UW Health Saves Hundreds of Employee Hours on Listening Survey Completion While Boosting Engagement

The Opportunity

Before 2018, UW Health struggled with a fragmented approach to employee surveys. Multiple departments — spanning DEI, Safety Culture, Nursing Satisfaction, and more — created their own surveys, resulting in over 150 questions. Employees experienced survey fatigue and confusion, while leaders grappled with scattered feedback and minimal clarity on where to prioritize action for improvements. Compounding these challenges, senior leaders lacked a cohesive strategy to unify their commitment to employee engagement.

The Solution

UW Health established an Employee Voice Listening Core Team within HR, creating a single point of oversight for all listening efforts. Key components of the new program included:

• Consolidated Survey Strategy: Combined DEI, Culture of Safety, Nurse Satisfaction, and Engagement into one annual experience survey, reducing questions from 130 to 55
• Lifecycle Listening: Introduced onboarding checkpoints and adopted Perceptyx’s exit surveys to track feedback throughout the employee journey
• Leadership Alignment: Collaborated on creating an annual calendar of HR events and listening opportunities, ensuring senior leaders stayed informed about survey timelines and accountable for action plans
• Focused Leader Tools & Routines: Perceptyx dashboards and embedded leader routines empowered managers to translate feedback into tangible improvements, from health and well-being initiatives to clear communication of UW Health’s vision

By standardizing the survey process, UW Health not only streamlined the experience for employees but also provided leaders with a cohesive, actionable data set — driving targeted improvements rather than scattershot interventions.

The Impact

After combining multiple siloed surveys into a single, focused employee experience survey, UW Health quickly saw a rise in engagement. The unified approach yielded a 4.2% lift in the engagement index from the first consolidated survey to the second — an indicator that employees valued having one clear channel for sharing feedback.

Leaders played a role in making these improvements tangible. In 2023, 38% of them prioritized health and well-being on their action plans, resulting in a 5.4% increase in well-being scores by 2024. Another 21% concentrated on improving senior leadership’s communication of UW Health’s vision, which rose by 5.93% within the same timeframe. These gains showed that when leaders listened to employees and worked collaboratively on focused goals, measurable progress followed.

For nursing teams, the unified survey highlighted concerns around meeting basic needs during the workday, workplace safety, and recognition from leadership. In response, a separate nursing well-being and burnout survey, supported by a dedicated workgroup, allowed frontline staff and leaders to co-create targeted solutions.

Beyond boosting engagement and well-being, the streamlined approach also brought about notable operational efficiencies. Reducing the number of survey questions saved nurses approximately 670 hours of survey-taking time each cycle, allowing them to devote more attention to patient care. Meanwhile, consolidating the entire process within a single Perceptyx platform freed up analytics teams from manual data crunching and gave leaders immediate access to actionable insights.