How to Build a Strong Company Culture in a Healthcare Organization

Disney is not only the happiest place on earth but also the happiest place to work. Mars, Inc., creator of M&M’s, claims generations of families working for the company since its establishment. Twitter employees can’t stop talking about their workplace. How did these companies create happy, proud, long-term employees? They all established a great company culture.

Creating a strong company culture is essential for all businesses, but it’s especially crucial in the healthcare industry, where stress and burnout are already prevalent. A toxic workplace not only affects the employees but also significantly influences patient outcomes and care delivery.

Why is Healthcare Company Culture Important?

Company culture defines the environment where employees work. It’s the combination of a vision, goals, values, beliefs, norms, and employee behavior. Company culture determines how employees act, decide, and engage. It threads through everything a company does, including policies, benefits, systems, procedures, and even how the office looks. 

The healthcare industry consists of extremely demanding careers with high turnover rates. Employees in healthcare are especially prone to workplace burnout and face critical life-or-death decisions every day. A positive healthcare company culture that fosters appreciation and support helps employees bounce back after every challenge. It helps employees become satisfied with the work they do.

A culture that encourages professional relationships boosts collaboration and communication, both of which are important in treating patients. Encouraging teamwork helps employees work toward the same goal. An effective company culture embraces learning, innovation, and change. In a constantly changing industry like healthcare, this type of culture helps organizations adapt and scale up.

How to Build a Positive Workplace Culture in Healthcare

The workplace culture in healthcare organizations significantly affects employee job satisfaction, retention, and quality of patient care. Here are five ways to build a strong, employee-oriented culture within your organization.

1. Define Your Values and Communicate Them

Your company values drive the direction of your company culture. It determines what is important and meaningful to your organization. It helps your employees make the right decisions. 

Make your values mean more than just words that you’re required to hang on a wall. Create values that genuinely represent you and your practice. Imagine what it looks like to live through your values and think of action plans to stay true to those values. Weave them through the employee’s day-to-day work activities and decision-making.

If your practice has been around for a while, but you have yet to establish written values, it’s not too late to create some now. It’s also not too late to change your company’s values if they don’t align with your organization anymore.

2. Optimize Your Hiring Process

If your new hires align with your company culture, it’s easier to ensure that everyone will move in the same direction. Structure your interview questions to help you screen applicants that share your company’s values and appreciate your company culture. LinkedIn shares some interview questions to help you assess candidates. 

Sometimes skills and experience are not enough to consider a candidate the “right fit.” Attitude plays a significant role in how the new hire can contribute and succeed within your organization. For example, hospitals and clinics need people who can work with a team, but if your new hire hates working with others, it’s not worth hiring them.

3. Create an Effective Onboarding Process

Your new hires probably heard about your company’s culture during the interview process, but onboarding is where they will first experience it. Onboarding allows you to introduce your company culture to new hires and ensure its continuity. Align your onboarding process to reflect your company values and what you want your company culture to portray.

Assigning new hires with a mentor during the onboarding process gives them an idea of the company’s culture on their first few days. Invite employees from different departments with different roles to participate in onboarding so that new hires get a bigger picture of the workplace environment.

4. Focus on Employee Wellness

Your employee’s traits and behavior shape the company culture, so it’s always worthwhile to invest in their health. You cannot have a great company culture, nor have a successful company, if your employees are not physically, mentally, and emotionally well. Additionally, the demands of working in the healthcare industry make even the most committed person demotivated.

Create a culture where employees’ well-being is important too. After all, how can one efficiently care for a patient if they don’t feel well themselves? Check in regularly with your employees and help address any work issues, stressors, or burnout factors they are facing. Offer resources to help your employees be their best selves. Introduce wellness programs and activities that promote work-life balance.

5. Ensure Your Leaders Are Walking the Talk

Your leaders are the faces of the culture you’re trying to build. You can’t preach your values if the person you expect to lead doesn’t practice them. Make sure your leaders understand the culture you are trying to build, know their expectations, and map their management style to your culture.

A strong culture doesn’t happen overnight or by accident. It’s created and nurtured by the action of your leaders who work consistently to cement it.

Grow Your Healthcare Company Culture with Nexus HR

As your organization grows, preserving company culture can be hard to maintain. Additionally, administrative tasks increase as your company scales up, and managing your employees will become more demanding.

Nexus HR can help you shape and ensure continuity of your company culture so that you can focus your time and energy on what you do best — patient care. As a full-service human resource partner, we align recruitment, onboarding, employee communications, and company policies to your organizational culture. Unlike other HR outsourcing companies, your employees can directly talk to us about any HR-related concerns.

Partner with Nexus HR today to grow your company culture and create happy and satisfied employees.