Many things may strike you while reading about the winners in Healthcare Finance News’ first-ever “Where To Work: BEST Hospital Finance Departments” program. But perhaps most importantly, the best finance departments demonstrate deep respect for employees and appreciate their hard work.
That was this project’s goal: To determine what characteristics distinguish the best departments from all the rest.
From start to finish, it’s been quite a ride, and the 15 hospital finance departments that made the long journey to the top deserve kudos for creating workplaces where employees thrive and have fun while working incredibly hard.
How we ranked them
The multi-stage program began in February and spanned four months. It included a nomination period, followed by a confidential, online 75-question employee survey and, finally, a data-analysis period to determine the top hospitals. Critical Insights, an independent market research company in Portland, Maine, administered the survey and determined the winners.
Overall, 60 hospitals were nominated for “Where To Work: BEST Hospital Finance Departments.” To qualify for the program, roughly half of a department’s staff had to complete the online survey. In the end, 36 hospitals qualified, and overall, a total of 965 finance employees completed the online survey.
To level the playing field, we divided finance departments into three categories: small (7-10 staff with a minimum of seven completed surveys); medium (11-24 staff) and large (25+staff). Of the 36 hospitals that qualified for the study, 10 were large (734 completed surveys), 14 medium (163 completed surveys) and 12 small (68 completed surveys).
Data crunching
As a means of interpreting some of the results and ranking the hospitals, the study used an index where a score of 100 is considered “average.” Here’s how all finance employees who took the survey ranked the importance of the seven workplace satisfaction categories addressed in the study:
- Satisfaction with elements of their day-to-day work (114)
- Satisfaction with their team, work unit or finance department (105)
- Satisfaction with the organizations’ workplace culture (99)
- Satisfaction with their direct supervisor or manager (99)
- Satisfaction with compensation, benefits and employee recognition (96)
- Satisfaction with senior management and executive leadership (95)
- Satisfaction with training, professional development and advancement (93)
All of these criteria are important, of course, but some, as the employees indicated, are more important than others. The top performers in “Where To Work: BEST Hospital Finance Departments” excel in the areas that finance employees consider most important, but, as you’ll see when you read the profiles of the winners, they take all seven of the project’s workplace traits to heart.