The following email message was sent to all UI Health Care employees on Jan. 23, 2025.

Colleagues,  

In October, we asked you to share your thoughts in the UI Health Care Working at Iowa Survey, which measures our team’s engagement. We heard from you, and that feedback has shown several positive trends within our organization. These results are a testament to the hard work, dedication, and collaborative spirit of our team.  

Like most health care organizations, we have areas where we exceeded expectations and areas we need to focus on for improvement. Now the next step is for all of us to be involved in discussing the results and working together to have a positive impact on our workplace moving forward. 

What we heard from you

You shared through the survey many strengths you’ve seen over the past year, both in your individual work units and across UI Health Care.  

Engagement, a composite metric that measures employee pride, intent to stay with the organization, willingness to recommend the organization to others, and workplace satisfaction, is the primary metric that we use from our Press Ganey employee engagement surveys. We're happy to share that our engagement score (3.85 out of 5) improved this year and met the target goal we set as an organization.   

We also see this positive trend reflected in our recruitment and retention efforts. We’ve seen a rise in the number of accepted offers and hires at our organization over the last year.   

This encouraging news complements the positive results we’ve seen in our survey: Our employees feel that they are part of a team that values their contributions and provides a high level of service—through clinical care, research, and education. 

Additionally, we performed well in the following areas:  

  • Trust in our work units: Communication between employees and supervisors is viewed as strong, and teamwork is actively encouraged. Employees consistently reported there is a climate of trust in their work units.  
  • Commitment to high-quality service: Our teams take great pride in delivering high-quality care and service. 
  • Focus on safety: Employees and management continue to work together to maintain the safest possible working conditions. 

You also shared with us opportunities for improvement. Here are the key areas in which we have continued opportunity to improve:  

  • Promoting well-being and balance: We have an opportunity to help our team disconnect physically and mentally when away from work.  
  • Enhancing our culture: We see opportunities to draw from our shared values so employees feel comfortable being their authentic self at work. 
  • Providing clear development opportunities: We want employees to be able to make meaningful connections with their work and have clear professional development and advancement opportunities. 

What you can expect next

Sharing these high-level results of the survey is just one step of the process. Management teams are receiving training on how to access and interpret their specific department feedback, which may have different areas of focus from the overall enterprise results above. They will then be holding broader discussions about the results with their teams. Ideas on what can be done collectively and as individual team members will also be part of these discussions.    

With input and feedback from their teams, department leaders will create and share impact plans, which will outline how opportunities for improvement will be addressed. Management teams will have access to additional resources to help implement action plans at all levels and establish safe environments to share thoughts and opinions.  

How you can help

We encourage you to share and discuss your honest thoughts with your supervisor. Please be mindful of the fact that your leaders may not have all of the answers. Instead, the impact planning will likely become a process of discovering next steps together as a team.   

Thank you again for your participation in the survey. We look forward to continued discussions in the coming weeks and months on how we take this opportunity to strengthen our teams. 

 

Denise Jamieson, MD, MPH 
Vice President for Medical Affairs  
and the Tyrone D. Artz Dean, Carver College of Medicine 

Brad Haws, MBA 
Chief Executive Officer, Clinical Enterprise 
Associate Vice President, UI Health Care 

Patricia Winokur, MD 
Executive Dean, Carver College of Medicine