FEATURED CASE STUDY

Situation

After the initial demands of COVID 19 had begun to subside in 2022, Littleton Adventist Hospital (LAH) in Colorado wanted to address ways to help their employees feel empowered and supported, especially as it relates to reporting safety issues. When LAH came to AIM they wanted to understand how comfortable employees felt reporting safety hazard issues, if they knew how to go about it, and if there were disparities in the comfort levels between groups and roles for doing so.

Approach

As with all of AIM’s work, the questions implicit in unraveling these issues are complicated and nuanced. Asking the right questions, in the right way, to the right people was just the beginning. 

Deciphering what that data meant so LAH leadership could make clear, well-informed decisions for improving their operations, and saving human lives was and always is on the line.

By working closely with leadership to understand the issues and to ensure confidentiality for employee responses, AIM was able to provide new insights about where LAH needed to focus their attention and resources.

Outcomes

AIM’s analysis of employee data, in addition to the working strategy sessions they led with LAH leadership allowed LAH to target specific steps for improving safety reporting training and to better understand the role “company culture” plays in encouraging employees to feel safe to report issues. AIM was able to pinpoint which departments needed the most safety reporting training, and more importantly, which departments suffered from feeling dis-empowered to file reports. Within a short timeframe LAH was able to increase feelings of employee empowerment across many of their departments to identify which departments required more attention, and to define what meaningful attention should include. AIM helped LAH think about the questions they were not yet asking but needed to ask to affect better safety reporting.