Remember, Employees Are Customers, Too

One of the most important mental transitions when you're building a culture that's focused on the employee experience is to remember that your employees are really customers of your organization.

All too often, we spend a tremendous amount of our time and energy on pleasing our external customer-the physician, our boss, the patients we serve, other departments-and we often forget about the people closest to home: the people right in our own departments.

Take a moment to think about how you expect your employees to behave with your customers. Do you expect them to go the extra mile? Take responsibility? Be accountable? Work together?

Consider employee expectations.

These expectations aren't all that different from what other customers expect. Yet, time and time again, we don't think about the employee as a customer and how their experience of working within the organization really impacts them.

Consider this scenario: An employee is working extra to cover for a vacancy. The position has been vacant for six weeks. When asked about when the manager plans to get help, the reply is, "We're working on it" or "Human Resources is recruiting."

Two weeks later, the employee asks about the position again-and gets the same answer. At this point, what kind of experience do you think the employee is having as a customer of your organization?

It's a good bet that this employee has begun to look elsewhere, or has become so discouraged by the lack of response that they're thinking less and less of their organization. Yet, daily, they're asked to provide great customer service and attend to the needs of customers. Is it any wonder why employees stop to ask, "When is it my turn to be a customer?"

Employees are your most important asset.

The employee is a key element of the overall customer experience model for healthcare organizations. As our chart shows, the customer experience within an organization is based upon having service delivered by the right people, using the right processes and working in the right settings. The culture is then applied to the various customers served, with an eye to understanding their individual needs and to creating the experience that they desire.

While this approach certainly sounds logical, it's much more difficult to execute because the importance of the employee experience is often overlooked. Even the smallest degree of attention to the things that matter for employees produces immediate results. Press Ganey's 2006 study of the relationships between employee satisfaction, patient satisfaction and physician satisfaction showed that there's a clear-and not surprising-correlation. When employees are happy, scores for patient satisfaction and physician satisfaction are equally high. When employees aren't happy, the scores in those areas are lower, in reflection of that employee dissatisfaction.

Similarly, the Center for Quality Management reports that the correlation coefficient between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction is .86 percent. Therefore, understanding how and what the employee experience looks and feels like is a major component in influencing and sustaining overall organizational satisfaction.
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