Employee satisfaction positively impacts Five-Star Quality Ratings, retention, and resident and family experiences. As part of its ongoing offerings to help nursing homes improve resident care, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the free, anonymous Nursing Home Employee Satisfaction Survey Toolkit to help nursing facilities identify the drivers of staff satisfaction and help you take action to make improvements. 

The survey offers facility employees an opportunity to share their perceptions about the nursing home workplace. Survey topics include:

• Employee engagement and team building
• Job satisfaction
• Management and leadership
• Scheduling and staffing
• Training

Supporting resources are available in the Downloads section of the Civil Money Penalty Reinvestment Program’s (CMPRP) webpage to support managers in implementing the survey, as well as aggregating and interpreting survey results, including:

• Implementation Guide with talking points, an email memo, and poster
• Data Collection & Analysis Tool to compile and analyze survey results
• Videos: Watch these two videos to get started:
  • Introduction to the Nursing Home Employee Satisfaction Survey (link): https://youtu.be/9WE40dUELpw
  • Data Collection and Analytics Tool Tutorial (link): https://youtu.be/wXN3bNJzZ6A

Nursing centers can use the CMPRP free competency assessment to determine the degree to which staff satisfaction is an issue at the facility.

The toolkit is available as part of CMS’s ongoing CMPRP, a three-year effort to reduce adverse events, improve staffing quality and improve dementia care in nursing homes. Learn more about the other CMPRP toolkits including Toolkit 1: Nursing Home Staff Competency Assessment.