The healthcare sector is under intense pressure.
An ageing population, complex patient needs, staff shortages, and technological transformation are stretching teams to the limit.
The fallout from COVID-19 still lingers. In the UK, the NHS has a waiting list of 7.37 million cases. And while the healthcare strikes of 2023 may have been resolved with pay rises, salary disputes rumble on.
If all that wasn’t enough, we can add long, inflexible shifts and emotionally demanding work into the mix. It’s no wonder that nearly one-third of healthcare employees are disengaged.
This is a problem. Because disengagement hits employee retention, patient care, and any new initiatives you try to roll out. It seems that employee engagement in healthcare is in need of urgent attention — STAT.
Ready to rewrite the prescription? Here, we explore what healthcare employee engagement looks like, why it matters, and how to foster it within your organization.
Too many healthcare organizations are getting employee engagement wrong
After hundreds of conversations with healthcare professionals, one thing has become crystal clear to the Blink team. Employee engagement is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the workplace.
Too often, it gets used as a catch-all term for every good thing a worker might do — from smiling at patients to hitting their KPIs.
An engaged healthcare worker is thought to be better organized, happier, more satisfied, more loyal, healthier, more motivated, more productive, better at communicating, and more prepared to go the extra mile.
Some of these behaviors are indicative of engagement. But there are a couple of key problems with this definition:
- It’s unrealistic. No one can embody all of those traits all of the time — especially in a high-stress, resource-stretched healthcare environment.
- It’s vague. Phrases like “go the extra mile” make engagement sound fluffy — a nice-to-have and not the essential driver of staff performance it really is.
- It’s unmeasurable. Tracking all those behaviors would be tricky. So measuring and improving employee engagement feels like too big a challenge.
When engagement is defined as a wish-list, finding practical solutions is tough. In healthcare, real engagement is specific, measurable, and tied directly to better patient care.
What employee engagement in healthcare isn’t
When figuring out what employee engagement in healthcare is, it can help to start with all the things it isn’t. Employee engagement in healthcare is not:
- Satisfaction: A satisfied nurse might feel satisfied with their shift pattern. But that doesn’t mean they won’t walk if another hospital offers better pay or hours.
- Happiness: A care worker may feel happy at work because they have a lot of free time to chat with co-workers. But that doesn’t mean they’re committed to the very best patient care.
- Motivation: A paramedic may feel motivated to work hard because they have their eye set on a promotion. But that doesn’t mean they’re invested in today’s patients or their current team.
- Empowerment: An organization may pride itself on the autonomy it affords to its staff. But staff will only take action and make decisions independently when they feel engaged and supported.
- Zero stress: A brain surgeon may feel stressed when operating but still be highly engaged. An optimal level of stress can actually increase engagement.
- Productivity: A hospital porter may transport patients efficiently all day long. But that doesn’t mean they’re interacting with patients and putting them at ease.
Engagement isn’t a fixed state. It ebbs and flows — from shift to shift and year to year. And it isn’t the same for every employee or every organization.
What employee engagement in healthcare is
In healthcare, engagement isn’t about surface-level positivity or breakneck productivity. It’s about creating the conditions where people — often working in high-stakes, emotionally and physically demanding environments — can bring their best focus, care, and energy to patients.
To achieve this, you need an employee engagement strategy that goes beyond the HR team to involve the whole of your organization.
Wondering where to begin? Start by taking a look at the three key drivers of employee engagement and retention in healthcare, as identified by Press Ganey. These drivers are:
1. Connection to the work. Not just liking the job but feeling that their work makes a difference, that their skills are used to their fullest, and that even the smallest task has meaning within a patient’s care journey.
2. Leader behaviors. Day-to-day interactions with managers have a huge impact on employee engagement. Employees who feel that their manager treats them with respect, treats everyone equally, cares about job satisfaction, and encourages teamwork, are more likely to be engaged.
3. Commitment to safety. Staff need to believe their organization is serious about high-quality care and safety. That means being able to flag safety concerns without fear of a backlash, and seeing lessons learned when mistakes happen.
These drivers are built into everyday moments — a handover that runs smoothly because everyone was kept in the loop, a break that’s actually honored, a manager who has your back when a patient’s family is upset.
Underpinning them are crucial workplace behaviors: clear internal communication, a culture that supports all staff, and strong connections between co-workers. The organization is dedicated to a positive employee experience, not just a positive patient experience.
When these elements are in place, employees are more likely to feel valued, remain loyal to your organization, and consistently provide the highest standard of patient care.
How can you tell if your healthcare employees are engaged?
We’ve talked about how engaged employees feel about their roles and the organizations they work for. But how is this expressed in their day-to-day work?
