Why healthcare culture is critical to driving exceptional consumer experiences

Let’s consider two distinct scenarios.

You are enjoying the outdoors. Perhaps it’s a hike, maybe you’re playing your favorite sport, or you might be playing in the yard with your child. Then, you lose your balance and trip and fall. You catch yourself by landing on your hand, and a sharp pain shoots through your wrist. It could be sprained or even broken.

A loved one drives you to the hospital, your doctor’s office, or urgent care to get help. Here is where our scenarios diverge.

In the first scenario, you enter through sliding doors to a sterile waiting room where the receptionist barely looks up from her computer. After a 90-minute wait with minimal updates, a rushed clinician examines you with little explanation. The X-ray technician seems annoyed by your questions. You leave with a treatment plan you don’t fully understand, feeling like just another case number.

In the second scenario, you’re greeted by name with genuine concern. The staff apologizes for the wait, keeping you informed throughout. Your provider listens attentively, explaining every step of diagnosis and treatment options. Everyone you encounter seems to work as a coordinated team, focused on both your injury and your anxiety about it.

So, what’s the difference? Not necessarily clinical competence—in both scenarios you receive care. The difference is the people and their healthcare culture, and how it manifests in the consumer experience.

In healthcare today, the connection between organizational culture and consumer experience shapes every clinical interaction. While both scenarios might deliver the same medical outcome, culture determines how patients feel throughout their journey, which in turn will influence healthcare decisions they make in the future, including whether they’ll consider your organization for new or ongoing needs and if they’ll recommend you to others.

Healthcare organizations must recognize that exceptional care experiences begin with intentional culture design. This approach isn’t peripheral but central to healthcare delivery—creating environments where empathy, knowledge, and trustworthiness don’t just happen by chance—they’re deliberately engineered into every interaction and touchpoint.

The healthcare culture-experience connection

Culture design goes far beyond simply documenting values on paper. True culture design is transformation-focused, purposefully pulling organizational levers to drive business and brand forward. It’s the difference between posting mission statements in hallways and creating environments where every interaction enables the brand promise. Equally important is identifying and eliminating behaviors that undermine your brand—whether it’s rushed interactions that signal consumers aren’t valued, inconsistent communications that erode trust, or departmental silos that prevent coordinated care experiences.

According to Monigle’s Humanizing Brand Experience: Healthcare edition Vol. 7 report, 59% of consumers report greater loyalty to healthcare staff than to the organizations themselves. Furthermore, the research shows that having exceptional staff (“Best People”) is the strongest predictor of HCAHPS.

This connection makes healthcare culture a strategic imperative, not just a “nice to have.” In other words, culture is not just beanbag chairs and pizza nights. Rather, it’s a deliberate system of expectations, behaviors, and reinforcement that enables employees to deliver on brand promises across every touchpoint.

The healthcare culture shift: people as brand messengers

The pandemic accelerated workforce challenges that were already brewing in healthcare. According to the 2024 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, hospitals experienced a staggering 106.6% cumulative workforce turnover between 2019 and 2023 – meaning hospitals essentially replaced their entire workforce in five years’ time.

When experienced employees leave, they take with them the unwritten healthcare cultural norms and institutional knowledge that define “how things are done here.”

This cultural disruption is especially consequential because consumers consistently report that people—not buildings, technologies, or even clinical outcomes—are the primary shapers of their healthcare experience.

In fact, according to the Humanizing Brand Experience research, 42% of consumers define “Best People” as anyone they encounter in the organization or the entire workforce. This means every employee—from parking attendants to billing specialists to nurses—shapes the consumer’s perception of your brand.

The attributes consumers most associate with “Best People” are knowledgeable (62%), trustworthy (51%), expert (44%), caring (39%), and reliable (37%). These findings demonstrate that consumers value both technical competence and human connection, expecting healthcare employees to deliver both simultaneously.

Creating this consistency requires clear expectations and alignment throughout the organization, a challenge made significantly more difficult when facing unprecedented turnover. Every remaining and new employee must understand their role as a brand messenger and be equipped with the tools and training to deliver on brand promises, including and especially during times of transition.

