Improving employee engagement in healthcare teams directly impacts the level of care these teams provide. Dozens of studies have shown that engaged teams improve patient safety as well as experience.
A recent analysis revealed that workforce engagement, resilience, and cultural safety are on the rise steadily in the US. If you are looking to explore ways that can bring about the same change in your organization, continue reading.
Because let’s face it, most engagement efforts die on the hamster wheel of conducting surveys → collecting feedback → analyzing results → pushing out half-baked measures. So you need to be intentional about not letting the engagement efforts die out.
In this article we will answer the core question of how to improve employee engagement with a simple 9-step plan customized to clinical realities. We will talk about weekly habits, outcome‑driven metrics, and solutions that make sense for care teams.
Let’s dive in
Your only goal here is to ask, “What matters to you [at work]?”
Now, this is not just a box to tick. Because the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) framework for improving Joy in Work says this should be the first step.
No, as a leader, ask this question to spark conversations.
According to the IHI’s Joy in Work framework, leaders should engage colleagues in honest, focused dialogue and begin to build shared purpose. And this sense of collective direction boosts intrinsic motivation, strengthens collaboration, and helps teams stay engaged even under pressure.
You don’t need intensive hour long sessions to kick off such conversations. A quick ten-minute huddle in the break room would suffice. Invite team members to share
Such questions make them feel valued and cared for, and the feeling sticks. At the University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center CICU, it generated camaraderie, started the culture of morning huddles, and established the priority for the care team.
Don’t ghost them once you’ve sparked the conversations. Listen to their problems and start finding solutions. Because the magic lies in solving problems. Install communication boards in unit zones to record actions being taken and reiterate that leaders truly heard them. That’s the fastest path to building a culture of engagement.
But you’ll also need to keep a record of these conversations to act as a baseline. To keep you, your team, and your engagement effort anchored. Create a 5- or 10-question pulse survey, depending on how engaged the team was. Record the feedback and analyze.
This is your baseline data and we will come back to them later.
Once the baseline is in place, it’s time to build momentum.
Set up a simple but consistent routine that brings your team together daily or weekly. Start the meeting or huddle with a recognition moment. Say, a shoutout for someone who went above and beyond or handled a tough shift with grace.
You can also start with personal success stories. Invite staff to share one thing they accomplished that day or a patient moment they felt proud of.
Follow it with space for open dialogue, where concerns or ideas can be shared without fear.
Give each team member a bit of autonomy. Whether it’s choosing how to handle a task or leading part of the meeting. This generates a feeling of ownership in how the team operates.
When small wins are celebrated and everyday barriers are named out loud, trust builds naturally.
Maintain this momentum for the next 4-6 weeks to start with.
Next, introduce a brief weekly pulse check. Just these three questions, for instance:
That’s enough to track trends without over-surveying. The real fatigue comes not from too many surveys, but from follow-through that never happens. So, if you don’t follow through with the survey feedback, response rates will drop down. Else, you can keep doing this same thing every week and see response rates rise.
In his New York Times Bestselling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, author and speaker Daniel H. Pink says that there are three elements to true motivation:
And you already know from experience that a motivated team is an engaged team. You can motivate your team in a very simple way. Here is how:
Pin up a board where everyone can see. Or start a digital thread on your engagement platform. Track the small wins, the challenges faced, and the micro-process being rolled out. This keeps action front and center, which motivates the team intrinsically.
Round off with two structured habits:
Regular huddles: Always conclude daily or weekly huddles with one commitment. To adopt something new or let go of something that was holding the team back. It’s up to you. If your team is excited and engaged enough, you can have one of both. A body of evidence finds that huddles lifted team efficiency, communication across roles, and safety perceptions in nearly 68% of cases studied.
Leadership 1:1: Having weekly 1:1 with all the direct reports is an engagement best practice you would do well to adopt. But considering the always-on situation in healthcare, start small. Ensure each team has five 1:1 check-ins. Again, the check-in need not be intensive. Something as simple as asking, “What’s one thing we could do better this week?” works. The only caveat is, you should listen, commit to taking action, and follow up on it.
By the final stretch of this 90‑day journey, you will observe something subtle but powerful taking hold in your team. Agency — the feeling that you can influence what happens even when it’s hard. It’s time to deepen the feeling.
