UI Health Care Working at Iowa Survey results: Thank you for sharing your perspective

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. Once again, thank you for responding to the survey. We had strong participation — more than 80% of employees completed the survey – which signals the results are reflective for most of our team members.

Engagement is the primary metric that we use from our Press Ganey employee engagement surveys. It is a composite metric of employee pride, intent to stay with the organization, willingness to recommend the organization to others, and workplace satisfaction. We're happy to share that our engagement score is 3.9 (out of 5). Our score improved again this year and exceeded the target goal we set as an organization. This increase is especially meaningful when we use it as a national benchmark, too.  Our employee engagement is higher than many other academic medicine centers across the country right now.

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:

• Trusting our front-line leaders: Employees have positive working relationships with their supervisors and report a strong culture of respect, communication, and supportive feedback within their units.
• Focus on safety: Employees and management continue to build a safe environment for team members and patients.
• Effective teamwork: There is effective teamwork among supervisors, direct reports, and employees across roles, supported by a climate of trust within each work unit.

You also shared with us key areas for improvement:

• Promoting well-being and balance: We have a chance to encourage our team to physically and mentally step away from work so they can recharge, reset, and return feeling supported and balanced.
• Engagement with senior leadership: We would like employees to feel that they have greater clarity on how and why decisions are made for our organization and make it clearer that their feedback is heard and welcomed into that decision-making process.
• Onboarding and retention: We will continue improving recruitment, recognition, and retention efforts to address staffing shortages and help employees feel that their teams are adequately supported.

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.

We encourage you to share and discuss your thoughts with your supervisor. Please be mindful of the fact that your leaders may not have all the answers. Instead, 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
University of Iowa Vice President for Medical Affairs
and the Tyrone D. Artz Dean, Carver College of Medicine

Patricia Winokur, MD
Executive Dean, Carver College of Medicine

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

Bevan Yueh, MD, MPH  
Chief Physician Executive, UI Health Care