Crowdsourcing at MetroHealth: Customer Story

Customer Success Snapshot

Listening Use Cases:
- Safety Culture, Employee Engagement
Our Partners:
- Dr. Joseph Golob | Executive Vice President, Chief of Quality and Safety
- Stacey Booker | Director, Patient Safety and High Reliability
The Challenge:
- Understand safety culture perceptions across a diverse workforce of 9,000+ employees, including clinical and non-clinical staff.
- Improve upon its prior safety survey implementation that had been created internally using Qualtrics, which had low response rates and was time-consuming to complete.
- Translate insights from multiple listening channels into actionable strategies to enhance psychological safety and professionalism.
- Use employee insights to drive measurable improvements in perceptions related to hospital safety culture.
The Solution:
- Partnered with Perceptyx to implement a streamlined Safety Culture survey, reducing the number of questions from 40 to 14, including a unique, highly-actionable crowdsourcing and voting component.
- Utilized Perceptyx's People Insights Platform to enable real-time data collection and analysis, allowing for targeted follow-up actions and increased buy-in of solutions co-created by staff.
- Implemented a comprehensive communication program to describe the new survey format, encourage staff participation, and share resulting insights.
The Impact:
- Achieved a dramatic increase in safety survey participation, with response rates jumping from 25% to 55%.
- Reduced average survey completion time from 15 minutes to just 2.5 minutes.
- Received more than 11,000 votes on crowdsourced ideas from employees, ensuring that feedback and proposed innovations reinforced MetroHealth’s speak-up culture.
- Utilized insights to develop targeted actions focused on psychological safety, professionalism, and non-punitive responses to errors.

Why MetroHealth Chose Perceptyx

A Fresh Approach to Safety Culture Assessment

MetroHealth needed a more efficient and engaging way to assess its safety culture. Perceptyx offered an innovative solution that addressed the limitations of traditional safety surveys while providing actionable ideas and insights.

Scaling to Meet Diverse Needs

With more than 9,000 employees across various roles, MetroHealth required a listening solution that could capture feedback from all staff, regardless of the level of patient interaction. The flexibility of the Perceptyx People Insights Platform allowed for a single, inclusive survey that resonated with all employees.

Innovative Crowdsourcing Channel

The unique crowdsourcing question provided valuable ideas for improving MetroHealth’s speak-up culture. Patient Safety Director Stacey Booker noted: "We saw very thoughtful interventions as to what the caregivers would like to hear and see from us. Now we can take that information and partner with the People Division to build some curriculum and tools for our leaders."

Real-Time Data and Agile Response

The Perceptyx Safety Culture Survey provided an immediate increase in participation rates and a decrease in survey completion times. This allowed the organization to hear from more voices while preserving time for critical patient care. Chief of Quality and Safety Dr. Joseph Golob highlighted this benefit: "Being able to get real-time data — what percentage we had completed and how long it's actually taking to do it — really helped us focus on increasing participation."

A Time-Tested Partnership

MetroHealth's partnership with Perceptyx reflects a strong commitment to enhancing their employee experience and safety culture through an innovative listening and action strategy. One early opportunity was transitioning from the traditional AHRQ Culture of Safety Survey to the Perceptyx Safety Culture Survey, a solution that provides focused understanding of current safety culture perceptions coupled with crowdsourced ideas from staff to quickly ideate and then prioritize specific actions. "We used to give another type of safety survey, which I think was 40 questions. We ran that internally. It was extremely tedious," Chief of Quality and Safety Dr. Joseph Golob recalled.

The MetroHealth team embraced the consolidated approach, which included crowdsourcing. The flexibility of Perceptyx's platform, in combination with validated survey content, allowed for a more inclusive experience that addressed the needs of all staff, regardless of the level of patient interaction. "With this, we had one survey that spoke to clinical as well as non-clinical staff. So you got the voice of everyone," said Stacey Booker, MetroHealth's Director of Patient Safety and High Reliability.

The Power of Crowdsourcing to Improve Safety Culture

MetroHealth's focus on enhancing safety has been significantly informed by the ideas generated from their staff, all of which were efficiently prioritized through crowdsourcing. This innovative approach invites all staff to share their ideas in response to a specific question, then asks them to vote on the full complement of ideas proposed by their peers. Doing so quickly closes the gap from insight to action, as all staff help prioritize the best next steps to transform their safety culture.

Crowdsourcing not only surfaces ideas at scale, but also builds buy-in to the final solutions since all staff have the opportunity to contribute and share their voices. The result is a dynamic, employee-driven process that ensures the most resonant and impactful ideas rise to the top, creating a safety culture that is reflective of the entire organization's collective wisdom and experience.

Dr. Golob praised the crowdsourcing component: "Although the first 14 survey questions were useful, crowdsourcing was by far the most useful, especially because we're so proud of having 11,000 employee votes, and seeing those top five insights that were voted to the top."

Booker further emphasized crowdsourcing’s positive impact: "When we started to take a look at it, just on the first day you saw these great responses from the caregivers, who really wanted to be heard. And they had great value-added comments on how we could improve the culture of speaking up here at MetroHealth."

Not only did the crowdsourcing component result in clear ideas on how to take action, but this listening channel, in conjunction with a more targeted survey overall, helped boost participation. Dr. Golob reported, "We went from a 25% response rate with the old survey to a 55% response rate with Perceptyx. Certainly a substantial increase, though not yet in the 70s, like where we were last year (77%) on our Perceptyx Employee Engagement survey. So we'll have another friendly competition with our People Team in the future to see if we can top that number."

