More Detailed Survey Means VA Can Improve Employee Engagement, Customer Service All at Once

The Department of Veterans Affairs has long had a hunch that if its employees were engaged at work, its veteran customers would be satisfied too.

Now, the department said it has the tools to best measure employee engagement down to the lowest level — and target specific resources and expertise to help individual supervisors, managers and medical centers make improvements.

VA’s hypothesis was validated recently by the Partnership for Public Service and the Boston Consulting Group, which examined data from nearly 150 VA medical centers over three years. They found medical centers with stronger employee engagement had higher patient satisfaction, lower turnover among VA nurses and better call center performance.

The results aren’t so surprising to VA’s own National Center for Organization Development (NCOD), which acts as a consulting arm to the department’s health, benefits and cemetery administrations. The NCOD administers VA’s all-employee survey and conducts research on how employee engagement translates to better outcomes for the department’s customers.

“Every year the strongest correlation is always between employee engagement and customer satisfaction,” said Dee Ramsel, director of VA’s National Center for Organization Development, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “They can look at patient satisfaction data in VHA and it will match up with employee engagement scores at each facility. They can look at cemetery satisfaction scores and it will match up with employee engagement data.”

The Partnership highlighted two VA medical centers where this correlation has been particularly evident. Employee engagement at the VA St. Louis Health System rose nearly 3% between 2016 and 2018. Its Strategic Analytics for Improvement and Learning (SAIL) rating rose from two to four stars over the

VA’s medical center in Altoona, Pennsylvania, also saw similar boosts in engagement and patient satisfaction. Engagement at the Altoona medical center rose more than 16% over the past two years, according to the Partnership.

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