A Culture of Care: Celebrating Our Journey to Becoming One of New England's Best Workplaces

Hello everyone,

I am thankful to be reaching out to tell you that Broad Reach has earned a distinguished recognition for our workplace culture. This is, obviously, wonderful news and something I’m excited to be now talking about with other healthcare professionals around New England and the country. But first and foremost, I want to first offer a word of gratitude for how everyone here has made this possible.

About a year ago, we partnered with Drive – Outcomes Through Culture an expert organization that would enable us to assess our culture here at Broad Reach. Over the last 15+ years, we’ve repeatedly placed in the Top-100 of The Boston Globe’s Top Places to Work.  But, this 2023 assessment offered us a significant opportunity to know more - how you view our collective culture as well as to understand what is meaningful to you personally. Our mission has always been to foster an atmosphere of inclusivity and respect, but knowing both where we stand and where we need to be in the future would enable us to take that up a notch and do it even better!

By now, you’ve probably heard that we scored highly on the culture assessment. Of the 250 healthcare organizations Culture Outcomes surveyed, the average score is 50. Ours was 89, which is the second-highest score ever recorded out of thousands of other organizations. Additionally, we were rated as having a “Healthy Functioning” culture without any limiting values on our overall team.

I was in shocked disbelief when I first heard the news — that feedback had to be too positive to be real. But the more we talked to Culture Outcomes and spoke with you all individually, the clearer it became that our score is indicative of our organizational culture. It speaks to the manner in which we all contributes to making Broad Reach a great place to work and an even better place for post-acute and community-based healthcare.

In Chris’s focus group meeting, you said time and again that you’re proud to tell other people where you work and that it’s a place where you can feel fulfilled in your work. Even more so, you say that you love interacting with your patients, residents, and co-workers. All of this speaks to a belief I’ve held for a long time: how we feel about our work affects not only our services but also our workplace. Simply put, the less miserable we are, the more time we have to spend with our patients and residents. And that’s a major shift in the way most healthcare organizations usually operate.

Sadly, over the last 40 years, providing healthcare services has transformed from a patient-based to a task-based model. Employee titles became synonymous with function: “feeding assistants” addressed patients’ eating, “cart nurses” administer pills, and so on. There are many aspects of Broad Reach of which I am proud, but maybe the most important is that despite all those tasks we have to complete, we always try to get past that, not leaving our work or patients into a pile of tasks—ever.

I know that some of you have had this experience in other facilities. It’s the definition of treating people as a “means to an end,” and it robs us of the reason we got into these professions in the first place: to help. When patients and their families come to us, they’re looking for a community. They’re looking for healthcare providers who care about them as people as well as their quality of life. Ours is not a place where we prescribe orders and hope they don’t get screwed up when somebody else carries them out. Despite all that’s changed, our work to still make genuinely connections makes all the difference.

Together, it is every one that creates an environment where people want to come to work—they want to connect with patients, families, and each other, and they want to lead with compassion and care. Ultimately, that’s what drives our mission. And it is why this culture recognition is so much greater than any one of us could individually achieve.

However, our job is not finished: an 89 is a great score, but we now also know where focusing even more can make the most difference. On the “Desired Cultural Values” portion of the survey, achieving more accountability and an increase in open communication rose to the top. The focus group work helped identify what that could look like. And we are ready to turn that vision into our reality. 

Our culture is strong because everyone here is willing to show up day after day and contribute to making Broad Reach a place where everyone wants to work. And I cannot thank you enough for that.

In gratitude,

Bill Bogdanovich

Drive’s World's Best Culture Certification spans across all industries. It is supported by Barrett's 25-year database and four million culture assessments, which include companies such as Mastercard, CocaCola, Prudential, Wegmans, PWC and Volvo. Drive is its leading user in aging services.