Employee Feedback Makes For Healthy Morale at Mercy

Building company morale has gone a long way past casual Fridays.
Competitive salary and benefits may be enough to lure employees, but more and more employers are learning the way to keep them is with a company culture that creates a team atmosphere and recognizes individual achievement.
Productivity losses caused by everything from playing on-line video games to NCAA Tournament pools to “bad apples” or low morale in the workplace are measured in the billions of dollars, and that makes investing time and resources in human resources cost-effective.
Purchasing a pool table for the break room or hiring a professional polling company to gauge employee mood are small prices to pay for the benefits returned in improved morale.
Mercy Health System of Northwest Arkansas has found that out as the hospital leadership guides its 1,400 employees through the process of moving from Mercy’s home of 50 years on Walnut Avenue in Rogers to a sparkling $145 million facility in the Pinnacle corridor next year.
With feedback from its employees, in the last year the nonprofit health care provider has implemented the “Mercy Excellence Award” and the “Mercy Spirit Squad” as methods to build morale and to keep coworkers in every department apprised of the details of the move each step of the way.
Mercy prides itself on its culture of service standards — its patient survey scores have improved each of the last five years — and many coworkers expressed concerns about transporting that atmosphere along with beds and equipment.
“Keeping that [culture] was at the top of our list,” said Michelle Bass, director of compliance and customer relations, who has been at Mercy for 14 years. “We deal with lives and that’s a precious thing.”
The Mercy Spirit Squad is made up of team leaders who educate their departments on various “milestones” such as the new electronic record keeping systems.
The monthly Spirit meetings engage the coworkers with skits or activities to learn about a topic and the team leaders are recognized each month for giving the best or most creative presentation to their team by a vote of their fellow leaders.
After commissioning a poll by Gallup, Mercy learned the most important desire of its employees was to be recognized in front of a group of their peers and the Mercy Excellence Award was born.
Employees can log on to the Mercy Web site and write stories about their coworkers who live up to one of the nine Mercy service standards. Six to seven employees are chosen from those submissions each quarter and at those meetings each story is read.
The winners are surprised with balloons, cookies and a lot of noise when they are selected, said human resources specialist Michele Cagle, who has been with Mercy for five years.
As many top administrators as possible will go in person to congratulate the winners who have included oft-unappreciated physicians and maintenance staff and everyone in between.
“It’s heartfelt and easy,” Cagle said. It gives everyone a chance to see what you’ve done. There are challenges, but if you see what you do working, it makes it easier.”