Sarasota Memorial Earns Gallup’s Exceptional Workplace Award

April 1, 2022 – Sarasota

Gallup announced the winners of its “Exceptional Workplace Award” for 2022, and Sarasota Memorial was one of only 41 organizations worldwide to make the list. 

This is the third time that Sarasota Memorial has won the prestigious Gallup award, which honors thriving organizations that have attained world-class performance by making employee engagement a cornerstone of their strategy.

After another year of unpredictability in workplaces around the world, Gallup found that Sarasota Memorial continued to engage and develop its staff amid the disruption.

“Gallup’s 2022 winners have steered their organizations through another unprecedented and challenging year. They didn’t slow down or hit ‘pause’ during times of uncertainty. They stayed true to their organizational values. Gallup commends all of the 2022 winners for their resiliency, determination and commitment to making their people a priority,” said Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being.

Gallup’s studies of team engagement and performance have found that highly engaged organizations significantly outperform their peers in important outcomes such as customer ratings, turnover, safety incidents, absenteeism, quality, well-being and organizational citizenship.

“The winners consistently put their people — employees and customers — and their values at the center of decisions,” Gallup said in today’s announcement.

To qualify for the 2022 award, organizations were required to meet rigorous criteria, including a high qualifying participation rate on Gallup’s 2021 employee engagement survey, and scores placing them at the top of Gallup’s global database. They also had to demonstrate overall performance excellence.  

Sarasota Memorial is Sarasota County’s largest employer, with about 8,000 employees committed to providing the highest level of care at two hospitals, a network of ambulatory locations and physician offices, a skilled nursing facility and behavioral health center.

According to Gallup, only 20 percent of employees worldwide are engaged (committed to their work and connected to their workplace). But the engagement level among “Exceptional Workplace” award recipients is 70 percent or higher.

Sarasota Memorial’s staff completed the 2021 Gallup engagement survey, which took place from July to August of 2021 during the unprecedented “Delta” surge in COVID-19 patients. Despite the ongoing pandemic and enormous spike in severely ill patients, Sarasota Memorial achieved a top-decile performance in the survey. The health system placed among the top 5 percent of all health care organizations that Gallup works with.

“We are especially gratified to earn the Exceptional Workplace Award this year, as it demonstrates our entire team’s steadfast commitment to our patients and each other, even amid the many challenges and the hardships of the pandemic,” said Sarasota Memorial President & CEO David Verinder. “We are a world-class institution thanks to the invaluable contributions of each and every staff member.”

2021 was the eighth year that Gallup — the internationally known research and polling organization — conducted an employee survey for Sarasota Memorial. SMH also won the Gallup workplace honor (previously known as the Great Workplace Award) in 2015 and 2018. Gallup’s survey, which contains key questions to measure staff’s engagement, has been administered to organizations around the world, and is based on decades of research across multiple diverse industries.