“It is the marginal areas that ensure employee satisfaction”
All employees need to perform well every day at Horsens Regional Hospital (Regionshospitalet Horsens). Focus is therefore on anything that can contribute positively to the staff coming to work and feeling committed and responsible for the work in general. Part of this focus centres on absence due to illness, and the target is to reduce the number of days lost due to illness by 700 days a year.
Ennova is helping Horsens Regional Hospital with this task; among other things through a linkage study, which will contribute with knowledge about the employees and ensure that action is initiated in the right places.
The employee survey at Horsens Regional Hospital is called MARS. For a number of years, the survey was prepared in collaboration with the hospital administration, but in 2004, Horsens Regional Hospital switched to Ennova, which has since been responsible for the surveys.
“We wanted to get the results quickly after the survey, and we wanted all employees surveyed at the same time. We would like the survey to be conducted within a two-week period. We wanted to ensure validity and speed, and our own system was unable to handle that,” says Steen Friberg Nielsen, senior doctor, about the switch to Ennova.
“Those were the requirements for Ennova – but, at the same time, we committed ourselves as well because, if this was going to work, someone needed to take the consequences of the survey being conducted. Otherwise, the employees won’t bother to participate next time. In my opinion, it is not up to the management alone to figure out what needs to be done once the recommendations are known by everyone. This needs to be done through a dialogue in which we bear the results of the survey in mind at all times.”
“We are competing for manpower in the public health sector, and we therefore need to know what it takes to retain our core employees and prevent them from relocating to the private sector. I’m a member of the board of a private hospital, and I can see what it requires pay-wise to retain competent staff. But pay is not the only factor that motivates people in this sector. It’s also about teamwork, being appreciated, very much about having the right management, a few perks and a number of other factors. We can do something about all that, and we therefore need to make sure that we are offering the right incentives to make the staff want to stay with us,” says Steen Friberg Nielsen.
Linkage on absence due to illness is a win-win situation
“The lack of hands gave birth to the idea of conducting a linkage study of absence due to illness. When there are suddenly fewer people to solve the tasks, we have to look at what it will take to get people to show up for work.”
“We therefore asked Ennova to analyse in which areas our internal data on absence due to illness were linked to the results of the employee survey. We had extensive internal data on absence due to illness and a very thorough employee survey, and that meant that we were able to test a number of hypotheses and come to a better understanding of the factors in the workplace that may have a bearing on absenteeism.”
“We have no wish whatsoever to reduce legitimate absence due to illness. We are a health organisation after all, and, of course, people do not have to come to work if they are ill. But we did find some linkage between absence due to illness and employee satisfaction, which indicated that we might be able to reduce some of the overall absence at the workplace by changing the conditions for selected professional groups.”
“Senior doctors with star status have almost no absence due to illness, so there is clearly a social element involved in absence due to illness. But responsibility is also an important factor. If a doctor is absent from Monday’s surgery schedule, he knows that, first of all, a lot of people are affected by cancelled operations and, secondly, the operations must be fitted into an already tight schedule later in the week. This is pretty much the same for all other staff members. Maybe it’s not necessary to postpone an operation, but any type of absence affects patient satisfaction and employee commitment. This is a fact that we have not been good at communicating. In a workplace such as ours, it is no longer unimportant whether you’re there or not. The notion that one more or less doesn’t matter is simply not true.”
“We would like to create the perception that we are ‘brothers in arms’. It is our responsibility as a management team to ensure that all employee groups feel important and indispensable, because they really are! We were therefore very surprised when the survey showed that certain employee groups do not feel sufficiently important. It might therefore be a good idea to look at the usual staff ranking order from a strategic point of view. By signalling that the social and health-care helper is just as valuable as a senior registrar, we could contribute to increasing the sense of responsibility, and this is directly linked with job satisfaction and commitment,” continues Steen Friberg Nielsen.
The results from the linkage study are only just over a month old, and the management at Horsens Regional Hospital has not yet had the opportunity to discuss the results with the individual employee groups. There is a host of information in the study and important knowledge on how more focus can be directed at some of the ‘neglected’ professional groups, which can thus come to understand more clearly how important their work is.
Next step – linkage on patients
Steen Friberg Nielsen is so happy with the results of the hospital study that he would like another linkage study conducted.
“We would like to have complete documentation on the connection between high employee satisfaction and high patient satisfaction. We have conducted a number of small surveys, but the data basis has been less than ideal and we don’t want to draw any hasty conclusions. It is a fact, however, that the opposite effect is well known.
There is thus a clear connection between poor treatment and poor perception. If we could conduct a patient satisfaction survey at the same time as an employee survey and let Ennova handle both, we could ensure that the data obtained are comparable.”
“Health services all over the world are clamouring for clear documentation on this issue and for recommendations on how to ensure high patient satisfaction. At Horsens Regional Hospital, we have what it takes to participate in the project and subsequently publish the results, but we would like to do so with external help. The material that we provide must have a degree of documentation that is ‘acid tested’ because, in our world, scientifically well-documented results are all that counts,” concludes Steen Friberg Nielsen.
At Ennova, we conduct linkage studies which show the connection between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction or student satisfaction, so the possibility of studying the connection between employees and patients does, of course, exist.
The calculation in relation to the example from Horsens Regional Hospital reflects an average consideration.
- If the employees’ motivation is increased by 10 points, the individual will,
on average, have almost 0.2 fewer absence due to illness periods.
- The average absence period is 3.9 days.
- This corresponds to approx. 0.75 fewer days of illness per employee.
- With 1,000 employees, this adds up to more than 700 days of illness less per year for the hospital as a whole.
- The savings will be at least DKK 1 million a year. Experience from other hospitals shows that up to DKK 5 million can be saved by reducing absenteeism. What is most important, however, is not the financial aspects – but less absenteeism will also result in satisfied patients and even better treatment quality.
