Hi, everyone. This is Lucas Voss with Becker's HealthCare. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Becker's HealthCare podcast series. Today, we have a very exciting topic, a very interesting topic, how health care organizations can revolutionize the employee experience and employee employee experience strategies by evolving from annual surveys to continuous listening. And we're gonna dive into innovative ways to leverage real time feedback, empower managers, and align employee and patient experiences for transformative action. And to do that, I'm very excited to be joined by Adam Tanner, the senior director of product management at NRC Health. Thanks so much for taking the time, Adam. Welcome. Thanks, Lucas. Happy to be here. Absolutely. Before we get started, I wanna give our audience a chance to get to know you a little bit more. If you could introduce yourself and give them a little bit of an of a background of your of your role, what your work in health care, and also NRC Health. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I joined NRC Health earlier this year. I have a background of over 15 years in HR technology and employee experience type of products, largely leading product and go to market teams. I did cofound a company in this space a little over 10 years ago. And since then, I've joined a few other firms in the market. Excited about what we're doing at NRC Health, of course, because of our exclusive focus on health care. When we think about employee experience and employee listening in health care, we know it's unique. We know it's different than other industries, and we know that the relationship and the connection to the patient experience and the patient outcomes we're looking for are even stronger than than perhaps in some other places. And so that's really a problem, you know, we're setting out to solve here at NRC Health. How do we help hospital and health care organizations listen to their people? How do we help them align that information and that data with the patient experience and the market experience? And how do we draw insights and and create actionable improvement from that information. And you're absolutely right. I think especially in health care, it's so closely tied together. The the employee the happier the employee, the well-being of the employee, the better for patient care, which is ultimately the goal here. And and I think I wanna start with the aspect of the annual survey. I don't think there's anybody that in the workforce that hasn't taken an annual survey, annual engagement survey, or trying to an organization trying to understand their employees a little bit better. But I want to touch on maybe a better way to do this. Right? In what ways can health care organization really leverage real time feedback as it happens beyond just that annual survey that I talked about to really gain more accurate insights into that day to day employee experience that happens on a regular basis? It's a great question. You know, one of my favorite parts of working on this problem in this space is that everyone has an understanding and a connection to it. As you said, everyone's, for the most part, been an employee Mhmm. Or been a manager, has taken a survey, or gotten results of a survey like this and and been, in that position of, you know, how how do we use this? How do we improve the organization? Unfortunately, right, I think most of us would say our experience historically with the annual engagement survey isn't a great one. From the employee's point of view, from my point of view, it's long. It's tedious. It's once a year. It feels like maybe we're measuring something that I don't always see how that is directly tied to my experience. Let's we'll get back to engagement versus experience here in a bit. And and so when we think about the evolution of that experience, from and just a once a year survey to what we're calling continuous listening, it is it is a, you know, a long time coming. Organizations have been running annual engagement surveys for decades. We saw some time ago organizations move from what I'd call, like, engagement 1.0 to 2.0 where we start hearing from folks more than just once a year. We're doing now what we would call a pulse survey. Right? And maybe we're hearing from folks twice a year. It's a little better, a little more frequent, perhaps a little more, accurate in terms of really trying to understand the employee experience, but it's it's a step. From there, we see organizations that have started to bring together even greater channels for employee feedback. Right? We're now going beyond measuring engagement to really trying to understand the employee experience and get people's feedback on their experience. And that looks like different types of solutions, doing onboarding surveys, exit surveys, crowdsourcing, even things like town hall meetings and, suggestion boxes sort of fit into this. How are we hearing from people all the time? And then where we find ourselves today and maybe is where we're even looking into the future a little bit here in terms of aspirationally, how do we not just bring all the ways in which we hear from our employees together, but really think about all the ways we hear from humans that are a part of or impacted by our organizations, and where can we see insights and opportunities that don't exist when these datasets live separately. What ideas do our employees have for improving the patient experience? What can our patients tell us about their experience that would have an impact or have a a change to how our employees feel? It's all there. The challenge is, you know, bringing it together in a way that's understandable and then getting it to the right people in our systems, in a way that they can take action on locally. Yeah. And I'm glad that you mentioned that because I think it it can't it can't be, you know, how do you feel 1 through 5 click the number here anymore. Right? We need a a a more interactive way to be able to find that