Employee feedback.

Employee feedback is one way to better understand your employee culture. As the number of employees who think about or actually leave your organization grows, it is even more important to understand how your organizational culture impacts employee retention and attrition.

Organizational culture is the shared beliefs and values of employees. There are many aspects of culture that can be both positive and negative. To build a sense of inclusion and belonging, we recommend that organizations focus on building a positive culture with effective two-way communication. Building a cooperative culture can inspire teamwork and help build positive performance. The pandemic, the uncertain economy, increasing uncontrollable changes and the number of colleagues leaving, can create conflicts and employee alienation.

Assessing and improving organizational culture.

Helpful employee feedback is a good way to start to assess and improve your organization culture. As we have mentioned before, it is important to understand the current state of mind of your employees and to understand how they perceive your organizational culture. If you have a smaller organization and think an informal approach would work better, one starting point is a discussion group of employees with key questions asked. Or you can consider a more formal type of organizational audit. This type of assessment would take a snapshot of your organization to get a picture of what the culture looks like strategically and from the team’s point of view. It is important to understand if your culture is helping or hurting the accomplishment of your vision, mission, values, and goals, or impeding them.

Usually, this type of audit would include the clarifying beliefs, attitudes, policies, procedures, and expectations. These aspects of your organization come from leadership communication and the practices of your organization. If your goal is to provide excellent individualized care to a specific population, the goal of your culture audit may be to assess your employees’ values and attitudes toward caregiving and teamwork.

With so many environmental uncertainties, it can be helpful to assess your team’s responsiveness to changing requirements of patients. It may be important to know whether your team thinks they have enough autonomy and if they have a sense of what leadership is doing to address the current challenging situation.

Measuring organization traits.

Based on the current situation, important cultural traits should be measured. For example, is the physical layout set up to maximize patient satisfaction and well-being? Can workflow be improved? Do team members have the authority and skills to make appropriate independent decisions, and is the leadership showing appreciation based on results?

Address gaps between goals and behaviors.

Based on the gaps between feedback compared with the cultural goals, a change plan should be developed to close gaps. These efforts could include additional training so employees can act more independently or providing more career development or creating a career ladder to engage employees in the goals of the organization.

Hire Outcomes HR helps healthcare organizations who are facing pressure to reduce turnover, by assisting with cultural assessments. We can help reduce attrition and open position times, by working closely with your leadership to assess your culture and if needed to help address staffing gaps through effective recruitment strategies and tactics.

Learn more at https://www.hireoutcomeshr.com/