How Community Health Network is providing the best caregiver experience

Leaders from Community Health Network share their experiences with EX25, the groundbreaking Qualtrics framework for managing employee experience.

Community Health Network is an integrated healthcare network with 8 acute care and specialty hospitals and over 200 additional sites of care in central Indiana, accounting for over 2 million patient encounters each year. As one of the first groups to implement EX25, they have taken a leading role in the development of modern employee experience programs for healthcare groups.

“Before our partnership with Qualtrics, we had a fairly immature listening strategy,” said Karly Cope, VP of Talent Management at Community Health Network. “We needed the ability to measure all of those experiences that matter, from candidate experience all the way through exit interviews.”

Understanding and managing employee experience

To measure those employee experiences, the leadership team at Community Health Network began implementing EX25 to better understand and manage the relationship between various aspects of their employees’ experiences.

While traditional employee experience primarily focus on engagement as the core driver, new research has shown engagement to be only a starting point when seeking true insights.

“Before our partnership with Qualtrics, we had a fairly immature listening strategy,”

In an effort to better understand the drivers of employee experience, researchers at Qualtrics spent years analyzing millions of data points and conducting an intensive, expert-led validation process. The results led to the creation of EX25, the first comprehensive framework of its kind designed specifically to tackle the problems facing organizations in the modern landscape.

“EX25 embraces the complexity of experience in healthcare,” said Kristi Roe, Healthcare Industry Leader at Qualtrics. “It’s about giving a voice to the shared experiences that they’ve (healthcare employees) had over the past few years.”

The EX25 for Healthcare model includes 25 drivers of employee experience in healthcare and  6 main KPIs in the model:

• Engagement
• Intent to Stay
• Experience vs Expectations
• Inclusion
• Well-being
• Burnout

Giving caregivers the best employee experience

As Community Health Network began to track these KPIs and drivers of employee experience, they worked closely with the team at Qualtrics to ensure the transition went smoothly.

“Our partners with Qualtrics were very aware of the change management part of this process,” said Joe Diaz, Director of Talent & Org Development at Community Health Network. “Qualtrics were great in being partners with us.”

Another factor that needed to be addressed was speed. Community Health Network needed a solution to take effect quickly and efficiently to meet their organizational goals.

“The EX25 methodology fit in well with us needing to deploy quickly,” said Adrienne Byfield, Senior Talent and Org Dev Specialist at Community Health Network. “The Qualtrics team was great in guiding us through the process. I think it helped that the questions are already there, but we get to pick the questions that are applicable to our organization. It’s pretty intuitive, so there aren’t a lot of questions as far as what to do in the system.”

Throughout the implementation process, Community Health, in partnership with their Qualtrics team, gained attention from key stakeholders and developed specific processes to train their team during the implementation. Cope was able to succinctly summarize the Community Health Networks' main focus, “We want our caregivers to have the best possible experience.”