AMPT’s Craig Spilker on how the pandemic changed healthcare worker recognition

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Craig Spilker, head of product and engagement at AMPT, a Nebraska-based employee engagement, recognition, and communication platform.

Spilker shared how healthcare companies, hospitals, and health systems are using the technology—which allows employees to shout-out colleagues on an internal social network-like platform—to improve engagement and retention. And he discussed how healthcare employee recognition trends have changed in wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about AMPT and its employee recognition platform.

We sit in a space where it’s just recognition for recognition’s sake. We try to teach and try to inform users and the employees on the best ways to do that and make it meaningful and impactful. On the back end, there’s direct incentives for human resource leaders or C-suite executives to keep turnover levels low, to keep engagement or fulfillment levels high, and to keep people active, happy, and engaged so you don’t have a revolving door or burnout.

The platform interacts and looks and feels like social media: It’s got your activity feed, it’s got widgets.

How is the platform being used by health systems, hospitals, and other health companies?

You have these teams that interact just to take care of a patient, and that’s primarily where most of the recognition happens. But you got this sort of cross pollination during Covid of activity between user groups or departments that really had had no prior interaction. Now teams are seeing a need to recognize everybody across the entire spectrum of the healthcare workplace.

What’s the biggest misconception people may have about your platform?

That social media just inherently is bad. When you talk about a cascading information flow and trying to take in as much in as you can in a short period of time, the social media framework is actually incredibly valuable.

The second thing is recognition itself. It takes 34 seconds on average to recognize a colleague on AMPT. When we survey people with the platform, the No. 1 reason why they don’t recognize others is lack of time. That’s the biggest misconception we deal with on a daily basis.

What healthcare trend are you least optimistic about, and why?

During the pandemic, the growth in travel nurses created a unique condition inside the workplace or culture. You’d have nurses who would leave and come back—born and raised in the same city, but yet they now had a salary that was maybe 50%–75% more than what they made. Effectively, they were a travel nurse traveling inside their own city, and that was creating a lot of contention, anger, and frustration.

You had contention by leaders, who were looking at shrinking employment budgets and talent budgets and going, “We can’t sustain this.” Some leaders are selectively engaging people. It’s a way to just force people to leave.

And the burnout is real. We were looking at some trends, just in simple metadata, and the amount of characters used in recognitions has gotten shorter over the last six months compared to the same period since starting in 2020—like a sizable change. Is that indicative of burnout? No, but it’s one of those weird things that we see.

We’re not the tip of the iceberg: Burnout exists, and everybody knows it. We’re just the last to see it.