This article originally appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of the Ontario Medical Review magazine.
Employee engagement and satisfaction caps off year
For the second year in a row, the OMA was named by Mediacorp as one of the GTA’s Top Employers for 2022. Applicants are evaluated and compared to peer employers on eight criteria including work atmosphere, benefits, vacation and time off, employee communications and training and skills development. The OMA was featured in a special magazine insert profile distributed in the metro print edition of the Globe and Mail, as well as via the Globe’s website, Eluta.ca and the Top Employers website.
Recognition through this award confirms the OMA’s belief that it needs a strong staff to effectively support its members. In 2021, the organization carried out several initiatives to engage with its employees, using new and existing tools to monitor their health, wellness and productivity and to address the impact of working from home during the pandemic.
The OMA’s annual staff engagement survey in April had a 94 per cent response rate, and showed encouraging trends, including an overall engagement score of 80 per cent, up 10 percentage points from 2020. Overall, most factors trended upward, including alignment and involvement (up 19 per cent to 79 per cent), and teamwork and ownership (+18 to 90 per cent). The area that declined the most was work and life blend (down 16 to 57 per cent).
The OMA also surveyed staff in October on the topic of wellness, looking at overall staff well-being, including workload and productivity, employee supports and resources, leadership and team building.
The overall trends showed continuing challenges with workload and work/life balance, but also continuing strength in employees feeling supported by their managers and teams. The survey had an overall participation rate of 91 per cent. Results showed a slight decline in staff’s overall well-being score. This is consistent with a general trend toward burnout and mental health challenges in most workplaces as the pandemic continues.
Leadership is addressing the survey results through initiatives such as enterprise mapping, performance management modernization, governance transformation, better management of meetings, and more integration between strategic planning and budgeting.