How to Improve Workplace Culture in Healthcare to Attract Top Talent

In today’s competitive healthcare market, attracting and retaining top talent is essential for success. A strong workplace culture is a key factor in attracting and retaining the best employees. In this article, we will break down what makes a great healthcare company culture and give you actionable tips to improve your own healthcare company’s culture.

What Is the Current State of Healthcare Organizational Culture?

Industry-wide, the state of healthcare organizational culture is mixed. Some healthcare organizations have made great strides in creating a positive workplace culture. However, many healthcare organizations still have a long way to go. According to a 2023 report by the CDC:

• 57% of healthcare employees reported feeling anxious
• 46% of healthcare employees reported burnout
• 44% of healthcare employees planned to leave their jobs within the next year

These findings suggest that, overall, healthcare organizations can do more to improve their organizational culture.

What Makes a Great Healthcare Company Culture?

Company culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors within a workplace and plays an important role in building your healthcare brand. It significantly impacts employee interactions among themselves, with customers, and toward their work. In healthcare, company culture is crucial as it directly affects both patient care and employee retention.

A positive company culture in healthcare prioritizes patient-centered care, fosters collaboration, and emphasizes ethical behavior. Employees in such an environment are dedicated to delivering high-quality care, going the extra mile for patients, and treating each other with respect while working together as a team to achieve common goals. This type of healthcare company culture has numerous benefits, including better patient outcomes, higher employee satisfaction, and reduced turnover rates.

Examples of a positive company culture in healthcare might include:

• Patient-centered care: Employees prioritize providing tailored, high-quality care to each patient, respecting their privacy and dignity, and creating a comfortable and healing environment.
   
• Collaboration: Employees work as a team to provide the best possible care, sharing knowledge and expertise and continuously seeking ways to improve patient care.
   
• Ethics: Employees are committed to ethical behavior in all aspects of their work, prioritizing patients’ interests and displaying honesty and trustworthiness.
   
• Professionalism: In healthcare, professionalism doesn’t always look like a suit and tie, but rather showing care and respect for others. Employees maintain a professional appearance and demeanor, dressing in the appropriate uniform and showing respect to patients and colleagues.
   
• Accountability: Healthcare professionals take responsibility for their actions and decisions, acknowledging mistakes and learning from experiences. This also requires the healthcare company culture to support accountability without fear of punishment.

Creating a positive healthcare company culture in healthcare is a continuous process requiring the commitment of employees at all levels. However, the benefits of such a culture are substantial, leading to improved patient care, employee satisfaction, and overall success of the healthcare organization.

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How Do You Assess Your Current Healthcare Organizational Culture?

Assessing your current culture is the first step to improving your healthcare organization’s culture, and there are a number of ways to do this. Some of the most common methods include:

• Employee surveys: Employee surveys can provide valuable insights into the employee experience. Surveys can be used to measure employee satisfaction, engagement, and perceptions of the workplace culture.
   
• Focus groups: Focus groups help you explore specific issues or topics in more detail.
   
• Employee interviews: Interviews with current and former team members can be used to gather information, explore the employee experience in more depth, and get a better understanding of the employee’s perspective.

Simply asking for feedback can go a long way in improving your healthcare organization’s culture. Healthcare professionals spend a lot of time with patients who don’t always follow their expert advice. Therefore, letting them know that their opinion matters can be a huge improvement. However, you can’t stop there. By taking their feedback and making meaningful changes, you can truly let them know how much their opinion is valued.

Top 5 Ways to Improve Workplace Culture in Healthcare

There are several things that you can do to improve your healthcare organization’s culture. Below are the top five most effective strategies in healthcare:

1. Create a Shared Goal: At the executive level, this goal may be contained in the mission and vision. However, it’s important to be mindful as you convey this goal to front-line healthcare professionals to ensure this mission resonates with them. Misunderstood communication or unwelcome directives can be the biggest barrier to building a cohesive healthcare company culture.

2. Empower Employees: Empowering healthcare employees can help to increase employee engagement and satisfaction. This means giving employees the authority to make decisions and to have a say in how their work is done. Especially when it comes to patient care. For example, there is a new CMS requirement, let the relevant employee groups know about it before changes are made and ask for comments on how to best meet it without disrupting workflows.

3. Develop Your Professionals: Providing opportunities for professional development can help to keep employees engaged and motivated. For healthcare professionals, this may look like supporting them with time off or funding to obtain specializations, certifications, or new clinical skills. However, it may also look like providing them with regular mentorship and helping them to develop their career roadmap.

4. Build Psychological Safety: Creating a psychologically safe workspace can go a long way in achieving open communication and improving your healthcare organization’s culture overall. This means creating a safe and supportive environment where employees feel respected and able to express their opinions without fear of retaliation. In healthcare company culture, this may look like rewarding safety callouts or providing resources to employees to resolve issues they identify.

5. Recognize and Reward Employees: Recognizing and rewarding employees for their contributions can help to boost employee morale and satisfaction. This means providing employees with regular recognition and rewards for their work. Whenever possible, choose more meaningful healthcare employee recognition ideas instead of stigmatized or overused rewards like pizza parties. The more creative you can be, the more valued your employees will feel.

BONUS! Create Work-Life Balance: If you expect to win over top talent, especially in Generations Z and Y, then promoting appropriate work-life balance is a must. Work-life balance is a term thrown around by many organizations and individuals, and can often be controversial in healthcare hiring. However, while work-life balance may look different in healthcare than in other industries, it is still extremely important to build into your healthcare company culture. This may look like:

• Allowing for remote documentation so that parents can leave to pick their children up from school and finish their work at home later
• Having appropriate PRN coverage for PTO requests during high-demand periods
• Giving healthcare professionals the option to choose their start time
• Permitting job share arrangements for parents or caregivers

By leveraging these strategies, your healthcare organizational culture will be attractive to top talent everywhere.

Improve Your Healthcare Company Culture to Attract Top Talent

Creating a positive workplace culture in healthcare is essential for attracting and retaining top talent. It entails focusing on employee engagement, professional development, and fostering psychological safety. This supportive and motivating work environment not only benefits patients but also aligns employees with organizational goals.

If you are looking for more ways to attract and retain top talent in the healthcare industry, visit the iHire Resource Center.