University of Michigan
PA-10: Assessing Employee Satisfaction

University Health System: UMHS uses a survey vendor, Press Ganey, to administer the survey and deliver results. Press Ganey’s clientele is exclusively in health care, and they focus particularly on academic medical centers. As such, they have the largest external benchmark available in the U.S. for hospitals for employee surveys. The survey itself is jointly designed by Press Ganey and UMHS, building upon a core set of mandatory items from Press Ganey’s model, and enhanced with supplemental questions that come from Press Ganey’s item bank and a few questions of UMHS’s own design. All rated survey questions use a 1-to-5 scale methodology. There are two open-ended questions, and a couple of non-standard supplemental questions that are descriptive in nature (i.e., categorical, but not based on a scale nor open-ended). The survey is administered annually in late winter or early spring. The survey is hosted through a third party application outside of UMHS (at press Ganey). Access to the online survey is controlled through a user-known password that is required to enter the survey, and is matched against a list of qualified employees sent to Press Ganey beforehand. A small number of departments whose employees do not have access to computers are supported with paper-based surveys, which Press Ganey receives and processes.

Budget and Finance: All employees of the Business & Finance Office are surveyed every other year for employee satisfaction.

University Health System: Issues raised by the survey can be addressed at several different levels depending on the nexus of control over the issue. Most issues and concerns are local. Individual leaders (managers, supervisors, and directors) have access to their survey results and comments, and are responsible for reviewing them, sharing results with their staffs, identifying problems, and developing and publishing action plans. Common types of issues that are addressed at the local level include professional growth and development opportunities, workload fairness and rebalancing, and ongoing continuous improvement through problem solving. Issues that are global in nature, or which center around a particular topic that is within the nexus of control of a particular department (e.g., environmental cleanliness, employee safety, etc.), are brought to the attention of the responsible department who has responsibility for addressing issues.

Budget and Finance: Results of the survey are made available to all B&F Departments, examples of initiatives undertaken due to survey results can be found here: http://www.bf.umich.edu/ess/initiatives/initiatives.php.