Engaged employees aren’t always smiling, stress-free, or happy to work extra hours. Instead, engagement can be seen in the small, meaningful ways they care for patients and their teams.
In practice, healthcare or hospital employee engagement may look like any of the following:
- Escorting lost family members to the right place
- Washing hands and checking IV lines without fail
- Helping a patient back to their room after noticing their yellow “fall risk” bracelet
- Listening patiently and actively as a patient asks for details about their medications
- Being mindful of quiet times at night
- Delivering meals while they’re still hot
- Wheeling a resident outside to feel snow for the first time in years
- Offering a hand or foot massage during a quiet moment
Why healthcare employee engagement matters
Engaged employees tend to be more satisfied in their roles. They experience lower levels of stress and better workplace relationships.
Achieve high levels of employee engagement at your healthcare organization, and you’re likely to see these other benefits, too.
Better patient outcomes
What’s good for staff is good for patients. Healthcare organizations with high levels of staff engagement are three times more likely to deliver a top patient experience. They perform better in terms of safety, too.
Engaged employees are more likely to hold themselves to the highest patient care standards, whether that means double-checking a patient’s medication list or sanitizing their hands more frequently.
Improved retention
Employee retention in healthcare is a major challenge. In the past five years, the average US hospital turned over an incredible 106.6% of its workforce. In the UK, 1 in 5 NHS workers is planning to leave within the year.
When staff leave, patient experience suffers. We know that for every 1% increase in employee turnover, patient experience scores drop an average of 2 percentiles.
Here’s the kicker. Disengaged employees are twice as likely to leave your organization as highly engaged employees. They’re also more likely to call in sick, adding even more strain to overstretched teams.
During a time of labor shortages and increased healthcare demand, boosting employee engagement is a critical healthcare retention strategy.
Costs fall and revenue rises
Turnover takes a financial toll on healthcare organizations. The British Medical Association (BMA) estimates that the cost of replacing a single doctor can be more than £300,000. Over in the US, the average cost of turnover for a bedside registered nurse (RN) is $61,110.
When employees are engaged, you reduce staff turnover and recruitment costs. And because familiar faces lead to higher patient experience ratings, you improve profitability too. Your organization enjoys customer loyalty, a better brand reputation, and increased referrals.
How to boost employee engagement in healthcare
To boost employee engagement in healthcare organizations, you need activities and strategies suited to busy frontline staff. Here are 9 strategies that work in healthcare settings.
1. Bring comms to the frontline
In too many facilities, staff still find out about shift changes or new protocols by wading through their emails, squinting at a faded noticeboard, or logging into a clunky intranet.
It’s not easy for busy frontline workers to get the information they need to do their jobs well. And seeking out resources takes them away from patients.
To reach every member of the workforce, internal communication in healthcare needs to be mobile and instant. It has to meet employees where they are.
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A quick update on the news feed. Shift information shared over group chat. A new safety protocol in the content hub. Make internal communication available on every employee smartphone and you keep staff informed and connected.
2. Put everything in one place
The right tech tools make employee communications easy to access — for even the busiest frontline worker. But you can improve engagement further by putting all workplace resources onto the same mobile-first digital dashboard.
Policies, contacts, shift schedules, pay stubs, PPE request forms, even quick links to other workplace tools, are all just a tap away. So your people spend less time searching and more time doing what they do best — caring for patients.
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3. Personalize the experience
What matters to the nurse on a night shift doesn’t necessarily matter to staff in the hospital kitchen or the team up in head office. So if you blast everyone with the same updates, it quickly turns into background noise.
To engage people with comms and organizational culture, you need to tailor the employee experience. Ensure employees in different departments, shifts, and roles see information that relates to them with the help of targeted alerts, segmented comms, custom dashboards, and shared-interest communities.
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4. Build co-worker connections
The emotional toll in healthcare is real. And without strong team connections, burnout hits harder. Worryingly, according to NHS workforce research, just 63% of employees say they feel a strong personal attachment to their team.
This is understandable. Building team bonds in healthcare can be tough. Teams are stressed and overstretched. Employees may work alone in patients’ homes or work shift patterns that rarely align.
The fix? Make space for camaraderie. Give people spaces to swap advice, share wins, or offer support after a rough shift. Those small moments of connection spark a sense of belonging, another powerful driver of engagement.
5. Lead by example
Engagement starts at the top. When healthcare employees are confident in senior leadership, trusting them to promote patient safety and demonstrating the organization’s values, they’re more likely to feel engaged in their work.
So leaders have to lead by example — and be visible to employees. That means showing up on internal communication channels, adopting an open style of communication, welcoming the input of employees, and consistently sharing the mission that drives your organization.
6. Celebrate your workforce
Too often in healthcare, the wins go unnoticed. Just 44% of NHS workers say they feel satisfied with the extent to which their organization values their work.
