High Employee Engagement = Better Member Engagement
by Maura McGinn
I’m an extrovert, and everybody knows it.
I delight in the daily interactions with interesting people, and I gain both personal and professional satisfaction from connecting these amazing people to one another. Those who know me well know that I started my career in executive recruiting where the connection points were people and opportunities. While doing that work, I happily facilitated introductions between clients and synergistic businesses. I love aligning people, priorities and possibilities with the ultimate goal of improving healthcare in the U.S.
Whether in the office, or out with family and friends, I am energized at that moment when commonalities are established, connections are made, and possibilities are identified.
In the arc of my professional life, I’ve never felt that thrill quite as frequently as I have at Belong Health. And, honestly, I (the extrovert) am more than a little surprised that’s true.
Something to Celebrate
Even though I’ve been with Belong since it’s the early days, I didn’t have the opportunity to meet with many of my colleagues in person until the end of 2022 at our company-wide Kingston, NY retreat. The COVID-19 pandemic, and our decision to create a distributed geographical company makes daily, in-person interactions difficult. Before the event, I knew names, faces, and roles, of course. But like so many other workplaces, ours had been a world of Slack channels, Zoom meetings, and virtual presentations.
Under the surface, however, some other form of connection had quietly been happening over the past year and a half.
At that Kingston retreat, even before we’d shaken hands or shared vignettes about our families, several of us confessed to a special sense of kinship that went deeper than our workplace day-to-day. The value of our work, and our love for its capacity for impact, sustained and united us.
Our mission— centered around health equity and better care for vulnerable and complex needs individuals— proved more than enough to bond us all. Of course, we all had to acknowledge how much of that work is still an uphill climb. Belong Health is an early-stage company, working in a distributed way, within a heavily regulated environment.
But that tough reality has only made our 2022 successes, and the collective effort that unlocked them, all the sweeter. And at that Kingston retreat, we all celebrated the best employee engagement scores have ever seen at any company in any sector.
94% positive engagement score and 100% of employees feel their manager truly cares about their wellbeing.