Reigniting Employee Engagement: a Guide to Rediscovering Purpose and Meaning in Healthcare

Many organizations know employee engagement is essential to success, but few approach it in the right way. Bonuses, thank-you notes, employee-of-the-month awards, and similar initiatives may produce temporary boosts in morale but do not build a long-term culture of true engagement. Reigniting Employee Engagement: A Guide to Rediscovering Purpose and Meaning in Healthcare presents a simple model for creating sustainable employee engagement—now more elusive than ever because of ongoing changes in healthcare delivery. Rising caregiver burnout is an especially critical issue, and this book provides a method for refocusing on basic human needs to reenergize the healthcare workforce. Author Tom Atchison explores the psychology of why and how people commit to their work, while debunking many myths, such as money being the best motivator. Each chapter features an interview with a successful healthcare executive who offers perspective and advice on how best to approach employee engagement. These “performance profiles” allow readers to see how the book’s model applies to real-world scenarios in healthcare.

Topics covered in this book include:

• Worker values, meaning, and purpose 
• Leadership’s role in employee engagement
• The importance of corporate culture
• Proven motivation techniques
• Strategies doomed to fail

Employee engagement is not as simple as telling someone they have done a good job. Meaning and purpose are the most powerful motivators in healthcare. The key is helping professionals to rediscover their passion for patient care and to remember what originally led them to their calling. This book shows the way.

Tom Atchison, EdD, is president and founder of Atchison Consulting LLC. Since 1984, he has consulted with healthcare organizations on managed-change programs, team building, and leadership development. He gives presentations to thousands of healthcare professionals every year on the elements of effective organizations. He has written numerous articles and been featured in many broadcasts about motivation, managed change, team building, and leadership.

Dr. Atchison has written four other books published by Health Administration Press: Followership: A Practical Guide to Aligning Leaders and Followers, Leadership's Deeper Dimensions: Building Blocks to Superior Performance, Leading Healthcare Cultures: How Human Capital Drives Financial Performance, and Leading Transformational Change: The Physician-Executive Partnership.