Happiness: The path to better hospital performance
A paper published by Alex Edmans of the University of Pennsylvania in the Academy of Management Perspectives; vol. 26 no. 4, titled “Why Happy Workers Should Make Shareholders Smile” the author describes how job satisfaction pays off with better-than-expected earnings and higher stock returns.
So, I was wondering — it has worked in other industries, why not in healthcare?
Cultivating a happy workforce results in more than just feel-good meetings and upbeat corporate retreats. According to this paper, satisfied employees actually raise the worth of their firms. Analyzing the performance of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work for in America” over a 28-year period, the author found that these firms generated higher yearly stock returns than comparable companies not on the list. They also systematically beat financial analysts’ earnings estimates, an indication that job satisfaction is an important variable.
Too often in hospitals and healthcare organizations, personal job satisfaction is not considered an important data point to providing higher quality of care, improving patient outcomes or reducing medical costs. Instead, more work is heaped on already over-burdened staff and they are told, “…do more, with less.”
All to often it is the patient who pays the price of the shrinking amount of time that nurses and doctors have to spend per patient. What is most unfortunate is when the systems that were developed to make their jobs easier, actually increase the burden — without providing any discernable benefit.
In the past these home-grown systems were all a Risk, Quality Manager had to choose from. But thankfully there are now better solutions that can not only provide better results, but also make their job easier — dare I say, happier?
It should be no surprise that a happier worker is a more engaged and effective worker. So, if you don’t have happy thoughts when you think about your current Risk/Quality Management, Performance Improvement system, then you should consider why.
Be happy. Get ActionCue Clinical Intelligence.
Read the full article here.
To learn more about the ActionCue hospital risk management software click here.
About the Author Faris Islam
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