Learnings from the road: A 3-step approach to improving employee experience

By Kyle Zaber, Ed.D., Workforce Advisor

Picture a patient arriving at a hospital. They check in, complete assessments, answer questions about symptoms, and undergo a thorough evaluation. Feeling heard and hopeful, they expect to leave with a diagnosis and a plan. Instead, they’re escorted back to the lobby and told, “Have a great day.”

Can you imagine such a scene? Probably not. Most healthcare professionals would agree: Assessment is just the beginning. What it reveals is then used to understand the patient’s needs, establish a plan of care, and guide ongoing improvement. Patients and caregivers work together in a shared partnership, with each playing a role in achieving the best possible outcomes.

The same principle applies to employee listening.

Too often, organizations invest significant effort gathering employee feedback, but stop short of acting on it — or act before ensuring with the workforce that leadership fully understands their needs. Surveys generate valuable insights about what the employee experiences; closing the loop after the fact demonstrates that their participation and input mattered. Employees want to know their voices were heard, understand what leaders learned, and see what changed as a result.

Just as patients and caregivers partner to improve health outcomes, employees and leaders must partner to improve organizational health.

Across Press Ganey’s national workforce database, three actions regularly emerge as critical to this partnership:

1. Sharing employee experience survey results
2. Involving employees in creating and executing on the action plan
3. Keeping employees informed about progress

Collectively, we refer to these as the “accountability items.” Organizations that consistently demonstrate these behaviors create stronger cultures of trust, partnership, and engagement. More importantly, they are far more likely to translate employee feedback into meaningful and sustained improvement.

Let’s explore each step in greater detail.

Sharing the results

Most organizations share employee experience survey results: Across Press Ganey’s national database, 68% of employees report that their leader takes this step. But this still leaves about a third of employees without visibility into what their feedback revealed.

This difference has a significant impact on the employee experience. Employees whose leaders share survey results rank engagement 56 percentile points higher than those whose leaders don’t.

Organizations that create exceptional employee experiences acknowledge feedback and make it visible — and show employees that they were heard. At every level of the organization—from system-wide results to department- and unit-level findings—leaders should follow up, bringing insights back to the employees who provided them. Each opportunity to share survey results and lessons learned reinforces a simple but powerful message: Employee voices matter. In doing so, organizations strengthen trust, increase confidence in the listening process, and establish the foundation for meaningful action and improvement.

Best practices for sharing results

• Set expectations before and during the survey by communicating when and how results will be shared.
• After the survey ends, acknowledge employee participation and reinforce the steps the organization plans to take with the feedback.
• Share insights, not just scores, by explaining what the data reveals and why it matters.
• Focus discussions on key themes to create clarity and alignment.
• Celebrate successes while identifying opportunities for improvement.
• After sharing the insights you’ve learned from the data, pause, and check in with the team to ensure you’re hearing them correctly. This sets you up for the next step more effectively.

Involvement in the improvement planning process

Employees are more likely to support change when they have an opportunity to contribute their insights, energy, and expertise to it. In fact, they want to have an impact on the things that matter to them and their colleagues.

Many healthcare organizations, however, haven’t been able to find ways to meaningfully involve employees in developing improvement plans. Only 38% of healthcare employees report being involved in this process. Yet those who are involved demonstrate substantially higher levels of engagement, with engagement scores ranking in the 84th percentile of the national database. The findings reinforce a simple truth: employees are more engaged when they have a meaningful voice in shaping change.

Healthcare organizations that successfully engage employees in improvement planning demonstrate the High Reliability Organization principle of “deference to expertise.” At its core, this principle recognizes that the individuals closest to the work often have the most relevant knowledge of the challenges and opportunities for improvement. Rather than developing solutions in isolation, effective leaders engage employees as partners in identifying priorities, generating ideas, and shaping action plans.

This does not mean every suggestion can or should be implemented. Leaders play a critical role in establishing priorities and operating within organizational, regulatory, and resource constraints. However, by creating space for meaningful employee input, organizations can uncover practical solutions, strengthen ownership of improvement efforts, and increase commitment to achieving lasting results.

Best practices for involving the workforce in improvement planning process

Organization:

• Use crowdsourcing initiatives to gather ideas and identify solutions from across the organization.
• Conduct focus groups to better understand workforce needs, challenges, and opportunities for improvement.
• Leverage senior leadership rounding to discuss key themes, gather feedback, and explore potential solutions with those closest to the work.
• Define and communicate key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress and demonstrate improvement over time.

Unit/department:

• Use tools like Press Ganey Solution Starters to facilitate discussion and identify improvement priorities.
• Engage employees in team-based conversations to generate ideas and build shared ownership of improvement plans.
• Facilitate team conversations focused on improvement strategies. Establish clear parameters around resources, timelines, and priorities, while remaining open to adaptations that may help advance promising ideas.
• Partner with human resources, organizational development, and other internal experts when additional facilitation or support is needed.
• Discuss key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help identify progress. These can help demonstrate the different stages of improvement working toward optimized outcomes.

Keeping the workforce up to date on improvement plan progress

Change doesn’t happen overnight. Sustained improvement requires persistence, focus, and an ongoing commitment. At the same time, healthcare is a dynamic environment, where priorities shift, new challenges emerge, and employees’ attention is constantly pulled in multiple directions. For this reason, leaders must be intentional about regularly communicating progress on improvement efforts.

The impact is hard to miss. Employees who believe their feedback leads to action are 10.2x more likely to be highly engaged (defined as an engagement score of 4.50 or higher on a 5-point scale). While improvement efforts are often underway, progress can be difficult for employees to see amid the demands of day-to-day work. So regular updates help make that progress visible.

Communicating milestones, sharing early wins, and highlighting actions taken in response to employee feedback demonstrate that leaders are listening and following through on their commitments. Even incremental progress shows employees that their feedback is effecting change. In turn, this strengthens trust in the listening process, increases confidence that employee voices matter, and reinforces the ongoing partnership between leaders and the workforce to improve organizational health and performance.

Best practices for keeping the workforce up to date

• Establish and communicate a regular cadence for updates, including the channels employees can expect for ongoing communication (e.g., newsletters, monthly e-mails, and town halls).
• Make the connection between employee feedback and the resulting action explicit, so people see their voices were heard and led to change. Within Crowdsourcing, invite employees to identify themselves so they can be recognized for their ideas. Where appropriate, apply the same practice at the unit and department levels.
• Share progress against KPIs, pulse survey results, and other relevant measures to make improvement efforts visible.
• Recognize contributions and celebrate milestones to sustain momentum and reinforce shared ownership of improvement efforts.
• Highlight how day-to-day behaviors support longer-term improvement goals and organizational success.

Individually, each of the three accountability behaviors is associated with higher levels of engagement. Together, their impact is even more powerful. Engagement is 75 percentile points higher among employees who experience all three accountability behaviors than among those who experience none.

Plus, research consistently demonstrates a strong connection between workforce engagement, organizational performance, and patient experience. Organizations that listen effectively and act on what they learn create stronger cultures, better experiences, and, ultimately, better outcomes.

No two organizations will approach this exactly the same way, but the fundamentals don’t change. Listening creates opportunity, but action creates impact. Involve employees in shaping solutions. Communicate progress consistently. These practices help transform employee listening from a measurement exercise into a catalyst for true improvement.

To learn more about how to gather, interpret, and act on employee feedback, reach out to our workforce experience team.