Always Room for Improvement

Great news - The employee engagement survey is back and as promised you gave us very important feedback that will help us improve our life at Children's Specialized.

Your Managers and Directors will discuss the data with you in early February for your specific area. There were some important themes that I would like to share with you ahead of time and also ask for your input to help me understand how we can improve our employee engagement.

Our overall scores showed us in the 86th percentile compared to the other Children's Hospitals surveyed.

We scored the highest on – “Would I recommend Children’s to my friends or family who need care.” To me, this speaks volumes and is the highest possible endorsement anyone can give to an organization or business.

This is the EXACT question our federal government will evaluate from our patient satisfaction surveys of Medicare patients. We should all feel very proud of this because it reflects our performance of our core business, the exceptional care we deliver to the children who we are privileged to treat.

We scored higher than our comparative group in the areas where we spent a great deal of attention on improving since our last survey. These were questions that dealt with communication by your Manager or Director, working cooperatively between work units and being respected by the person you report too. This has been a very important focus to us and the results of this survey showed you valued our improvements.

The survey identified two areas where we need to reestablish focus: recognition of the work you do and career development.

It would be really helpful to hear from you, besides more money, what would be recognition that would be most meaningful to you? In the same vein, understanding that in health care, frequent title changes or promotions are not the norm. We will be using the 100 day work out to begin to identify solutions to improve these areas for us.

In that same way, we will be doing the survey again in 2012. Just as we have moved on the speed to change and respond in our quality and efficiency, we need to do the same with employee engagement. We must measure where we are, create changes to improve, and then measure again.

Please share your thoughts on the blog about recognition and career development. Your suggestions are always so helpful and the blog could provide a forum to get different opinions out there.

Many thanks as always.

Gifts – Good, Bad, Hilarious!

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a joyous holiday with their family and loved ones.

One of my friends got a new Ipad for her birthday and she is totally enthralled with all of the things it does. She told me about an "app" that she called "Shazam" that will match the music that is playing and tell her what it is. Think of how many times we have heard a new song, or even an old song that we hadn't thought of for years, and you want to find it but can’t remember the name. This technology gets you the song just by listening to it and will allow you to buy it on Itunes immediately.

So it started me thinking, let’s have a little fun surrounding the holiday season and talk about some of the great or funny gifts we each received this year. Did you get a really great gift over the holiday - new technology or something that makes you smile? Or something that made this holiday extra special?

My cousin gave me "dysfunctional family bingo" - haven't opened it but it did make me laugh. I’ve also heard of families passing around the same gag gift every holiday – is this part of your family’s tradition? If so, what do you pass around?

What about that present that just made you go, “Hu?” You know, when Aunt Nancy gives you a lovely baby sweater, but you don’t have any kids. Or Uncle Charlie gives your 9 year old son a pair of pink bunny slippers?

Let’s have a few laughs and enjoy our gifts a little longer by sharing our stories.