CHRISTUS leverages Achievers platform to drive business success and employee engagement

Business challenge

CHRISTUS Health is a Catholic, not-for-profit system made up of more than 600 centers, including various facilities, community hospitals, walk-in clinics and health ministries. CHRISTUS Health’s full international network is a community that’s 45,000 strong with more than 15,000 physicians providing individualised and compassionate care.

First to launch an Achievers program was CHRISTUS St. Michael, a health ministry in Northeast Texas with a decidedly strong culture and desire to modernise their recognition and years of service solutions. CHRISTUS St. Michael saw an immediate impact, including improved associate engagement and reduced turnover. Eager to replicate the success at this location and to unite their ministries through one standardised recognition program, CHRISTUS looked to Achievers.

Prior to rolling out their program with Achievers, each hospital within CHRISTUS Health operated their own homegrown recognition strategies that impeded system-wide visibility and did not allow for cross hospital recognition. CHRISTUS needed a single platform that would fulfill their program goals while seamlessly fitting in to the fabric of their established culture.

Goal #1: Engage associates

CHRISTUS cares about their Associates, and they needed a platform that allowed team members across all levels to easily recognise and reward one another publicly.

Goal #2: Standardise the experience

Associates at each ministry needed to have a shared recognition and reward experience that provided a consistent way of enabling not just peer-to-peer recognition, but also celebrating milestones, years of service awards, and the option to acknowledge tenured Associates in a personalised way.

Goal #3: Celebrate moments that matter

For CHRISTUS, it was important to have each of their Associates’ special moments — birthdays, anniversaries, milestones and more — consolidated in a way that allowed for shared celebrations across the organisation.

Achievers Employee Success Platform™ Solution

Soon after seeing the success of CHRISTUS St. Michael’s Achievers program, CHRISTUS began rolling out Achievers to all of the health system’s U.S. hospitals. CHRISTUS chose to name its platform kudos!, a friendly nod to giving praise for an achievement. New Associates are introduced to kudos! during their new hire orientation so they get a feel for the CHRISTUS commitment to their Associates’ experience from day one.

Leaders receive an even more in-depth training about the importance of creating moments that matter through recognition during CHRISTUS Health’s Leader Foundations, a six-month leadership onboarding program. Additionally, kudos! has become part of everyday conversation, with senior leaders and managers working together to ensure frequent recognition of their teams.

CHRISTUS kudos! incorporates and celebrates CHRISTUS Health’s core values of Dignity, Integrity, Excellence, Compassion, and Stewardship through points-based recognition. Resilience, Quality, Patient Satisfaction and A Thank You are additional attributes and behaviours available within the points-based module.

In addition to nurturing their values and desired Associate behaviours through peer-to-peer recognition and celebration, CHRISTUS uses kudos! to incentivise specific actions and outcomes. For instance, CHRISTUS ran an initiative in which Patient Access Representatives received kudos! points when they generated health plan leads.

These types of campaigns may also be leveraged to drive efficiency: driven by recognition, office teams are encouraged to enroll patients into MyChart, an electronic health management portal. Transitioning patients to MyChart reduces the amount of time CHRISTUS Health’s office staff spend on administrative tasks, therefore affording them more time and attention towards improving the patient experience. Similarly, CHRISTUS Health’s Wellness Department runs initiatives that award points to Associates who reach defined fitness targets.

To ensure that those “moments that matter” do not go unnoticed, CHRISTUS added service anniversaries, birthdays and other celebrations in kudos! which presents Associates with a pre-signed, custom celebration card to mark their special occasions. Similarly, CHRISTUS has incorporated a number of their legacy awards, like Associate of the Quarter and Associate of the Year, into kudos! providing greater visibility of these awards and streamlining the nomination and awards process at CHRISTUS.

Business impact

With near 100% adoption rates among CHRISTUS Health Associates, leaders were eager to drive a culture of recognition by increasing recognition frequency and standardising the celebration of moments that matter.

