How Survey Data Revealed Leadership Opportunities to Improve Morale at a Healthcare Practice

Whenever I visit my doctor’s and dentist’s offices, and I share what I do for work, they all respond with the same answer: “We need you here.” They share challenges with teamwork, management, and the ever-present risk of burnout in their industry. According to the CDC, 46% of healthcare workers reported burnout in 2022 (CDC, 2023).

When we think about the “employee experience,” often large companies come to mind, with manager dashboards, leader presentations, and established corporate lines of communication. Small and local organizations equally need our support, but they often don’t have the survey infrastructure or the budget to hire a full-time organizational development consultant.

Through my work at Red Trail Consulting, I help small to midsized organizations collect employee feedback through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, and partner with leaders to turn feedback into action.

Over the past few months, I have been working with the leaders of a small healthcare firm. The following is Part I of a case study of our survey work together and the leaders’ commitments to action. Part II (to be published later this year) will discuss progress and outcomes.

Client Background

Client A, a small (~50 person) outpatient specialty healthcare firm based in Norfolk, VA, has been operating for over 35 years. It has built credibility through word of mouth and strong relationships with patients, passing through generations. Performance and patient satisfaction have rarely been challenges.

However, in the past couple of years, the leadership team noticed a significant dip in staff morale. In my initial leader interviews, they shared that although they deliver high-quality patient care, they felt their teamwork could improve but did not know where to start.

Methodology

Prior to my work with them, Client A did not have a formal mechanism to collect feedback from the staff on their experience. Managers mainly relied on one-on-one meetings with their staff to listen to feedback, an approach meeting its limits in a 50-person organization.

As an industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologist, I approach work with new clients like a scientist. I hypothesize what the challenges could be, then use data to validate and diagnose opportunities for leaders.

In November 2025, I launched Client A’s first engagement survey to offer the staff an opportunity to safely express their opinions anonymously, allowing me to understand their experience at scale.

The survey included questions that relate to engagement, including, but not limited to, management support, teamwork, psychological safety, workload, and access to learning and development (Bailey et al., 2017). I used the staff’s recommendation of Client A as a place to work as a proxy for engagement (Im, 2022), a metric that is commonly leveraged in industry. Seventy percent of the staff participated in the survey, with a fairly representative sample of doctors, managers, and staff. After analyzing the survey results and open comments, I presented the results to the leadership team.

Client A’s strengths were clear and resonated with the leaders’ experiences. The staff shared that they had great doctors, clearly defined roles, supportive managers, and motivated colleagues—all testaments to years of refining top-quality care for their patients.

However, their top opportunities caught the leaders by surprise. At their January 2026 quarterly staff meeting, we shared the results and announced three commitments to action.

Three Leadership Commitments to Action

1. Establish Consistency With Active Leadership Styles

From the open-ended comments, stronger leadership emerged as the top theme. The staff wanted more assertiveness, accountability, and consistency from their leaders.

The leaders expressed concerns that they didn’t want to rule with an iron fist; I asked them to consider whether their hands-off, laissez-faire approach (Perez, 2021) was having the impact they intended. From the comments, staff felt their leaders were sometimes inconsistent and even showed favoritism in some instances.

The leadership team committed to leadership training in the first half of 2026. Together, our goals are threefold:

• Explore active leadership styles, like transactional and transformational leadership, and their positive impact on commitment and performance in healthcare (Perez, 2021; Huang et al., 2025).
• Discuss what leadership looks like in alignment with the firm’s core values and in response to staff feedback.
• Identify their individual strengths as leaders through one-on-one coaching, using Hogan’s personality assessments as a starting point.

2. Promote Recognition of Good Teamwork

The staff also shared a need for more recognition of their good work. Although the staff shares positive remarks about each other at their quarterly staff meetings, a few were interested in the doctors explicitly recognizing their teams’ contributions.

In response, the leadership team committed to gathering positive feedback from the doctors ahead of their staff meetings to share. What makes for good doctors does not necessarily make for good leaders, and this is where leaders and doctors can work together to continue rewarding good work.

We also discussed rescheduling some of the staff meetings so doctors could attend and directly recognize their teams’ contributions. Sometimes simple logistical work can help enable this key lever for engagement (Jo & Shin, 2025). I found that doctors were significantly more likely to recommend Client A as a place to work compared to managers and staff; recognizing their teams’ efforts could help close this gap.

I also encouraged the leaders to shout out the staff who were mentioned in their patient survey as exceptional team members, an example of leveraging multiple data sources to improve the work experience.

3. Open Outlets for Regular Feedback and Progress Updates

Taking action on feedback was Client A’s lowest score, paired with comments asking for more communication and responsiveness to suggestions for improvement.

The staff’s responses of taking action were significantly related to their likelihood of recommending Client A as a place to work, meaning improving perceptions of action could directly improve their engagement. This became the driving force of our work together.

Our first step, presenting results and commitments in January 2026, was well received. One leader called it one of their best meetings and said the staff really appreciated it.

But the work does not stop there. The leadership team committed to sharing progress on their commitments at their next quarterly staff meeting in April 2026. In May 2026, I will launch another survey, establishing a biannual cadence to continually measure sentiment and track progress.

Why This Matters for Small Organizations

Although the leaders initially believed teamwork was their main challenge, the survey data revealed more pressing opportunities in leadership, recognition, and taking action.

This is why survey work matters: It challenges assumptions and helps diagnose where to create meaningful organizational change. Data insights can be especially helpful for leaders of small organizations (<200 employees). Although they have limited resources to carry out full-scale HR programs, starting with a survey helps narrow focus to make the biggest impact on the employee experience.

As we continue to gather and act on feedback, our work will evolve from these commitments. Curious how our progress unfolds? Stay tuned for Part II of this case study later this year.

References

Bailey, C., Madden, A., Alfes, K., & Fletcher, L. (2017). The meaning, antecedents and outcomes of employee engagement: A narrative synthesis. International Journal of Management Reviews, 19(1), 31–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12077

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). Health workers face a mental health crisis. https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/health-worker-mental-health/

Huang, Q., Wang, L., Huang, H., Tang, H., Liu, J., & Chen, C. (2025). Transformational leadership, psychological empowerment, work engagement and intensive care nurses’ job performance: A cross-sectional study using structural equation modeling. BMC Nursing, 24(1), 1025. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-025-03685-7

Im, H. (2022). Come work with us: Inclusivity, performance, engagement, and job satisfaction as correlates of employer recommendation. Journal of Personnel Psychology, 21(4), 208–214. https://doi.org/10.1027/1866-5888/a000305

Jo, H., & Shin, D. (2025). The impact of recognition, fairness, and leadership on employee outcomes: A large-scale multi-group analysis. PloS One, 20(1), e0312951. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0312951

Perez, J. (2021). Leadership in healthcare: Transitioning from clinical professional to healthcare leader. Journal of Healthcare Management, 66(4), 280–302. https://doi.org/10.1097/JHM-D-20-00057

 

AI Usage Disclosure

This document was created and written by the author. Claude and ChatGPT were used solely for structural guidance, light grammar, formatting, and word choice refinement. All ideas, sentences, and substantive content are the author’s own.