You can achieve this by making them responsible for improving practice through intentional steps.
Begin with a small, cross-role group (nurse, clinician, support staff) that convenes weekly to tackle one workflow friction. Help them pick a process, may be over‑registration burdens or discharge communication delays. Then use lean tools like Plan–Do–Check–Act to co-design a fix.
If you think this is too much of an ask, you are underestimating the capabilities of your team. Plus forgetting the three elements to motivation — autonomy, mastery and purpose. In one community hospital, such shared governance in a nurse group sparked measurable improvements not just in practice, but in engagement and patient satisfaction.
Beyond processes, you need people to feel confident to speak up. That’s psychological safety. The quiet assurance that sharing concerns, even mistakes, won’t mean punishment, but learning. It’s critical to building any engaged team.
A practice that anchors both agency and safety is the daily huddle. These short stand-up gatherings improve communication, situational awareness, staff engagement, and even outcomes.
Over time, as you celebrate small wins, share concerns without fear of backlash and solve hurdles on-the-spot, you build a climate where people feel trusted, and where the team fuels its own improvement cycle.
In every shift, gather for a daily huddle: just 5 to 10 minutes to share one concern, one update, and one support need. This may sound simple, but it transforms the way your team performs. A body of evidence finds that huddles lifted team efficiency, communication across roles, and safety perceptions in nearly 68% of cases studied.
And make huddles a daily habit. Data shows that when huddles are consistent, i.e. run most days, they boost teamwork, situational awareness, and even shorten hospital stays or reduce alarm fatigue.
These daily stand-ups become rituals of trust and over time people start to speak up because they have experienced others being heard.
Once you observe engagement on the rise, typically 8-10 weeks after the baseline survey, it’s time to pause and ponder over the effect of your efforts. Basically, bring out the baseline survey data and compare it against your current status.
But before comparing, ask your team for what they feel. Ask them to speak in just one sentence (okay, maybe two!) how the quarter felt. And follow up with, “Which weekly habit made that possible?” Do this in a weekly huddle or better still, design a quick survey. To capture everyone’s experience.
Once you have compared and analyzed the data, share with your team as well as the leadership how engagement scores have shifted. Highlight the number of micro-processes you improved. If you can get hold of patient experience data, such as HCAHPS scores that relate to teamwork or communication, you will have more ways to motivate your team to continue doing what they are.
But don’t stop here. Ask the team: “Which one area should we focus on next quarter? And what's a single habit we can introduce to move it?”
This continues the habits and culture you have built.
Improving engagement should be treated as an on-going practice. A practice you can start this week in 10 minutes by designing the baseline survey. Begin with one honest question, keep the small wins visible, and make huddles and 1:1s non-negotiable. Do that for 90 days, measure the changes, and let the team choose the next small habit to carry forward.
Share your progress with leadership and with patients through metrics you already track, like HCAHPS. Keep the loop tight: listen, act, measure, repeat. That is how teams stay engaged, and how care becomes phenomenal.
Start with listening. Ask what matters to your team. Act on small wins quickly to build trust and momentum. Start weekly rituals such as huddles, short 1:1s, visibility boards, and micro-governance. Measure outcomes, share progress, and let teams choose the next habit to sustain engagement.
The five Cs are clarity, connection, contribution, coaching, and credibility. Clarity defines roles and expectations. Connection builds belonging and team trust. Contribution and coaching fuel purpose and growth. Credibility means leaders follow through. Use these Cs as diagnostics, not checkboxes, to guide action.
The four Ps of employee engagement are purpose, people, progress, and praise. Purpose links daily tasks to missions. People are the relationships that make teamwork possible. Progress signals growth and mastery. Praise is timely recognition that reinforces desired behaviour. Prioritise these in routines and reviews to shift motivation inward.
Seven key drivers include meaningful work, manager support, recognition, growth, autonomy, communication, and wellbeing. Recognition and growth keep people motivated. Autonomy and clear communication reduce friction and increase ownership. Wellbeing ensures teams can sustain effort under pressure. Focus on all seven for resilient engagement.
Four enablers help engagement stick: leadership, manager capability, systems, and employee voice. Leadership sets direction; managers translate strategy into daily habits. Systems deliver feedback loops, recognition, and clear processes. Employee voice ensures interventions are relevant and co-owned. Together they convert ideas into durable practice.