How UPHS Creates a Culture of Care for its Employees

The University of Pennsylvania Healthcare System’s Wellness Team recently discussed their well-being program strategy and results at our quarterly virtual event, LimeTime. Their Limeade well-being program, WellFocused, aims to show care for their employees in the demanding healthcare field.

“WellFocused uses Limeade for the obvious reasons — to track steps and healthy activities, do mindfulness, set health goals — but we use Limeade for a lot more. We integrate Limeade into everything that we do across the organization. So, it’s our vehicle for communication, engagement…our resources and benefits live in there. And we have really high participation…the WellFocused program was founded when I started in 2011 and we’ve built everything from the ground up and I’m really excited about what we’re doing.”
Jen Brady, Associate Director, Benefits and Wellness, UPHS

UPHS program goals, initiatives and results

One of the main points emphasized in the presentation was the importance of building a culture of care that enables employees to show up at work as their best selves and thrive. The team recognized that the demanding nature of the healthcare industry can lead to stress, burnout and other well-being challenges. By creating a culture of care that encourages employees to prioritize their well-being, they have seen an improvement in morale and overall well-being with the help of Limeade. A few 2022 results and a key learning included:

4.5/5 employee satisfaction score
An increase of 11% registered users year-over-year
85% employee engagement score
An increase of nearly 50% overall well-being for at risk employees
+19% program participation year-over-year
44% Well-Being Assessment completion rate

“UPHS believes that the best care for your patients starts with the best care for you. If you aren’t financially well, you can’t turn that off when you come to work, you’re going to be stressed out. If you’re having a stressful day at work, you don’t leave it at the door, you bring it home with you. And so, our job is to make sure that our employees are getting a well-rounded, robust program in order to help meet them where they are and provide different things for employees to have better well-being. We really take a whole-person approach because we know that everyone needs something different.”
Jen Brady, Associate Director, Benefits and Wellness, UPHS

A key strategy the team highlighted was their emphasis on integrating all benefits and resources within the Limeade program, focusing on what their employee’s need the most like burnout support, on-demand and live coaching and connecting other teams from across the organization so there’s one place employees go to find what they need.

“We try to integrate Limeade into everything we do across the organization and vice versa. For example, our employee engagement survey, a link to that will go in Limeade, our employee annual giving program, that will go into Limeade, PennMedicine Academy is our organizational development and learning department, they focus on PennMedicine experience, so, “What’s the experience like as a PennMedicine employee?” and we integrate that into Limeade. So it’s this cross-promotion between our team and all the other teams that are working on things as a way to engage people.”
Jen Brady, Associate Director, Benefits and Wellness, UPHS

Mitchell Sherman, Wellbeing Coordinator, UPHS also walked through successful program initiatives including:

Beating burnout campaign
On-demand programs
Coaching offerings
Work-life integration

“This is a great example of how we’ve used Limeade as a tool to enhance our well-being initiatives. There was a series of webinars and articles released through Limeade that we released on a specific cadence starting in October and it goes through May. So twice a month an article or webinar is released on our Limeade feed and this takes you to a specific Limeade page with information on how to beat burnout, ways to identify, ways to combat and ways to prevent it in the future…So we really try to approach this from a lot of different ways to make sure that everyone is getting the tools they need to combat and beat burnout…We’re still doing our best to combat this very real thing.”
Mitchell Sherman, Wellbeing Coordinator, UPHS

The importance of care and employee well-being

The University of Pennsylvania Healthcare System demonstrated that investing in employee well-being is essential to providing quality patient care. By fostering a culture of care, integrating important benefits and resources, providing information and trainings on specific topics, and using employee feedback to create personalized campaigns, they’ve seen a significant improvement in employee well-being and a reduction in burnout. It’s clear that to provide the best care for patients, healthcare organizations must prioritize the well-being of their employees.