SMH Earns Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award
This week, Sarasota Memorial heard the good news that it was one of only 41 organizations worldwide to earn Gallup’s Exceptional Workplace Award for 2022. This is the third time that Sarasota Memorial has won the prestigious Gallup award, which “honors thriving organizations that have attained world-class performance by making employee engagement a cornerstone of their strategy.”
“Gallup commends all of the 2022 winners for their resiliency, determination and commitment to making their people a priority.”
Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being
After another year of unpredictability in workplaces around the world, Gallup found that Sarasota Memorial continued to engage and develop its staff amid the disruption.
“Gallup’s 2022 winners have steered their organizations through another unprecedented and challenging year. They didn’t slow down or hit ‘pause’ during times of uncertainty. They stayed true to their organizational values,” said Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being.
Gallup’s studies of team engagement and performance have found that highly engaged organizations significantly outperform their peers in important outcomes such as customer ratings, turnover, safety incidents, absenteeism, quality, well-being and organizational citizenship.
To qualify for the 2022 award, organizations were required to meet rigorous criteria, including a high qualifying response rate on Gallup’s 2021 employee engagement survey, and scores placing them at the top of Gallup’s global database. They also had to demonstrate overall performance excellence.
According to Gallup, only 20 percent of employees worldwide are engaged (committed to their work and connected to their workplace). But the average engagement level among “Exceptional Workplace” award recipients is 70 percent.
The winners “consistently put their people — employees and customers — and their values at the center of decisions,” said Gallup.
96 percent of SMHCS employees completed the 2021 Gallup engagement survey, which took place from July to August of 2021 during the unprecedented “Delta” surge in COVID-19 patients. Despite the ongoing pandemic and enormous spike in severely ill patients, Sarasota Memorial achieved a top-decile performance in the survey.
The health system placed among the top 5 percent of all health care organizations that Gallup works with.
“We are especially gratified to earn the Exceptional Workplace Award this year, as it demonstrates our entire team’s steadfast commitment to our patients and each other, even amid the many challenges and the hardships of the pandemic,” said Sarasota Memorial CEO David Verinder. “We are a world-class institution thanks to the invaluable contributions of each and every staff member.”
This was the eighth year that Gallup — the internationally known research and polling organization — conducted an employee survey for Sarasota Memorial. Gallup’s survey, which asks employees key questions that tie to their performance, commitment to the organization and specific business metrics, has been administered to organizations around the world. It is based on decades of research across multiple diverse industries. SMH has won the employee engagement award (previously known as the Gallup Great Workplace Award) in 2015 and 2018.
Sarasota Memorial has increased its overall scores and percentile ranking in every year it has completed a Gallup survey, as shown above. Sarasota Memorial’s Grand Mean scores are in dark blue, compared to other organizations that work with Gallup, shown in red. The Grand Mean measures the organization’s overall engagement and is an average of the 12 questions asked on the Gallup employee survey. A higher Grand Mean score (with a maximum possible score of 5.00), means the greater the level of staff’s engagement to their workplace.
Many thanks to the thousands of SMHCS staff who completed the 2021 survey!