By Derek Fenwick
Senior Director of Human Resources
In the last Insider, I shared a high-level look at our company’s strengths and opportunities. If you missed it, I encourage you to check out that article to help provide a framework for the deeper dive into the data that we’ll begin exploring today.
If you were on last Friday’s Talk with JoLynn call, you know that one of our strategic priorities this year is to reaffirm that Infinity Rehab is a great place to work for everyone. Prior to the pandemic, we gained this official status two years in a row. To my knowledge, we are the only company in the contract rehab industry that has ever earned this status (you can double-check me on that claim here).
Whether we pursue the official GPTW seal again is still to be decided. What is certain is that we want every employee at Infinity Rehab to feel like this is a great place to work. Every. Single. One. To do this, we must go beyond the summary trends in our employee survey and start to uncover how the workplace experience may be different for different groups and individuals. From there, we can better target our efforts where they are most needed.
During my analysis I started by looking at our survey results from three different angles:
- Managers vs. non-managers
- Therapists vs. Assistants vs. Non-clinicians
- Generational differences
First, here’s what the response breakdown looks like by group:
This generally matches our employee mix well, except for our managers being a little overrepresented compared to non-managers (more to come on that shortly). So, let’s jump into a few questions where the data suggests a difference in opinion among groups.
For this article, I’m going to focus on the difference in opinions between managers and non-managers. I used the statistics feature inside our survey platform to determine which questions had a statistically significant difference in responses between managers and non-managers. Here are five questions that stood out:
What does all this mean? This suggests to me that our managers are generally more engaged and satisfied with their work experience than our non-managers are. On the surface, that makes sense. Managers hold a job that naturally exposes them to more information about the company, more leadership opportunities, and more opportunity to influence how things are done.
Here’s the bigger question though – is it ok that non-managers are relatively more neutral across the board on these questions than their peers in manager roles? And more importantly, is there any action we need to take based on this observation?
The answer lies beyond our employee survey in our turnover data. Look at these two charts:
This first chart is our rolling turnover for Infinity managers. As you can see, we have been below 10% turnover for the last year and trending toward 5% which is considered best in class. Now, compare that chart to this one:
This is the non-manager turnover over the last year, sitting squarely in the mid- to high-30% range. The difference is so stark that it’s hard to believe that both these charts are from the same company. To put this in perspective, this means that for every 100 Infinity rehab managers we lose about 5 each year, while we lose more than 30 non-managers over that same period.
Given that about 80% of our employees are non-managers, we absolutely must work to close the gap between managers and non-managers on the employee survey metrics around engagement and satisfaction.
I call on our managers to help bring your own experience into the experience you help to create for your non-manager team members.
- Take time to recognize a job well done in the moment that it happens.
- Proactively share the highlights of the company meetings you attend with the people on your team.
- Listen deeply to your team members’ opinions and respond with action to address their issues.
- Tell each of your employees what you uniquely appreciate about them.
Together we can make 2023 be the year of the non-manager at Infinity Rehab. Change happens over time, and it does take each of us, so thank you, managers, in advance for your help supercharge the employee experience for each member of your team in the way that is most meaningful to them. Working together we can start now on our effort to reaffirm that Infinity Rehab is a great place to work.
In the next Insider, I’ll share employee survey insights about the difference in the therapist vs. assistant vs. non-clinician experience.