Booker expanded on the survey communication process: "We had several internal email communications that went out that talked about the survey, how it was a shorter survey, and that there was going to be this crowdsourcing question. We let people know that with the crowdsourcing question, ‘we want to hear from you.’"

Dr. Golob highlighted the transformative impact of this approach. "We would report updates about the Safety Culture Survey on our daily huddle. And what was nice is that you actually get real-time data. We knew this was taking 2 minutes and 30 seconds to complete, and we were able to share what percentage we had completed. To reiterate, crowdsourcing was the best and most innovative part of the survey."

The crowdsourcing component not only gathered ideas but also allowed employees to vote on them, ensuring that the actions taken were those that resonated most with the staff, ultimately increasing the likelihood of successful implementation. "The top five crowdsourced insights were in line with what I was expecting," said Dr. Golob said. "So you shouldn't be worried that you're going to get 65 different action items from your staff. You already know what they're going to be. People told us that they wanted to talk more about patient safety in their unit. They wanted to hear more, they wanted to engage more."

Insights That Drive Safety Culture Outcomes

By acting on the priorities identified through employee feedback, such as psychological safety, professionalism, and its speak-up culture, MetroHealth expects to see significant improvements in subsequent surveys. Stacey Booker explained how these insights will be actioned: "One of the things that we are working on organizationally is psychological safety. So the overarching system action plan will be around that and listening to people and feeling heard helps to enhance that."

This insight has driven a company-wide focus on not just collecting feedback about safety, but visibly acting on it in a non-punitive way and then communicating the results of those actions. Dr. Golob said, "Now I actually have data. I have data to say that the teams want to be more involved, so we have data to show them this. And it's robust data — 1,000 participants, 11,000 votes. Even a surgeon like myself can't challenge that data."

Booker also described how survey insights are already being integrated into ongoing initiatives: "We're in the process of rolling out a new safety event reporting system. So leveraging the importance of closing the loop, and getting the insight and feedback from your front-line staff on improvements to prevent a recurrence is in precise alignment with what was heard via crowdsourcing."

Comparing Results with Previous Surveys

While the Perceptyx Safety Culture Survey was different from prior safety surveys, MetroHealth was still able to draw some comparisons. "There are very similar questions," said Dr. Golob. "So we were able to pull out the similar questions. For example, there is a teamwork composite on the prior survey, where we were at 74% positive. Now, on the Perceptyx survey, we came in at 79% on the teamwork composite. In other words, we could still use your survey to show this 5% year-over-year improvement."

"When we used the prior vendor’s survey, we used three role-specific surveys," added Booker. "With Perceptyx, we could do one survey that spoke to clinical as well as non-clinical staff. Previously, we would hear, ‘Do I need to complete this survey?’ Because that person was in an administrative role or a non-patient facing role. Now the answer is always, ‘Yes, you do.’ It is inclusive. Everyone felt engaged."

A Partnership Built for the Future

As MetroHealth refines its culture of safety, its partnership with Perceptyx serves as a cornerstone of its strategy. The organization will continue exploring new ways to leverage the platform's capabilities, particularly in areas like psychological safety and professionalism.

Booker summed it all up: "I think the key thing to remember is that a survey like this is going to validate what you already know. You already have the thoughts as it relates to what it may be. This is just the validation letting you know you were correct. Now let’s use our data to help make those changes, to make those differences."

In partnering with Perceptyx, MetroHealth revolutionized its approach to safety culture assessment and improvement. The platform's innovative crowdsourcing channel has empowered employees to surface and prioritize ideas directly from the front-lines, ensuring that actions taken are not only data-driven, but deeply resonant with staff.

This ability to quickly gather, prioritize, and act on employee-generated ideas has created a virtuous cycle of engagement and improvement, which should, over time lead to tangible enhancements in both employee satisfaction and patient safety outcomes. By harnessing their staff's ability to surface and prioritize ideas, MetroHealth is rapidly driving actions that come directly from employee voices and establishing a powerful new standard for safety culture improvement in healthcare.

Lessons in Listening from MetroHealth and Perceptyx

MetroHealth's experience offers valuable lessons for other healthcare organizations considering a similar approach to safety culture assessment:

Embrace innovation: The crowdsourcing component proved highly valuable to quickly uncover and prioritize ideas from staff on how to drive action. Not only were staff able to provide their ideas, but the ability to also vote on the best path forward helped improve buy-in since all staff had a voice in the solution. Dr. Golob advised, "Don't be afraid of it, the crowdsourcing question. You're gooing to get new information for sure. But it's going to really support what you probably already know."
Trust your staff: Employees provided thoughtful, professional responses when given the opportunity. "We saw very thoughtful interventions as to what the caregivers would like to hear and see from us," said Stacey Booker.
Leverage real-time data: The ability to track participation in real-time allowed for targeted communication and increased engagement with the safety survey itself. "Being able to give real-time data, what percentage we had completed and how long it's actually taking to do it…that really helped us focus on increasing participation," explained Dr. Golob.
Focus on inclusivity: Having one safety culture survey format for all employees encouraged participation, even from non-clinical employees: "This really was inclusive. Everyone felt engaged."