You can help staff to feel seen and valued — and inspire their loyalty — by making employee recognition an everyday part of organizational culture.
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Create a post in the feed thanking a team for their handling of a difficult case. Allow co-workers to nominate their peers for awards. Share a monthly rundown of standout employee moments.
You can also highlight positive patient stories. Regularly reinforce the link between an employee’s actions and patient outcomes and you remind your people just how much their work matters.
7. Give employees a voice
Employee surveys, polls, forums, listening tours, 1-to-1s. However, you do it, go beyond the annual healthcare engagement survey to gather staff feedback regularly — at least once a quarter.
You may uncover a particular shift that struggles with understaffing or a unit where safety concerns are being ignored. Or find that critical comms simply aren’t reaching their target audience.
Give employees a voice and you gain valuable insight into the employee experience — and what you can do to improve it. Dive down into the data and act upon it to show employees that their opinions are shaping how the organization is run.
8. Prioritize employee well-being
42% of NHS staff say they have felt unwell as a result of work-related stress in the last 12 months. And 81% of healthcare workers in the US say that they will look for a workplace that supports their mental health in the future.
So train your managers in how to recognize and respond to signs of stress and burnout in their employees. Provide mental health and well-being support — and ensure employees know how to access it.
But — as healthcare workers know well — it’s important to address root causes, not just symptoms. Depending on your employees and their needs, that might mean:
- Offering flexible work and shift swap options
- Providing competitive salaries
- Promoting a culture of psychological safety so employees can speak up and report issues
- Ensuring workloads are manageable
9. Track healthcare employee engagement
If you don’t measure employee engagement at your organization, it’s all guesswork. You can implement healthcare engagement trends — but you can’t be sure if and how new initiatives are benefiting your workforce.
With the right employee engagement tools, you can track engagement over time, establishing benchmarks and KPIs, like absenteeism, turnover rate, and employer net promoter score (eNPS).
You also establish a link between employee engagement activities and business-boosting metrics like employee satisfaction, patient satisfaction, employee productivity, and retention.
Employee engagement in healthcare: the Blink perspective
Blink is a mobile-first employee app designed for frontline workers. With engaging communication channels (including a news feed and chat), digital forms, employee surveys, recognition tools, and a range of integrations, Blink is helping healthcare teams to become more informed, connected, and empowered.
Back in 2020, we ran a pilot program at one of the UK’s largest private hospitals. Employees across several departments — including nurses, porters, receptionists, cleaners, and security guards — used the Blink app to access internal comms.
Using Blink cost the organization £2 million less than building a native application. But it still gave all frontline workers an easy way to get the resources they needed while on the move.
The results? A 30% increase in engagement with internal communications, with patients receiving better, faster care from more engaged staff. Our easy-to-use mobile platform meant that employees could access all the information they needed, and leadership could share vital messaging without interrupting the flow of care.
Since then, we’ve partnered with many other healthcare organizations, including:
- Children’s of Alabama. Blink has helped one of the busiest pediatric hospitals in the US achieve 78% app adoption in just a couple of months. The app is boosting connection and collaboration across the frontline.
- Elara Caring. The 17,000+ carers at Elara now chat and receive updates via Blink, with 95% saying they feel more connected to the organization. This is a massive shift for a workforce that previously felt overlooked and undervalued.
- Coastal Medical. At this healthcare transport company, the average employee opens the Blink app 5.7 times a day. The ambulance industry sees a turnover rate of around 20%, just for paramedics. At Coastal Medical, that figure is now less than 5%, thanks to a strong workplace culture, co-worker connection, and easy access to vital information.
Transforming employee and patient experiences with Blink
When healthcare workers feel engaged in their work, they provide a better standard of care for patients. They’re more likely to feel positive about their work and committed to your organization.
An inclusive and open organizational culture, employee recognition, easy internal communication, and staff well-being strategies are just some of the building blocks you need to put in place to boost employee engagement in healthcare.
And this is where Blink comes in. A single, secure app puts updates, resources, feedback channels, comms tools, and recognition into the palm of every employee. It’s a mobile-first solution, designed for the realities of healthcare work.
Blink. And transform employee engagement at your healthcare organization.
Healthcare employee engagement FAQs
What does engagement mean in healthcare?
Engaged healthcare employees are aware of what they should be doing at any given time, have the resources they need to complete their work, and feel like they play an essential part in achieving organizational goals.
Why is engagement important in healthcare?
Various studies have found that engaged healthcare staff can lead to better patient care, lower operating costs, a safer workplace, and increased profitability.
How can healthcare improve employee engagement?
You can improve healthcare employee engagement by having a strong internal communications strategy, collecting and actioning employee feedback, recognizing employee efforts, and prioritizing employee well-being.
