Hospital Sisters Health System x Qualtrics

Every health system that measures colleague engagement faces the same challenge. The results come back, leaders sit down with their numbers, and someone asks the obvious question. What are you going to do about it?

At Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS), that question had stopped producing much. Leaders dutifully built action plans. Some worked. Most were one leader solving a complex problem alone, from scratch, in a setting where staffing stability and teamwork shape patient access, continuity of care, and daily operations.

What HSHS had was never a shortage of good ideas. Frontline leaders were already inventing practical, low-cost solutions that had no way to reach anyone else.

So HSHS changed the question. Instead of asking leaders what they were going to do, it started asking what they were already doing that worked.

Solved in one clinic, unknown in the others

The assumption was that somewhere in a health system this size, someone had already solved a problem another team was still fighting. At Prairie Cardiovascular's clinic in Carbondale, Illinois, someone had solved one.

Past engagement comments repeatedly surfaced the same concern: colleagues wanted more control over their work-life balance. The team there responded with a flexible scheduling model built by a committee that included at least one colleague from every department, three scheduling windows each year, and no additional staffing cost. Colleagues gained real choice over their schedules while the practice held its coverage and performance expectations.

Turnover in the practice fell from 47.3% in 2024 to 7.9% by January 2026. Call-ins dropped noticeably. As the team described it, lower turnover meant greater continuity of care and less strain from continually recruiting and onboarding.

The problem was, outside that clinic, almost nobody knew any of it had happened.

Multiply that across multiple markets and dozens of departments. Teams were confronting similar challenges in parallel, each starting from zero.

Building a way for good ideas to move

The HSHS Colleague Engagement Symposium was created to identify, recognize, and share proven practices. Leaders were invited to submit practices their teams had already put in place, documented on a single page that covered the challenge they faced, what they tried, how they measured it, what came of it, and what they learned.

Leaders brought engagement insights and pulse results from Qualtrics, alongside retention figures, patient satisfaction results, and productivity measures. Because an item-level result could be set against like departments in their own hospital, the same department at other ministries, and national benchmarks, a leader somewhere else could tell whether a practice was worth borrowing.

The first year brought 47 submissions, and 35 leaders presented across an eight-hour virtual showcase held over two days. Five were invited to share their practices again at HSHS's Spring Leadership Development Days.

Then HSHS did to the program what it was asking leaders to do within their departments. It measured, listened, and changed. Participants said the virtual format needed an in-person component. So, in year two, every hospital hosted its own poster gallery. Each market then advanced its strongest practices to a two-hour enterprise showcase, down from eight.

Two new recognitions came with it. The Colleagues' Choice Award let colleagues, rather than leadership, name the practice they found most valuable. The second, the 2025 Symposium Success, highlighted a team that had taken a practice from the previous year's symposium, adapted it, and made it work

When an ICU team at HSHS St. John's Hospital in Springfield, Illinois, came to the second symposium, they weren't presenting an idea of their own.

A year earlier, Nursing Director Erin Hazen had presented the Gummy Bear Project from the emergency department (ED) at HSHS St. Elizabeth's Hospital in O'Fallon, Illinois. Her team worked in a department where patients and families arrived frightened and frustrated, colleagues saw trauma and loss daily, and the work was often thankless. Hazen's answer was small and a little silly on purpose. Wearable gummy bear charms, given when someone caught a safety issue or simply made the shift better. Recognition spread beyond the ED to radiology, lab, registration, and security, and colleagues began nominating each other for them.

The department was working through construction and peak census at the time. Patients praised the team through it. “The staff did a great job in a construction zone and with many patients waiting," one patient wrote.

"We see this in our patients' experience comments," Hazen said. "Feeling seen and appreciated motivates all of us to bring our A game to the work we do each day. The gummy bears are a small, fun way to visually recognize the team, and it sparks conversations with our patients."

Nursing Manager Jackie Devore was in the audience when Hazen presented the project.

"After hearing Erin Hazen present her gummy bear project at last year's symposium, I could not wait to implement a similar initiative with our ICU team," Devore said.

Her unit had a different version of the same problem. Colleagues felt their work went unrecognized, tension between shifts was rising, and there wasn't much joy at work. Her team launched Turtley Awesome: turtle charms, awarded by leaders and by peers.

Eight months in, the ICU's score on Meaningful Recognition had risen 10% between the 2025 engagement survey and the 2026 pulse. Meaningful recognition reports in Qualtrics helped leaders recognize their team members, and kudos boards filled with peer-to-peer recognition. The us-versus-them between shifts, Devore reported, went away, and not only there, but with other units the ICU works alongside.

The same pattern in other departments

Between the May 2025 engagement survey and the February 2026 pulse, the Patient Access Center's engagement rose from 75% to 78% while voluntary turnover fell from 39.3% to 5.0%. Over the same period, Sterile Processing climbed from 75% to 94%, with colleagues describing stronger relationships and greater willingness to go above and beyond for patient care. In Surgical Services, every colleague surveyed agreed that the people they work with cooperate to get the job done.

Those improvements carry past the engagement score. Stability in the Patient Access Center means more consistency at one of the first points of contact in a patient's journey, and cooperation under pressure in Surgical Services is part of what coordinated care requires.

"Engagement is not a survey outcome; it is a leadership behavior." — Stephanie Shanle, System Director, Colleague Relations and Talent Development, Hospital Sisters Health System

Leaders used Qualtrics to prove a practice had worked, and the Colleague Engagement Symposium put it in front of someone who could use it.