Our work in the Labor Management Partnership has many important implications for achieving success at Kaiser Permanente and the health care industry as a whole. Why is this so important to union members and the unions to which they belong?

It is clear from research and experience that employee engagement is a key factor in high performance. In most places of employment, employee engagement is quite low, and where it is higher it is difficult to sustain. This makes sense. After all, most workplaces are not places of learning and innovation, nor are they structured to be reliant on the experience, heart and soul of workers. Most workplaces are driven from the top down.

Yet according to recent research by Gallup Consulting:

Employee engagement is a core strategy: “The world's top-performing organizations understand that employee engagement is a force that drives [performance] outcomes. … In the best organizations, employee engagement transcends a human resources initiative – it is the way they do business.”

Engaged employees are more productive: “They are more profitable, more customer-focused, safer, and more likely to withstand temptations to leave. … The best performing companies know that developing an employee engagement strategy and linking it to the achievement of corporate goals will help them win in the marketplace.”

• In world-class organizations, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is more than 9 to 1.
• In average organizations, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is less than 2 to 1.

High scores at KP

Our People Pulse scores show high levels of employee engagement across KP – an 86% positive rating, 15 points higher than the health care industry norm. And survey results for 2010 show that members of UBTs have significantly higher scores than KP employees not in UBTs.

Furthermore, members of high-performing UBTs (ranked at Level 4 or 5) have higher levels of engagement than do members of teams at earlier stages of development.

So it is clear that our approach to employee engagement – the achievement of high-performing teams – is successful.

And what is success?

It is extremely important that we learn the right lessons from our high-performing teams. High performance comes from teams having the time for training, reflection, use of data, improved relationships, proper staffing and active sponsorship from managers, physicians and union leaders.

From the union perspective, employee engagement is one of our most important jobs. Workers belong to unions for many reasons, and among them is to enable a work environment where workers feel they are contributing to the outcomes of the organization. But let’s go a little deeper…

Our mission is to achieve high quality and affordable universal health care. Equally important, our mission is that the best paid unionized workers enable this achievement.

Employee engagement is a key goal of a strong union – a union whose members believe that their union has helped empower them to have a satisfying and stimulating work experience.

It matters how

We must pay close attention to how we achieve employee engagement and remember that most organizations fail at it. Our data show that the path to employee engagement at Kaiser Permanente comes through high performing unit-based teams.

Our National Agreement lays out the transformational pathway to achieve this great success…an amazing and wonderful achievement through collective bargaining at a time when the nation is learning to pay attention once again to this most precious institution and human right.

It is “the way we do business.”