feedback and to understand, okay. How are my employees actually feeling? What can they contribute? How can I make that better? Which leads me into the next part of this, right, how do we do that? How do we encourage continuous improvement, right, and how do we change that mindset of empowering employees to actually share feedback, participate in solution finding. And, again, like I mentioned, ultimately, having that empowerment of of shaping their own environment, what's the best way to do that? How can health care leaders really foster that attitude? It's it's, it's the, in my opinion, most important part and probably the most difficult part. I think what we're talking about here is for many hospital systems more around a culture transformation than simply employee surveys. Right? It's easy, relatively easy enough to survey people more frequently. And technology and AI has made it easy enough for us to make sense of that data and understand themes and strengths and opportunities, but, truly, to help the entire system, the entire population feel like we're really listening. And we're taking that information, and we're using it to drive and guide decision making. And everyone's a part of that, not just executive team. That's the culture transformation that goes along with it. We've seen some great success stories of organizations who have gotten quite quite a bit down this road where Mhmm. You know, managers really feel ownership or engagement and feel responsibility to their teams. It's not another task I have to do. It's not, an exercise that comes around once a year. It's it's how we work. And I think there are some things that technology can help us with there, making the data more accessible, making things more transparent, helping, you know, get this information to the right people at the right time and get the information from the right people at the right time. But there's still a big human element to it. We have to be having dialogue with our teams. We have to be agreeing or at least acknowledging what was said in the survey and what are the things within our control on our local team that that would make this thing a little bit better. And if we get every manager and every team thinking that way, what are the things that we can control that would make our team's experience better? We see that, you know, the, I don't remember the analogy exactly, but, right, but, like, the rising tide rises all ships. Right? It it, it's gonna raise the entire organization, the sum of all these incremental improvements. Yeah. And I love that you're you keep using one one word, and that that's we. Because I think that's so so important in this context. Right? It cannot happen if if not everybody is involved top down. I think that that's really key to be able to create that buy in and create that engagement, which brings me to the next part of this, which which is really starting from the top. Right? The manager has a role to empower. The manager is ultimately a part or in charge of being able to say, okay. How can I make this better? How can I improve the employee experience? And I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on, first off, how can they intervene effectively when they're feeling like, hey. This isn't really working out. It's something's happening. I need to change. What role do they have? How do they do that? And then also, how do they turn it around? Right? What what can they do to be able to turn that around? Yeah. I mean, managers, I believe that managers want to do a good job. Right? They want to be good managers. They want to help their people succeed. They want to help the organization succeed. But many managers became managers without a whole lot of training or development, without a whole lot of experience, without necessarily all of the tools and resources that they might need to to feel confident and feel successful here. And so one thing we see is that for many managers, this can, before the culture transformation, feel kind of like I'm on the defense. Right? This is almost about me. My team's not engaged. That's by fault. And in many ways, it's easier to ignore that and to than to lean into it and do something about it. That's where we need to you you know, I think you used the word empowering. We need to help managers feel that this isn't punitive. This isn't, something that they're doing wrong or right. This is simply, a conversation that they need to start having or or continue having with their teams. It's it's almost like going from me. I feel like I, the manager, am, you know, either responsible for the success or fail responsible for the failure to we, the word that that that you mentioned. We're in this together. And so every employee has a has a role in improving engagement. That's part of it. Giving leaders not only the data, but the tools and the support to kinda lead whether to turn around or just lead the improvement is also critical. In that evolution of employee engagement over the years, right, we were talking about you know, there was a place where first, managers didn't get any data about their teams. And then probably we got to a place where we're giving managers lots of information, lots of data about their team, arguably too much. Our managers aren't IO psychologists in those cases. They're not data analytics experts. What managers need is simplified, digestible information around where their team is today, where we're doing well, where we have an opportunity to improve without overcomplicating it, in a way that that maybe has, you know, unexpected consequences and creates a lack of action instead of greater action. And so that's, again, that's what we're thinking about from a from a product standpoint and just from a, enablement standpoint. How do we help managers? How do we help every human in the organization understand their role and understand the things they can do to improve the results? And that is very unique and very personal. Right? No one man or no 2 managers are gonna have