Baton Rouge, La.-based Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System realized it wanted to recognize employees following recent successes in quality, patient satisfaction and team member engagement. To that end, the organization implemented a 4% increase to the base pay rate for 15,025 team members.
“It was the perfect opportunity for us to be able to, once again, invest in our team members, specifically with across-the-board increases for all of our employees that were eligible,” Hunter Richardson, executive vice president and chief administrative officer, told Becker’s. “That was shortly after we had already completed a full market analysis, but also raised our minimum wage to $14 an hour at the end of 2024. And so, it was an additional investment that we felt was important to continue to prop up and support our team members, and keep them rewarded and engaged in the care that we provide to our communities.”
This 4% raise was only part of the system’s broader effort to enhance employee engagement and recognition. Mr. Richardson said pay is an important piece of the organization’s total rewards package, but the system also looked at other benefits, such as adding an additional holiday. FMOL Health is also adding GLP-1 coverage to its health plan and four weeks of paid parental leave.
“The specific 4% [was a] cash opportunity we had to recognize our employees,” Mr. Richardson said. “But we’re also looking at it from a broader perspective of the whole total rewards package, and also the experience that they have in our organization by continuing the development of our leaders.”
He specifically cited examples such as implementing twice-yearly leadership assemblies, quarterly leadership summits and partnering with pollster Gallup to implement a strengths-based leadership development program.
For President and CEO E.J. Kuiper, the most important aspect of all of these investments in team engagement and culture is how they affect the environment for patients and their family members.
“If you focus … too much on the outcomes, you’re going to leave your employees behind,” Mr. Kuiper told Becker’s. “So we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can create an environment that could be considered best place to work or best place to practice medicine, and we’re very intentional about it, from leadership development to creating fun activities in our offices, in our clinics, in our hospitals, around food or celebrating awards that we might get. All those things create an environment that optimizes patient care.”
The effects appear in the system’s turnover rate, which has dropped below 12% over the last 12 months.
FMOL Health also seeks continual feedback from employees.
“We not only do that through our twice-a-year employee satisfaction, employee engagement surveys, which are very important, and we gain a lot of feedback from that,” Mr. Kuiper said. “But another thing that we do is all our screen savers across our system are a quote of the week that I send out, which is nice, because we get a lot of emails and texts from that, but at the bottom of that quote, it [has an] email address that we monitor, and we get a lot of very important feedback about the things that are going well that we should do more of, or barriers that might be in their way.”
He said he also gets a sense of employee morale from walking the halls of the system’s clinics and hospitals.
“I was so impressed when I first joined this organization [in 2024], and when I started interviewing, that you could actually sense that this is a place that is different and it’s special,” Mr. Kuiper said. “It’s a healing environment. You can have beautiful buildings and state-of-the-art technology, which we do, and we’re blessed that we have it and that we can invest in that. But … it’s the people that make the buildings home and create that healing environment.”
Still, health system officials realize compensation will remain only one lever to continue investing in these workers.
“The other piece right is about continuing to develop our people and give them the opportunities for that, [and] investing in our academic partnerships to create future pipelines,” said Mr. Kuiper. “If we can make those investments, both in our current footprint, but also in the future of healthcare … you create those lasting partnerships that keep that pipeline of talent continuing to come.”
Even with this in mind, Mr. Richardson added, “I don’t think it will ever be enough. We’ve got to continue to focus on, how do we create an environment where there is a waitlist for people who want to come work for us? We want to get to the point where we continue to be partners in the communities that we serve, but we want to have people lined up down the street wanting to come work for us, because we are different, and creating that environment is a journey that I don’t think will ever end.”