Building a patient-centered healthcare culture from the inside out

Designing a culture that delivers exceptional consumer experiences requires intentional approaches that connect employee behaviors to consumer outcomes. Effective culture design begins with defining specific cultural attributes that support brand promises—not generic values, but distinctive characteristics that reflect what makes your organization unique.

For example, imagine a regional health system struggling with inconsistent consumer experiences across its locations. Leadership might identify “proactive communication” as a key cultural attribute tied to their brand promise of reducing anxiety.

Once defined, these attributes must translate into aligned behaviors that create the desired consumer experiences. So, continuing with our regional health system example, these behaviors might look like introducing oneself and explaining one’s role, providing estimated wait times, and updating patients on next steps without being asked.

This cultural transformation requires creating accountability systems that recognize and reward employees who exemplify these behaviors. Successful organizations implement recognition programs that celebrate desired behaviors, provide training that develops both technical and interpersonal skills, and ensure leadership consistently models cultural expectations.

Returning to our regional health system example, they might embed these desired behaviors in their culture by creating a digital recognition platform where patients and colleagues could recognize staff who demonstrate exceptional proactive communication. Monthly department meetings might begin by highlighting these stories.

New employee orientation could include simulation training on these specific communication behaviors, while existing staff would receive quarterly micro-learning modules. Department leaders might conduct weekly “communication rounds” to observe and coach these behaviors in real-time.

Within six months, this hypothetical health system could see measurable improvements in both consumers experience scores related to communication and reduced consumer anxiety measures.

The organizations making the most progress have evolved beyond simply communicating culture to actively designing it through interventions that change how people work. This design approach reshapes organizational fundamentals, creating sustainable patterns rather than temporary initiatives.

The employee-consumer journey intersection

Journey mapping has become a standard tool for understanding and improving consumer experiences. However, many healthcare organizations are missing the opportunity to overlay consumer journeys with employee journeys to identify critical intersection points where employee and consumer experiences directly impact each other.

This dual-lens approach reveals opportunities to reduce friction, enhance service delivery, and create meaningful experiences for both staff and patients. By mapping the full employee journey alongside the consumer journey, organizations can pinpoint bottlenecks and areas of friction that might otherwise remain hidden.

This collaborative approach cannot thrive within traditional organizational silos. When departments operate in isolation, the consumer experience inevitably suffers at handoff points. The new paradigm of healthcare brand growth demands breaking down these barriers, with marketing, clinical teams, operations, and human resources working together at the intersection of outcomes and shared responsibilities. Without this cross-functional collaboration, even the most well-designed culture initiatives will falter when tested by real-world consumer journeys.

For example, a registration process that frustrates patients often similarly frustrates staff. By redesigning this process with both audiences in mind, organizations can create improvements that simultaneously enhance consumer satisfaction and employee engagement. These intersection points represent the most leveraged opportunities for experience improvement.

Measuring the impact of healthcare culture on experience

Yes, the connection between employee culture and consumer experience can and should be measured. Forward-thinking organizations track metrics that matter across both domains, including employee engagement and satisfaction alongside consumer experience scores.

More importantly, they analyze the correlation between these metrics to understand how employee experiences influence consumer outcomes. This analysis often reveals direct relationships between units with high employee engagement and those with superior consumer satisfaction – and vice versa.

Creating feedback loops to continuously improve these metrics is essential. Providing consistent, structured opportunities for employees to share experiences, similar to those used for patients, help organizations identify emerging issues before they become crises. Acting on insights from these feedback mechanisms demonstrates organizational commitment to both employee and consumer experiences.

Healthcare culture as the foundation of lasting patient trust

In today’s healthcare environment, where consumers have more choices than ever, healthcare culture may be the most sustainable competitive advantage. Technical capabilities can be replicated, facilities can be built, but a cohesive culture that consistently delivers on brand promises is uniquely difficult to copy.

For healthcare leaders, the path forward is clear: invest in culture design as a strategic imperative, equip every employee to be a brand messenger, and recognize that the journey to exceptional consumer experiences begins with the employee experience. When your people embody your values in every interaction—whether during a routine visit or a moment of crisis—you create an environment where healing happens not just through clinical intervention, but through human connection.

The healthcare organizations that thrive in the future will be those that understand that in healthcare, culture isn’t just how things get done—it’s what gets experienced by every patient who walks through your doors.