How to Build an Award-Winning Healthcare Culture

It takes time, intention, and many hands, says one CHRO who has done it eight years running.

Welcoming. It's an ethos that Baptist Health South Florida takes seriously—and applies liberally.

The theme pervades everything from the pineapple—a hallmark of hospitality—adorning their logo, "PineApp," and flagship hospital fountain, to some of the very first words Adriene McCoy, senior vice president and chief people officer, utters when asked how the system has amassed more than two dozen national awards for their culture over the past eight years. 

"Every organization wants to be known for something," McCoy says. "Baptist Health wants to be known for being a warm and welcoming environment, and that comes through, and it really resonates with people."

It resonates so much that new joiners often cite it—"unscripted"—as the reason they've come aboard, McCoy says. "I'm always stunned by the consistency."

HR leaders around the world say a thriving culture is a top priority for 2024.

But how does a CHRO go about cultivating one across an entire organization, especially one that's as vast as Baptist Health? (The system is South Florida's largest, with over 27,000 employees and 4,000 affiliated physicians across 11 hospitals and hundreds of outpatient facilities.)

It takes time, intention, and many hands.

Why it's worth it

"Culture is not a one and done," McCoy says. Instead, it's a worthy—and ever more necessary—investment for CHROs.

"Years ago, HR departments evolving was the nice thing to do," she explains. Not so today, when rapid change in where and how people work demands constant innovation. "If you're not doing that now, you're way behind the eight ball."

She would know—culture is Baptist Health's superpower. This year, the organization earned #61 in Fortune and Great Place to Work's 100 Best Companies to Work For, and #2 in their Best Workplaces in Health Care (Large) category.

In fact, the system has made iterations of both lists every year since 2016, along with additional national rankings of best employers for diversity, women, and social responsibility.

Accolades aside, there are urgent, material reasons to build a strong culture. "If you don't have a highly engaged workforce, [if] you have high turnover, you may find it difficult to recruit people," McCoy explains.

Indeed, one's relationship to work—liking it, finding it meaningful, feeling it makes a difference—was the top reason healthcare employees said they would stay with an organization for three years, even if offered a job elsewhere, according to research that Press Ganey, a healthcare consultancy and survey solutions provider, shared with HealthLeaders.

Other drivers Press Ganey found include strong managerial and team relationships, as well as the organization's care quality; ethics; and follow-through on diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments for patients and employees.

In other words, it all comes down to culture. "And that's something that has to be cultivated over time," McCoy says.

Get everyone in the mix

One way Baptist Health has used time to their advantage: By tapping leaders with staying power. CEO Bo Boulenger had been with the system for nearly 40 years before stepping into the role last year, and his predecessor, Brian Keeley, spent more than 50 years there. McCoy herself has been with the organization nearly two decades.

All that dedication leads to consistency—of message, of expectations—around how to care for one another and the broader community, she explains. 

Though such strong, consistent leadership is powerful, the best people strategies are far from top down, McCoy says. They're also not the mantle of any single department.

"HR is not an island that should ever independently try to move the needle on culture," she explains. "Getting people deeply engaged in conversation is how you get things to permeate a culture."

Baptist Health convenes business resource groups (BRG) and employee activity groups to involve people at all levels of the organization in strategic discussions. McCoy's team also pulses participants on key initiatives to ensure things like rollout and communication are landing.

For example, by partnering with Baptist Health's multi-generational workforce BRG, McCoy's team learned that younger employees often come into the organization "with an expectation of transparency."

Based on this finding, her team increased the frequency of their surveying from annually to quarterly and arranged for their vendor to meet with employee group representatives to ensure the survey design reflects their input.

Now, McCoy's team can share and act on timelier insights, and sees proactive outreach as "a way of doing business."

Actually value values

Values can be another powerful cultural touchstone—when they're treated like more than lip service.

"Most organizations have these values. They're listed somewhere. Maybe people talk about them. Maybe you hear about them more in orientation, and you don't necessarily hear about them again," McCoy says.

Instead, Baptist Health is going to great lengths to ensure their core values—People, Belief, Compassion, Excellence, and Integrity & Transparency—are "part of the everyday conversation." 

To do it, her team launched an organization-wide initiative last year in partnership with patient experience, employee experience, and marketing and communications.

First, they developed inspirational programming on the role of values at Baptist Health: what they are, why they matter, and how they shape strategy and business operations. Then, to achieve reach and resonance, they tapped leaders across the organization to facilitate hundreds of sessions delivering the material.

Following the context-setting sessions, the organization has been deep diving into a new value every two months. Each focus kicks off with a video-based lunch and learn to help leaders understand how to talk about the given value in huddles with their team members, so it's relevant whether they're part of a clinical unit or the accounting department.

To ensure learnings stay top of mind year-round, McCoy's team also launched an awards program that allows colleagues to nominate each other for bringing values to life and earn perks like intranet badges, publicity in broad-based internal communications, and eligibility for higher-level quarterly and annual awards.

All told, these efforts have reached more than 22,000 people—employees, affiliated physicians, and board members—in a matter of months.

It's an achievement McCoy attributes to the initiative's emphasis on conversation and community building.

"It's all about conversations and alignment and making sure that people are inspired and engaged in the work that we do in a meaningful way," she says.

Make real impact

Of course, it's important to understand the impact of all this intensive work. "There are barometers all over the place that we use to say, ‘How are we doing?' " McCoy explains. "Because otherwise you don't know whether or not all these activities make a difference."

But making a difference they are.

Baptist Health's turnover has dropped by almost half within the last year, McCoy says, and it's largely thanks to "all of these efforts."

Her team also keeps a pulse on success through employee surveys—which show consistently high engagement and satisfaction with communication—and patient experience scores, which cover cultural dimensions like how well staff are collaborating with each other on the patient's behalf.

"We just constantly want to help people get better because we know that if we take care of our employees, they're going to take care of our patients," McCoy explains.

That's also why Baptist Health supports their people throughout "their entire career journey," whatever that means for them, she says. "If you've got people that just want to come in and do the job, that's fine. If you have others that want to grow and develop into roles of greater scope and responsibility, then we really want to support that."

They provide this support through "very strong" internal training programs, along with tuition reimbursement, scholarships, and residencies for purviews as diverse as pharmacology and pastoral care.

It all comes back to Baptist Health's award-winning people approach: to invest in innovating for and with an ever-evolving workforce.

"We have to keep going back to the drawing board—not as though anything is wrong, but to constantly advance our thinking about how talent feels about their work," McCoy says. "As we know, when teams come together, and there's a level of openness and innovation, very special things can happen."

Delaney Rebernik is a contributing writer for HealthLeaders.