personalize care.
- Value every person.
- Take ownership.
- Work collaboratively.
- Partner with the community.
Senior leadership loved the results and — at the urging of those driving the process — agreed not to revise them. The group then went to work to operationalize the commitments in several ways.
Summa began requiring professional development for all supervisory staff throughout the health system, with six-hour workshops to bring leaders together from across the enterprise. The focus has been on providing a better structure for supervisors to incorporate the above commitments into staff engagement and performance evaluations.
Beyond that, Summa has implemented several other new processes to ensure that they permeate the organization, including leadership rounding, thoughtful delivery of feedback and more effective team meetings. The latter is predicated on equal information sharing among managers and staff, and a focus on improving physician and employee engagement.
The Results
All of this hard work to transform the organizational culture has paid off for Summa, Sutton said. They’ve climbed from the 6th percentile nationally in employee engagement in 2015, up to the 41st percentile in 2019. The same trend held true for physicians, moving from the 1st/2nd percentile up to the 47th percentile over that same time period. The health system’s market share is up two percentage points since 2017. In addition, the organization’s operating margin improved by $50 million in one year.
Other measurements are trending in the right direction as well, including a 6.2 percent increase in team members’ perceptions of patient safety, and the HCAHPS top box score, which measures patient satisfaction, is five points higher than 2017, Sutton added.
As a qualitative example, Sutton pointed to the recent unveiling of a new patient tower, which drew more than 200 employee volunteers to assist after hours. “We had 5,000 people from the community take tours that weekend, and more powerful to us than the turnout was the pride that we saw in the organization. We hadn’t seen that in a while,” Sutton observed.
Summa leaders are determined to make sure the gains last. The six commitments now represent more than half of the categories in employees’ annual performance evaluations, and they’ve placed them front and center during both recruitment and orientation.
“It’s one thing to make improvements, but it’s another thing to sustain them over time,” Sutton said. “We need to ensure that physician and staff engagement is really hardwired into all aspects of our health system going forward.”
This article features interviews with:
Benjamin Sutton
Senior Vice President, Strategy and Performance Management
Summa Health
Akron, Ohio
