Schneck Medical Center: How a Small-Town Employer Grows a World-Class Workforce

Schneck Medical Center is growing a high-performing workforce that, in turn, is yielding nationally recognized results on patient-focused health care measures. 

"We understand that it is our investment in our people that has significantly contributed to our 100 years of success," said Kathy Covert, the organization's vice president of human resources, in her presentation at the Baldrige Program's 24th Annual Quest for Excellence conference.

Schneck Medical Center, a 2011 Baldrige Award winner, develops employee relationships through a seven-step process, anchored in its small-town culture, that ends with measuring and improving approaches. Among practices Covert described are the medical center's Hiring for Excellence Program, focus on engaging physicians, and Grow Our Own system of identifying future workforce members and cultivating its relationships with them.

The hiring program reinforces the organization's cultural values and standards of behavior by going beyond ensuring technical expertise. The organization conducts behavior-based peer interviews and follows up with "validated behavior assessments." It also uses "stay interviews" in retaining employees—a practice that Covert said her organization learned at a previous Quest conference from 2008 Baldrige Award winner Poudre Valley Health System.

To engage physicians, Schneck Medical Center builds their trust and respect through such practices as involving them as project champions and on physicians' excellence and advisory committees. The organization also has a chief medical officer position and an in-house physician recruiter.

The Grow Our Own initiative is exemplified by the story of Dr. Eric Fish, who began his employee-employer relationship with his hometown hospital as a 18- and 19-year-old student groundskeeper. More recently, as its medical director of obstetrics and gynecology, he helped develop the medical center's robotic surgery program. Between the time when Fish was operating a lawn mower on grounds to his work today in operating a $2.5 million surgical device, the organization has been steadily deepening its relationship with him.

Returns on the medical center's investment in its employees include physician engagement results at the top-decile level nationally and an improvement from 85% to 92% in favorable responses to the employee survey question "I would recommend employment here" from 2005 to 2010. That gain occurred despite some cuts in employee benefits in 2009, which Covert said were tied to the national economic downturn. Schneck Medical Center also has seen turnover decrease by 25 percent between 2007 and 2011. Such results prove, as Covert pointed out at the start of her presentation, that "we grow more than corn in Indiana."