The power of engagement: creating the culture that gets your staff aligned and invested.

The Canadian government officially recognizes the value of staff engagement in providing better healthcare. Evidence demonstrates that engagement is connected to improved financial outcomes as well as better patient safety and clinical outcomes. There is a need for health leaders to create organizational cultures that simultaneously result in higher rates of employee and physician engagement, better clinical care, and lower costs. This article highlights the research and experience gained on the benefits of engagement, explores Studer Group's approach to improving both engagement and quality, and shares the results achieved by the firm's Canadian partners. In addition, it describes some of the "building blocks" that, together, create the necessary cultures of engagement inside organizations.

Making process improvement 'stick'.

To sustain gains from a process improvement initiative, healthcare organizations should: Explain to staff why a process improvement initiative is needed. Encourage leaders within the organization to champion the process improvement, and tie their evaluations to its outcomes. Ensure that both leaders and employees have the skills to help sustain the sought-after process improvements.

Do your nurses speak finance?

To ensure that financial and clinical leaders have the same perspective on the direction their organization is taking, hospitals should: Build a platform of common understanding. Connect to the"why". Be transparent. Give clinical leaders the tools they need. Create true collaboration.

Alignment, action, and accountability getting results in a down economy.

A disconnect often exists between the way external pressures are viewed by senior leaders and middle managers. This disconnect creates a situation where the organization may have difficulty moving quickly in the face of change or responding appropriately to the external environment. Senior leaders can improve performance through efforts aimed at aligning goals, aligning behaviors, and ensuring accountability.

Keep your patients coming back.

Does your practice deliver the customer service--in addition to the medical care--that patients want? The secrets of engaging physicians in a better patient experience.

How healthcare wins with consumers who want more.

With consumerism on the rise, many hospitals are responding to high patient expectations by embracing a journey that "hard wires" a culture of service and operational excellence into their organizations. The "healthcare flywheel" describes a way to frame the process, by explaining how hospitals can harness employee passion for making a difference in patient lives to create self-sustaining momentum for change. Organizations can be guided in their journey by nine principles that align goals and measure results under five "pillars" to better set and respond to patient expectations, increase organizational focus on service and performance, measure performance against expectations, and create highly effective leaders. A brief case study of Sarasota (Fla.) Memorial Health Care System is included to illustrate how consumer-driven initiatives also increase profitability.