Employee Engagement During COVID-19: Using Culture to Manage Stress, Maintain Productivity

Employee Engagement During COVID-19: Using
Culture to Manage Stress, Maintain Productivity
Crystal Anderson
Becky Vea

© 2020 Health Catalyst
Proprietary. Feel free to share but we would appreciate a Health Catalyst citation.
Employee Engagement During COVID-19
As states and communities balance
reopening with social distancing and other
COVID-19 safety protocols, uncertainty
around the workplace persists.
For some healthcare organizations,
reopening means transitioning specific
roles from the remote-first setting back to
the office setting, full or part time, or
maintaining remote-first practices.
Regardless of each state’s policies and
organizational and team member choice,
uncertainty, stress, and fear are likely.

Healthcare team members who may have
transitioned to the remote setting during
the pandemic include case managers,
clinicians offering telehealth services, as
well as administrative, financial, and IT
teams, and others contributing away from
the frontlines of care.

As health system leaders and managers
consider when, if, and how these individuals
might return to the office setting, positive work
culture can be a consistent and unifying factor,
giving organizations a constant source
of guidance and community in an
unpredictable landscape.

A Positive Work Culture Maintains Employee
Engagement amid Uncertainty
Workforces and leaders returning to an office setting in the wake of COVID-19
are confronting significant concerns, such as the following:
? What will social distancing look like in the office setting?
Will safe practices allow for effective in-person communication?

? How suddenly will my employer make the shift back to the office?
Can I balance working from home with work on site?

? Are accommodations in place outside of the company to allow for
effective and safe childcare and elder care? Will my employer be flexible
if those systems are not yet fully functioning?

? As an organization, how will we respond to societal and cultural changes
in the wake of the pandemic? (e.g., Am I expected to shake a client’s
hand, and can I wear a mask during meetings?)

? What accommodations will organizations make for high-risk team
members or those with high-risk family members?

Such wariness and fear can threaten team
member job satisfaction, productivity, and
wellness—in the workplace and beyond.
Organizations can address these concerns
with positive work culture and defined
values, creating a consistently supportive
environment despite societal shifts.
By supporting team members through
short-term hardship, leadership engenders
long-term loyalty and commitment among
its workforce and retains high-performing
team members.

As a lynchpin in a positive culture, values
that are consistent and aligned with an
organization’s mission provide a
foundation for shared decision making,
helping all members understand how and
why leaders make decisions.
Positive culture also helps employers
retain high-performing team members,
as mission and environment tend to
become increasingly crucial to team
members throughout their careers.

Remote Access to Healthcare
A three-part approach to human resource
(HR)-led best practices for maintaining a
positive work culture can help build morale
and engagement, support team-member
wellness, and ensure productivity:
Remote access to healthcare
Care for mental health
Transparency

Caring for team member health should
be a priority for leadership in any environ-
ment, but COVID-19 has pushed safe,
accessible workforce healthcare even
more to the forefront.
To perform well, employees need to
know they can get quality care when
they and their family members need it.
During the pandemic, this means
accessing care while maintaining
social distancing.

By offering telehealth benefits,
organizations help team members get
primary and non-emergency care via
phone or video call, thereby staying
out of high-risk medical clinics, offices,
and emergency departments.
Though telehealth has been available
in different formats since the mid-20th
century, the 2020 coronavirus
pandemic and limited access to
in-person care have forced
consumers to adopt virtual care.

Moving forward, companies will
determine whether they want to
commit to and promote telehealth
by highly subsidizing virtual visits.
Such a move may be a significant
factor in maintaining a culture in
which team members feel
supported and safe.

In addition to telehealth, organizations can
also support remote access to health and
wellness with programs such as mail-order
prescription services and remote access to
fitness and wellness programs.
For example, some companies are
streaming exercise and yoga classes from
their gym or reimbursing memberships to
other online programs.

Care for Mental Health
Considering the pandemic, society is more
aware than ever of the impact of mental health
on happiness, quality of life, and productivity.
Positive work culture will continue to embrace
mental healthcare, particularly as stress and
uncertainty rise in response to COVID-19.

