Kootenai Health again earns Gallup accolades

Kootenai Health has earned the 2022 Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award.

This is the fifth time Kootenai Health has earned Gallup honors. The Exceptional Workplace Award recognizes the most engaged workplace cultures in the world.

Gallup found that Kootenai Health, which has 3,700 employees, continued to engage and develop its people amid another year of unpredictability in the workplace.

"Gallup’s 2022 GEWA winners have steered their organizations through another unprecedented and challenging year," Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and wellbeing Jim Harter said in a news release.

"They didn’t slow down or hit ‘pause’ during times of uncertainty. They stayed true to their organizational values," Harter said. "Gallup commends all of the 2022 GEWA winners for their resiliency, determination and commitment to making their people a priority."

The Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award winners’ ratio of engaged employees to actively disengaged employees is 13 times higher than the global average.

Just 20% of employees around the world are engaged while 34% of the U.S. workforce is engaged. At least 70% of employees at Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award organizations are engaged.

“At Kootenai Health we recognize our employees are our greatest asset,” Kootenai Health CEO Jon Ness said. "To earn this recognition in spite of the extraordinary challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and national staffing shortages is a point of pride for our entire organization. In some ways, these challenges served to highlight the strength of our organizational culture.”

Gallup’s analysis on team engagement and performance is the most comprehensive workplace study ever conducted, with data on more than 2 million employees in 276 organizations across 54 industries and 96 countries. Highly engaged organizations significantly outperform their peers in important business outcomes, including customer ratings, profitability, productivity, turnover, safety incidents, shrinkage, absenteeism, quality, wellbeing and organizational citizenship.

“This recognition shows that Kootenai Health really is an employer of choice,” said Sarah McManus, Kootenai Health’s director of employee and guest experience. "We don’t just tout an exceptional employee experience — we deliver it. Although the pandemic impacted employees in every area of our organization, we never lost sight of our core values.”

The main Kootenai Health campus in Coeur d'Alene includes a 330-bed, community-owned hospital and more than 200 employed providers across more than 25 clinical specialties including family medicine, cardiology, orthopedics and surgery.