the exact same recommendation. What's going on on my team is undoubtedly a little bit nuanced from what's going on on, you know, on Lucas' team. And so how do we make sure that we're guiding those those folks in the right direction? Yeah. I I was gonna ask too. That data, that very specific data that you were able to access that you're getting, the data reports that are specific, that are that are digestible for these folks, does that ultimately help to be a little bit more individualized too in terms of not just having, like, one swap. Okay. I need to do this, but I can focus on different team members individually and really tailor my feedback to them and tailor what they need to them. Does that data help in that process? It does, not quite to the individual. And so, right, with with most employee engagement, employee experience type programs, what we see is these are either anonymous or confidential. And so a leader is getting results for their team as long as the team is of a certain size. But I'm not literally saying, oh, I can see what Lucas said and respond to Lucas the individual. That still can become very personalized when we talk about a team of, you know, 5 direct reports. These are the themes that emerged that kinda bubble to the top for our team, and this is why we think it's critical. You know, real dialogue, actual conversation and interaction is is a part of this solution. When a manager and their team start talking about the things that surfaced for that group, we'll quickly get to those individual personas, perspectives, and really how do we move this forward in a way that feels good to all of us. Yeah. Absolutely. I wanna tie us back to something that we actually started started our podcast off with, which is the connection between, you know, when I feel good as as a as a physician, as an employee, whatever it may be, right, I can provide better service. I can provide better patient care. Can you just elaborate in from your perspective a little bit more on and how does that focus on employee experience really ultimately enhances patient care and improve the patient experience? It's, I believe data that's been proven within and with it with and outside of health care. Right, the relationship between the employee experience and the, let's say, customer or consumer experience. There's a quote. I I don't know who to attribute it to, right, that your consumers, your customers' experience will never be better than your employees' experience, but especially in a service environment like health care where they're so closely correlated. And I and I think that's true. To touch on our last conversation, you might also say that an employee experience is very difficult to be harder than their manager's employee experience because the manager is so so important and so responsible for their team. And so we see these relationships all over the place in this ecosystem. And what we're working with our partners on is really to try to understand this relationship between employee experience and patient experience, again, in that unique nuanced way. The correlation is there, in general, right, when we look across the entire industry. But what are the things that if we improve for our employees would have the greatest impact on our patients? Is it things related to DEI, or are there things related to, collaboration or the way we work across teams that is the area to focus on when we can really try to understand what is the outcome, what is the KPI we're trying to to improve. And if that's truly patient experience or patient satisfaction, then we can work all the way backwards to understand what are the drivers of employee experience or what are the dimensions of the employee experience that can help us move the needle as much as possible here at our hospital? Yeah. Absolutely. It's something that's continuously evolving, I think, and continuously changing too, and organizations need to be aware of that. They need to be able to move move with those changes and and be able to adjust. Adam, while we have you, I I I just briefly wanted to touch to close this out a little bit on on what you're really seeing as as sort of the development in 2025. Why should health care leaders really now make an effort to be able to focus on this and make the employee experience a a priority? And what are you seeing for 2025? Well, Lucas, I think you just said it. Change. Right? Change is happening. It's not slowing down. Organizations in health care are merging and, coming together in, at accelerated rates than what we've seen in the past. When we think about, right, 2 years ago, chat GPT didn't exist. 2 years ago, we were still coming out of the, we're still in, you know, a big part of the COVID pandemic. So we think about the the amount of changes that can happen in in 2 years. And now to reflect back on the beginning of our conversation, some systems at one point or today still maybe aren't even surveying their employees or hearing from their employees except every 1 or 2 years. It's just you can see how that's not gonna work. Change is happening continuously. We need to have our finger on the pulse continuously. The solutions allow for that to be the case, and that's, I think, why it's it's so critical for every system to be doing more of this and leaning into this now more than ever. It's not new, but it is is continuing to speed up and continuing to become more of a priority. Absolutely. Adam, I wanna thank you for your time today and your insights. I think this was incredibly interesting. I feel like we could spend another hour talking about just what to expect in 2025. Again, thank you so much for taking the time and being here today. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening, letting us share our perspective. Looking forward to the next one. Absolutely. And we also want to thank our podcast sponsor, NRC Health. You can tune in to more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our podcast page at beckershospitalreview.com.