In addition to an Employee Assistance Program
(a voluntary program that offers free and
confidential assessments, short-term
counseling, referrals, and follow-up services
for personal and work-related problems),
organizations increasingly subsidize remote
access to mental health through platforms
such as Headspace or Talkspace.

To maintain openness around mental health
post pandemic, companies will need to
establish top-down support.
Practices include training managers on how to
respond to mental health needs, encouraging
team members to take personal time off when
they need an emotional break (even and
especially during social distancing), and
hosting interactive listening sessions to
discuss challenges safely.

A positive culture will recognize the impact
of family and household mental health
on employee wellness and will extend
resources to dependents and partners.

Transparency
Transparency about organizational
success and challenges engenders trust
and builds community by making team
members feel connected to their
companies on a deeper level than a
paycheck and tasks completed.
But the right level of transparency
is unique to each organization.

Transparency
While some leaders find that full
transparency serves their communities
best, others have their HR departments
absorb the brunt of challenges, and some
balance the two approaches.
The right approach to transparency
matches the organization’s culture and
communications (e.g., open versus
selective sharing, etc.)

Transparency
Despite a company’s communic-
ation style, social distancing may
have interrupted familiar structures
and habits.
For example, managers can’t share
news with their teams by stopping
by their desks, and team members
can’t have impromptu breakroom
exchanges.

Transparency
To maintain transparency, leaders
must consider how to keep all lines of
communication open—from more
formal all-team meetings to casual
conversation and, importantly,
channels for team members to voice
concerns and gratitude to leadership
as it navigates the pandemic.

Transparency
Communication solutions may involve group
chat and instant messaging platforms (e.g.,
Slack or Microsoft Teams) for casual
exchanges and remote all-team meetings
with an anonymous question function for
team members to engage openly.
Surveys can also provide an excellent
channel for team members to share insights
confidentially and leaders to listen and learn
about employee concerns, challenges, and
gratitude.

In this Together:
The Power of a Positive Culture
As organizations confront pandemic-driven
practices and environments, a positive is
culture is one aspect of a post-COVID-19
world that leaders and team members
can control.
Safe, reliable access to health and
wellness, remote mental health resources,
and consistent communications will keep
organizations united in both their support of
work communities and their business goals.

In this Together:
The Power of a Positive Culture
Good cultures will be the products of
decisive, people-focused leadership
that carefully weighs its options and
chooses the policies that align with its
values and goals.
Best practices will also include sharing
and learning across organizations as
society moves forward safely, positively,
and productively.

For more information:
“This book is a fantastic piece of work”
– Robert Lindeman MD, FAAP, Chief Physician Quality Officer

More about this topic
Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
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The People Operations Business Partner at Health Catalyst. She graduated
with a Bachelors in Management with an emphasis in Organizational Behavior
and Human Resources from Brigham Young University in April 2017.
Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Crystal Anderson
Joined Health Catalyst in August 2016 as a SR Human Resource Business
Partner. Prior to HC she worked for a budding ecommerece company,
Glasses.com as a Director of Human Resources. She has worked for other
major top rated companies like 1-800 CONTACTS and Discovercard. She has
over 15 years’ experience in Human Resources, Operations and
Training/Development.
Becky Vea

Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Health Catalyst is a mission-driven data warehousing, analytics and outcomes-improvement
company that helps healthcare organizations of all sizes improve clinical, financial, and operational
outcomes needed to improve population health and accountable care. Our proven enterprise data
warehouse (EDW) and analytics platform helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs in
support of more than 65 million patients for organizations ranging from the largest US health system
to forward-thinking physician practices.
Health Catalyst was recently named as the leader in the enterprise healthcare BI market in
improvement by KLAS, and has received numerous best-place-to work awards including Modern
Healthcare in 2013, 2014, and 2015, as well as other recognitions such as “Best Place to work for
Millenials, and a “Best Perks for Women.”

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