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America's Best Employers
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Two Years Into The Pandemic, Hospitals Earn High Marks As America’s Best Employers

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Madeline Bell joined the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as a night nurse in 1983. Nearly 40 years later, she’s steering the 167-year-old institution and its more than 15,200 employees through the coronavirus pandemic. “The most important thing that I've learned is the critical importance of leadership’s physical presence,” says president and CEO Bell.

When the recent omicron variant surge created a staffing shortage, Bell volunteered in the hospital’s supply chain unit, packaging and delivering inpatient supplies alongside employees so she could talk to them about what was on their minds. The top concern? Burnout.

It’s an issue many frontline healthcare workers are struggling with two years into the global pandemic as the surge and lull of new cases seems to endlessly loop. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, also known as CHOP, has stood up a variety of programs to help employees navigate the uncertainty, including offering more flexibility in scheduling and split shifts, bringing back retired nurses and offering subsidized childcare through the YMCA. It also created a public health department with a hotline and town halls to help address employee questions around testing, vaccination and issues like returning to work and school for their families.

These and other initiatives helped CHOP secure the top spot on Forbes’ list of America’s Best Large Employers 2022. Forbes partnered with market research company Statista to pinpoint the companies liked best by employees in our annual ranking.

“Every single day, I know that something I do, and every person who works here does, is going to improve the lives of children and their families,” says Bell. “And that's a higher calling and I think keeps us all very united and very connected.”

Despite two years of challenges, including staffing shortages, supply chain issues and reductions in many outpatient and elective procedures, employees at several large hospitals expressed pride and purpose in their work and how their employers were handling the pandemic. Joining CHOP in the top 10 are Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (No. 4), Mayo Clinic (No. 7), University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (No. 9) and MD Anderson Cancer Center (No. 10).

“It definitely has been an evolving process,” says Memorial Sloan Kettering’s vice president of human resources, legal and regulatory affairs, Leslie Ballantyne, when reflecting on the pandemic. “At all times we've looked at multiple dimensions of our employees' lives: what they need for themselves, what they need for their families and what they need to do their work.”

She does acknowledge one major difference between year one and year two: Covid-19 vaccines. All of the 138-year-old hospital’s more than 21,100 employees are required to be vaccinated. While that’s helped lower infection risk on the job, many employees with children, especially those too young to be vaccinated, continue to face uncertainty around school and daycare closures. Sloan Kettering already had a contract with employer-sponsored childcare provider Bright Horizons to run a center for employees in hospital housing on Roosevelt Island, as well as a backup program for employees whose usual providers may be sick. In February 2021, it opened another center a few blocks from the main hospital.

The hospital runs an incident command system that continually keeps tabs on the Covid situation in New York City and adjusts employee resources accordingly. For example, Sloan Kettering covered commuting and parking costs when transportation options were limited, and organized hotel stays for frontline workers who didn’t want to risk Covid exposure to their families. “We just needed to be agile and flexible and responsive and have people really attuned to what was going on so that we could adjust accordingly,” says Ballantyne.

At both institutions, constant communication with employees has been key. Ballantyne says her approach is: “As often as possible and as honestly and transparently as possible and in as many modes as possible.”

CHOP’s Bell says hers stems from her days as a nurse on the night shift. “What would I have thought when I was a nurse receiving that information?” she says. “I try to have empathy and change the way I approach how I interact with people and particularly how I communicate with people.”

For the full list of America’s Best Large Employers, click here. For the full list of America’s Best Midsize Employers, click here.

For more coverage of America’s Best Employers:

America’s Best Employers 2022: Methodology, Trends And What Makes A Top Employer

What ‘Corporate Culture’ Means When The Office Isn’t Center Stage

Inside Vera Bradley: How Barbara Bradley Baekgaard Built A Company As Whimsical As Its Creations

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