Norton Healthcare Customer Testimonial

Transcript

I'm Conrad Kresge and I work for Norton Healthcare in Louisville, Kentucky. We're a healthcare organization with just over 18,000 employees supporting six regional hospitals and additional medical practices. I’ve been with the organization for almost 10 years. I'm responsible for quantifying our culture, making sure we're doing right by our employees through supporting them, and supporting our leadership in our efforts.

We've been partners with Perceptyx dating back to 2019, so just over four years now. And it's been a wonderful journey. We've really expanded our listening strategies and are looking forward to all the new products and the roadmap. It's just been pleasant all around. Perceptyx has an intuitive platform, it’s easy to utilize, and they anticipate our needs. Often we'll come to them with a quick question and they've already thought it out, have a well-rehearsed answer, and they're able to help us develop and meet our leaders where they are. Perceptyx’s working knowledge of the platform and products is just outstanding.

Our listening program has gone through the roof since working with Perceptyx, whereas previously working in a healthcare environment we were doing touch bases maybe once a year with a safety and engagement survey and really that was enough for us dating back six, seven years ago. But healthcare's changed for better or worse and we decided that we needed to expand our listening program to make sure that we were gathering feedback from our employees as often as we can. So we've gone live with career cycle surveys for our newest employees, exit surveys, and pulse surveys that are topic specific. We have a leader rounding program where we're engaging with employees on a one-on-one basis. So really eliciting all the feedback we can to make sure that we understand what's going on with our workforce, and that allows us to adapt and change as quickly as things are adapting and changing for our employees.

So when we look back, even four years ago, burnout really wasn't a hot topic for us. We had done some burnout assessments. We were pretty high scoring, but then the Covid-19 pandemic happened and things changed rapidly for our workforce, and burnout started creeping in. We saw what we call a halo effect, where healthcare employees, our clinicians, were leaving it all on the table, they were doing everything they could for their patients, and they'd come home in the evening and have nothing left in the tank. And so we needed to adjust our strategy, make sure that we were listening to them and providing program development that was able to improve their well-being. And not only while they're at work, but also holistically, and we've really been able to do that by repackaging programs that we already had, by promoting them, re-communicating them, and then developing new programs. We've really been able to see improvement in burnout and well-being perceptions for our workforce, which has been so rewarding to see over the last three years.

We've been able to overlay other business metrics, such as turnover, retention data, and we see that there are hotspots within the organization. So not only do we focus on those areas, but we focus on the areas that are doing really well, and we go in and find out, what's the difference here? Why are these areas that maybe have the same kind of work or the same kind of workload, why are they doing so much better than other areas? And we find that it's often a myriad of things, we found that burned out leaders typically have burned out staff. So we'll come in and we'll sit with those leaders, coach them up, figure out what's going on, what can we do as an organization to make your lives easier while you're caring for our patients. And we've really been able to move the needle. In the last two years, we've gone from a lower percentile ranking to a high percentile when it comes to stress and burnout, which is huge for us.

Our team has a huge focus on recognition utilization. We want to recognize our employees for going above and beyond and doing great work when they're with our organization, so we've tied recognition utilization directly to our engagement results. We've found that there's a sweet spot for recognition where we expect our leaders to recognize employees at least eight times a year. And that's really important because we know our folks are doing great work and we want to get out there and make sure that we recognize it, that they're appreciated. And that also improves perceptions of value. And we found that when folks are feeling valued, they're more likely to stay with the organization for a longer period of time and that's really our goal, is to make sure that we're providing a wonderful work environment for folks when they're with Norton Healthcare.

What I like most about the technology is without a doubt the actionable insights. So very often we'll come in, we'll sit with a leader, we're interpreting results and say, so, okay, my engagement dropped for my workforce from last year. What do I do about it? Well, guess what, it's already built in the Perceptyx platform. We hop in and look at the actionable insights. We say, okay, maybe ideas and suggestions weren't as valued as they were the previous year. Well, here's some tips and tricks, things you can do that are going to impact that score. And it gives us credence to say, “Hey, we're gonna help you. We're gonna build out this action plan and we're gonna follow up and make sure that we're doing all these things because we know we're gonna see gains in the next year.” And we've been with Perceptyx long enough that our leaders have buy-in now, and they're really seeing that. 

We're also going to look to go live with Perceptyx’s Dialogue product, a crowdsourcing element that has been missing from our portfolio of listening strategies. And we want to empower leaders to do a quick poll, a quick pulse to see how things are going for their employees? Did that intervention that we went through last month, is it what we expected? A basic red, yellow, or green of how are you feeling today? And that's going to be really valuable. Those kinds of insights are going to drive change in our units within our practices. And so we're really looking forward to going live with the Dialogue product.

It's extremely valuable to have somebody that's dedicated just for our employees. By partnering with Perceptyx, rather than doing something in-house or something through our patient experience platform, we know that our employees know that this is dedicated to them. That the organization values our employees, they value them so much that not only are they partnering with an outside organization to make sure that our responses are confidential, but that we have a high powered employee insights platform that is going to interpret these results and do so multiple times a year and that's really important. Our internal communication team has been wonderful in helping us ensure we let employees know that it's not just about the employees at a given time, but it's about them all the time. And that’s been a key element for us.