Beyond Job Satisfaction: How to Build Lasting Engagement
Written by CHAP’s VP of Learning Solutions, Jan Sweat, and Valerie Yaw, Certified Partner, The Predictive Index & Principal, SHIFT
Employee engagement is one of the most overused—and misunderstood—concepts in healthcare leadership. Traditional engagement tactics often fall flat, especially in home-based care, where team members often work independently and are spread across vast geographies.
Team lunch? Nice gesture.
Employee survey? Possibly helpful.
Leadership that understands what truly drives engagement? That’s where things start to change.
Through CHAP’s Healthcare Leadership Certification, we’ve seen firsthand how engagement improves when leaders stop managing reactively and start leading intentionally. And more importantly, when they immediately put what they’ve learned into action.
Here’s how that transformation takes shape, and why it sticks.
Why Most Engagement Efforts Don’t Work
Many leaders equate engagement with employee satisfaction. But satisfaction is about how someone feels, engagement is about what they do. A team may express contentment with their jobs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re contributing meaningfully, taking initiative, or driving outcomes.
Leaders can’t rely on surface-level indicators. Engagement must be built into the daily rhythm of leadership. And it doesn’t happen through one-time efforts. It happens when leaders set the tone consistently, through coaching, curiosity, and clarity.
A Learning Environment Built for Action
That kind of leadership, rooted in clarity, curiosity, and consistency, requires more than good intentions. It takes structure and support to turn insight into action.
Most people leave leadership workshops with many notes but little follow-through. The CHAP certification intentionally breaks this cycle. Participants are asked to create an “intention list” of two actions they’ll take back at work the next day, not aspirational goals or vague ideas, but concrete, immediate steps.
This simple shift, capturing takeaways in real time and holding yourself accountable, transforms the learning from passive to practical. It ensures that insights from the room are applied in the field and that the workshop has a lasting impact beyond the session.
The Four Dimensions of Engagement
As CHAP facilitator Val Yaw explains, culture doesn’t drive engagement alone. Leaders often overemphasize cultural alignment while overlooking the day-to-day experience of their people. A more accurate approach considers four essential factors:
- Job Fit – Is the employee doing work that aligns with their natural strengths and behavioral wiring?
- Manager Relationship – Do they feel seen, supported, and challenged by their supervisor?
- Team Dynamics – Can they collaborate effectively with the people they rely on daily?
- Culture Connection – Do they believe in the organization’s broader mission and values?
Engagement is contextual. Before leaders can motivate a team or coach effectively, they need to understand the complete picture of someone’s experience, what energizes them, what’s misaligned, and what they need to thrive.
Tools That Translate to Real Teams
That’s where tools like The Predictive Index come in. Rather than being treated as a personality assessment to file away, it becomes a lens to examine leadership challenges in real time. Leaders use it in the room to explore team dynamics, reflect on their style, and test how to adapt their approach based on behavioral insights.
This data-driven methodology allows leaders to diagnose engagement gaps at their root—whether it’s a mismatch in behavioral drives or misalignment within team structure.
It’s not about labeling people; it’s about creating alignment. When applied in context, it helps leaders build stronger, more responsive relationships with their teams.
Learning That Sticks (Because You Practice It)
The workshop itself is structured for applied learning. Participants don’t just sit through slides; they actively engage with peers, role-play challenging conversations, and receive feedback in the moment. Often, they use the cohort as a stand-in for their leadership teams, rehearsing how they’ll bring conversations and changes back to their organizations.
This structure helps leaders move past theory and into real preparation. It also fosters meaningful connections among participants, many from similar care settings, who share common challenges.
Cohort Camaraderie and the Capstone Project
That camaraderie doesn’t end when the workshop does. Each cohort also works on a Capstone project, an initiative they continue to apply after the program ends. The project gives participants a monthly touchpoint to revisit the tools, reconnect with peers, and evaluate their progress.
The ability to revisit engagement efforts through the lens of The Predictive Index gives leaders a consistent, measurable way to gauge progress and course-correct in real time.
This ongoing engagement ensures the workshop is not a one-and-done experience, but a foundational leadership shift supported by real follow-through and community.
Start Leading with Intention
If you’re a leader in home-based care looking to move beyond surface-level efforts, start here:
- Ask what part of a team member’s role may be misaligned, not how they feel.
- Identify one conversation you’ve been putting off and make time for it this week.
- Write down two things you’ll do tomorrow to lead differently than today.
Intentional leadership doesn’t require a complete reinvention. It requires small, consistent decisions that build a connection over time. And with tools like The Predictive Index, leaders can conduct fit/gap analyses to ensure employees are not only placed in roles aligned with their natural strengths but also supported in career paths that energize and engage them.
Engagement Starts with You
The CHAP Healthcare Leadership Certification is designed for leaders who want to understand what motivates their people and practice the kind of leadership that produces results.
You’ll leave with the tools, the practice, and the clarity to make engagement more than a goal. You’ll make it a pattern.
Are you interested in attending but need more time to check your calendar or review with your team? You can now reserve your spot at no cost until you register.
