As fully described in the White Paper The Importance of Using Healthcare-Specific Benchmarks for Employee Surveys in Healthcare Organizations, the healthcare industry is qualitatively different from other industries—and these differences have a profound impact on employees’ attitudes, perceptions, satisfaction levels, and organizational engagement.  There are fundamental, structural, inherent differences among healthcare employees relative to other industries.  The significance of this fact cannot be overstated if one seeks to compare employees across organizations.  Therefore, it is crucially important for employee satisfaction measures in healthcare organizations to be benchmarked exclusively within the healthcare industry to produce meaningful, actionable insights.  This is one of many reasons why HealthStream Research is dedicated to the healthcare industry.

As Mollie Elizabeth Condra, Ph.D., HealthStream Senior Director of Communications, Research & Investor Relations, writes in the White Paper, benchmarking and the adoption of best practices from outside the healthcare industry can be fraught with complexities for workforce development.  To accurately and meaningfully understand how one’s workforce rates along the full spectrum of important satisfaction measures, it is imperative that healthcare organizations be compared to other healthcare organizations (i.e., “apples to apples” comparisons).  The unique environmental factors and characteristics inherent in healthcare jobs are all important in understanding and interpreting employee surveys.  For example, the stress that comes with occasional bouts of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror where life or death decisions are made is common in healthcare organizations, but extremely unlikely in most other industries.  The ability to manage, cope, and work effectively under this type of stress is a crucial skill for healthcare professionals that affects their performance and well-being.  This, in turn, affects their employee satisfaction scores.

It’s easy to see, then, that rating the nature of stress between a healthcare professional and an employee outside of healthcare is like comparing "apples to oranges."  It’s not meaningful.  Moreover, healthcare employees tend to remain in the healthcare industry to a far greater extent than other industries’ employees remain in their industry.  This means that the fundamental, structural qualities that characterize the healthcare workforce—and differentiate it from other industries’ workforces—are relatively the same across healthcare organizations.  This fact reinforces the validity of benchmarking healthcare organization employee satisfaction measures exclusively among other healthcare organizations.