Cooinda Village Uses Palm Pilot Technology to Increase Participation in Employee Satisfaction

Cooinda Village is a 78 bed facility that has a 23 bed specific dementia unit. It is located in Benalla in north central Victoria. It is predominantly a low care facility. Cooinda Village has been benchmarking with QPS Benchmarking since March 2009. One of the indicators submitted last quarter was employee satisfaction. Ensuring that staff engaged with the survey was considered by management to be very important and was actively encouraged. In the first attempt at this indicator Cooinda Village managed to get 51 staff to participate. The overall average score for staff satisfaction was an impressive 84.1%.

According to Quality Manager Julie Folan, the strong voluntary participation rate can be attributed to two major factors.

Firstly, staff meetings were held to discuss the employee satisfaction tool and the implications and benefits for staff of completing the survey. Staff members were invited to review the survey tool and to ask questions. Following the meeting they were given three weeks to complete and return the survey.

The second identified reason for success relates to the use of palm pilot technology that can be used to communicate with staff on an at will basis. So to ensure that staff remembered to complete and return the survey reminders were sent to all staff both pre and post the due date. Because staff need to log onto the system at the commencement of each new shift the palm pilot reminder system has worked extremely well. "We have had the system in place for nearly seven years and whilst staff were at first reluctant to use the system it has now become second nature", explains Julie Folan. "Now that all staff members are using the system effectively new staff find that learning and using the system is quite easy."

A review of results indicates that Cooinda Village staff members rated their facility higher than average in all areas other than equipment and external relationships. Cooinda Village scored well above the industry average for the section on 'Information and Communication' and may in part be due to the hand held communication system. It is considered also by management that strong communication systems have helped boost employee ratings in the `Teamwork' section.