Development of Employee Engagement Model in a Tertiary Care Hospital

In recent times, there has been increasing emphasis on the employee engagement and its significant role in the performance and productivity of employees and the organization outcomes. This becomes especially important in the healthcare sector since increased employee engagement may translate to improvement in quality of patient care and employee retention, among other hospital outcomes. The studies have found engagement level of nurses to be the number one variable correlating to mortality, even beating out the number of nurses per patient day and also shown a strong correlation between engagement and reducing staff turnover and absenteeism. This study focuses on measuring the engagement and retention levels among the nursing staff of tertiary care hospital and their association and develop a workplace model based on the findings. A cross sectional survey was conducted at the hospital over a six month period with sample size of 250, using standard NRC Picker Employee Experience Survey Questionnaire. Engagement scores were categorized into low, medium and high categories. Correlation analysis was done to identify the association between engagement and retention levels and the relative importance of various factors to the retention and engagement levels.

The mean engagement score at the hospital was found to be 31.57, which falls in the high level. Also, 95.2% of employees were in high engagement category, 2% in medium engagement group and 2.8% in low engagement group. There was a significant positive correlation found between the engagement and retention level, which was further corroborated independently by the retention data for last 6 years.

This study gauged quantitatively the engagement levels among the hospital nursing staff, and provided a means to determine association between the various factors and engagement as well as retention.