Activation and usage at-a-glance:

CHRISTUS knew that implementing a successful recognition and engagement program would require an investment, and looking at their metrics, it is clear this investment has paid off. Beyond achieving CHRISTUS Health’s stated goals around Associate engagement, standardising recognition, and celebrating moments that matter, CHRISTUS has also driven tangible ROI through kudos! Nowhere have these results been more impactful than through two key programs: Associate Resiliency and Near Miss/Zero Harm.

Associate resiliency program

Seeking to provide just in time learning for Associates, CHRISTUS leveraged kudos! to help facilitate their Associate Resiliency program. The goal of the program is to equip Associates with resilience techniques that encourage mental well-being and mitigate the effects of stress and burnout.

In anticipation of a busy flu season, CHRISTUS recognised their Associates with kudos! points for completing an e-learning course and worksheet that provided a framework for building and improving resilience. A “Resilience” recognition option was also added to kudos! to encourage peer-to-peer support during this especially challenging time.

The Associate Resiliency program results speak for themselves: Associates who participated had a 2.9% lower turnover rate three months after the campaign compared to those who did not participate and CHRISTUS experienced an investment gain of nearly $150,000 and an ROI of 250% for every dollar spent. Even more, the benefits of the campaign stretched beyond the initial impact, propelling a positive behaviour change in Associates: recognition rates remained high, as did usage of CHRISTUS Health’s online learning platform.

Near miss/Zero harm program

CHRISTUS cares deeply about the health and safety of their patients. The goal of the Near Miss/Zero Harm program was to continue to cultivate a culture in which Associates feel comfortable speaking up and to increase the reporting of on-the-job near misses — incidents that could have had the potential to cause harm had they not been identified and averted. ‘Near miss’ reporting is an important initiative for any High Reliability Organisation (HRO) like CHRISTUS and is an important component of the journey toward zero harm.

To execute this important initiative, CHRISTUS once again turned to kudos! housing the program details within their Achievers platform and empowering and recognising Associates with kudos! points to report near misses.

The result was a dramatic six-fold rise in near miss reporting. As Associates began to feel more comfortable speaking up about these pivotal moments in patient care, they began to report them more frequently, which helps move the culture in the right direction as the organisation continues its journey to zero harm.

Like the Associate Resiliency program, the impact of the Near Miss initiative extended far beyond the initial campaign. CHRISTUS continues to see an increase in near miss reporting, with the annual volume of reports up year over year, producing lasting positive impacts on Associate behaviour.

Recognition and retention

In an attrition analysis, CHRISTUS found that Associates who responded unfavorably to an engagement survey item asking about recognition were about three times more likely to leave the organisation in the next three months than those who responded favorably. CHRISTUS then compared the received recognition index (average number of CHRISTUS kudos! recognitions received per Associate) of teams scoring below benchmark on the recognition item against the received recognition index of teams scoring above benchmark on the recognition item and found a statistically significant difference.

With this in-mind, the CHRISTUS team sought to impact recognition scores and address associate turnover. They began by encouraging leaders of teams with low recognition scores to be more intentional about providing frequent and meaningful recognitions through kudos!

CHRISTUS’ success story in summary

CHRISTUS Health’s interest and investment in bettering their Associate experience has earned them some well deserved accolades. Honored to be a recipient of The Achievers 50 Most Engaged Workplaces® Award and with an Elite 8 win for Accountability and Performance, CHRISTUS communicated the achievement across the organisation and shared digital badges for email signatures as a source of pride for Associates.

The organisation continues to leverage its learnings from the Associate Resiliency and Near Miss/Zero Harm campaigns and recognises the role the Achievers platform has played in facilitating their improved organisation-wide connectedness and engagement. And while the topics of these campaigns are evergreen, CHRISTUS has found dynamic ways to utilise its kudos! program to support its teams during novel crises such as, natural disasters and COVID-19.

For example, ministry leaders leveraged kudos! to share supportive verses and messages to boost morale. Since CHRISTUS does not use a company-wide message board, kudos! also acts as social media within the organisation — an opportunity to share important messages and updates.

As the kudos! program evolves into the future, CHRISTUS continues to think with intention about the Associate journey—from onboarding to departure—and to ensure that kudos! is interacting and evolving alongside them, meeting their needs and supporting their engagement.

Ready to see how organisations like CHRISTUS Health are leveraging recognition to drive engagement and business results?