To successfully address these complex challenges, investment firms are actively searching for trustworthy and reputable partners with in-depth expertise in post-trade execution. These partners have the ability to seamlessly navigate the intricate network of transactions and provide unwavering assurance to clients in their post-trade activities. 

This blog explores the intricate landscape of trade confirmation and settlement, unravelling the six pivotal steps underpinning these essential processes. Our aim is to demystify the intricacies and shed light on the crucial stages that culminate in the seamless execution of trades within the financial realm. 

Key Stakeholders in the Trade Settlement Lifecycle 

Navigating Trade Settlement Complexities 

Although the trade settlement process aims for efficiency, its complexity arises from various factors. Let’s delve into some of these intricacies and examine why clients frequently rely on external institutions (such as custodian banks and clearinghouses) for assistance in trade settlement: 

• Regulatory requirements: Different geographical regions and financial markets adhere to distinct regulatory frameworks for trade settlement. Complying with these regulations adds intricacies that require specialized expertise to navigate effectively.  
• International transactions: Cross-border deals introduce additional complexities related to foreign exchange dynamics, tax implications, and adherence to global legal regulations. 
• Trade volume and frequency: Institutional investors and traders often handle a high volume of trades. Managing settlement for such a large volume of transactions can be time-consuming and prone to errors. 
• Trade types and instruments: Financial markets host a variety of trade types and instruments, including equities, bonds, derivatives, and more. Each instrument’s settlement process possesses unique characteristics, contributing to overall complexities.
• Time sensitivity: Timely settlements are crucial to prevent trade failures or penalties. Ensuring all parties meet deadlines requires efficient communication and execution. 
• Risk management: Trade settlement involves counterparty, operational, and market risks. Inadequate risk management could lead to financial losses. 

In response to these challenges, investment firms are actively seeking reliable and proficient partners who can confidently manage post-trade execution activities. This is where expert consulting firms come to the forefront, offering comprehensive trade settlement services tailored to the unique requirements of investment firms. 

These firms understand the pivotal nature of the settlement process and the financial and reputational consequences of errors. With a team of experienced professionals, cutting-edge technology, and a profound grasp of the financial sector, these firms are well-prepared to handle the complexities and intricacies of trade settlement. Through meticulous attention to detail and stringent quality control, they ensure accurate and efficient processing of each trade, mitigating the risk of errors and reducing potential losses for clients. 

Conclusion: 

Trade settlement facilitators play a pivotal role in aiding clients with their trade settlement needs. These facilitators offer an array of services aimed at streamlining and speeding up executing and finalizing trade transactions. Their services typically encompass trade matching, clearance, and settlement. Harnessing cutting-edge technologies and established networks guarantees accuracy, transparency, and security in trade settlements. Clients reap the benefits of minimized operational risks and expedited error-free settlement cycles. Moreover, these facilitators provide valuable insights and reporting, empowering clients to make informed decisions and optimize their trade activities. 

Hedge funds strive to attain strong investor returns through varied investment approaches. They must establish structured fund management, compliance, and reporting systems to accomplish this goal. This is crucial to satisfy investor demands, maintain competitiveness, mitigate risks, adhere to regulations, uphold transparency, improve efficiency, and prevent regulatory issues.  

Efficient middle and back-office operations play a critical role in ensuring seamless operations of the fund, and adherence to regulations, resulting in the generation of accurate and reliable reporting. Systematic middle and back-office operations form the backbone of a well-structured and successful hedge fund by managing the operational aspects that underpin the fund’s activities. 

Fund managers understand that it can be difficult to support and scale their operations team; instead, they are moving to outsourced providers to satisfy critical requirements.  The right Managed Services Partner will streamline their middle and back-office operations, allowing them to focus on core business activities and capitalize on service level agreements, which include expanded coverage across multiple time zones.   

This article explains the advantages of outsourcing middle and back-office functions and how it enables fund managers to enhance their operational efficiency and competitiveness in the market. 

Expert Middle & Back Office Support 

Outsourcing middle and back-office operations provides hedge funds with the benefit of utilizing a team of skilled professionals equipped with specialized knowledge. By harnessing this expertise, fund managers streamline their processes, improve productivity, and enhance risk management practices. 

• Optimizing Hedge Fund Efficiency – Hedge funds employ diverse investment strategies to achieve returns surpassing traditional market benchmarks and align with investor expectations. However, the intricate nature of middle and back-office operations can strain a fund’s resources and time, because it requires meticulous attention to tasks such as trade execution, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance. The shift in focus from operational tasks to more investment-focused tasks allows fund managers to make more informed decisions, adapt quickly to market changes, and seize lucrative opportunities.
• Adaptability – Partnering with a service provider with diverse asset class and accounting expertise equips hedge funds for swift adaptation to market shifts and strategies. This seamless flexibility facilitates scaling in trading new asset classes, bolstering the fund’s ability to navigate market fluctuations and make informed decision-making confidently. Fund managers gain reassurance that their daily middle and back-office operations remain unaffected by altering strategies and trade volumes. Expert service providers adeptly accommodate changes, minimizing implementation time and managing the learning curve effectively.
• Advisory – Choosing the right managed service provider is of utmost importance. A reliable service provider surpasses the responsibility of guaranteeing precise daily middle-office and back-office activities. They proactively collaborate with fund managers to enhance workflows and provide advisory support. This approach involves identifying challenges and offering tailored solutions, like incorporating automated swap settlement and reconciliation processes. This is supported by implementing complex tasks like reconciling performance and financing interest against broker files; and adapting tax lot reconciliations to align with specific client preferences, ensuring accurate Profit and Loss (P&L) and General Ledger Providers play a crucial role in delivering valuable expertise and encouraging the adoption of best practices among their clients. This is achieved through a structured series of workflow assessments that are designed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their client’s operations. The provider’s commitment transcends contractual obligations, validating the decision to outsource by delivering extra value. Such dedication reinforces the partnership and cultivates a successful, efficient, and productive relationship with the hedge fund.
• Utilizing Time-Zone Difference – Asset managers collaborating with overseas outsourcing partners gain access to a dedicated and efficient support team available around the clock, spanning pre-market and early trading hours. The time zone disparity enables hedge funds to receive continuous support and real-time aid, even during their non-working hours. With a local presence in the US office, clients enjoy 24/5 coverage. Moreover, the US-based team collaborates closely with fund managers and operations heads, directly streamlining workflows and executing new strategies. This setup ensures rapid issue resolution and seamless operations, minimizing downtime and maximizing productivity. The presence of a dedicated support team empowers hedge funds to tackle operational challenges and sustain uninterrupted functionality. This dynamic contributes to their overall success and competitiveness within the market. 
• Customization and Scalability – It is imperative that outsourcing partners recognize the distinctiveness of each hedge fund and understand the importance of catering to their unique requirements. Consequently, the right partner will offer tailored solutions to accommodate individual needs. This necessitates that the outsourced partners possess functional expertise and a technical understanding of the client’s preferred systems and technology. Customization may include curated portfolio reporting, specialized tax lot services, portfolio re-balancing, manual journal entry setups, handling swap and borrow financing adjustments, and other ad-hoc requirements unique to the fund’s operations. This level of personalized service ensures that the outsourcing partner can efficiently address the fund’s individual demands, providing comprehensive and bespoke support that enhances operational efficiency and accuracy. The ability to cater to such diverse and specific requirements further validates the value of outsourcing for hedge funds seeking a highly adaptable and dedicated partner. 
• Risk Mitigation & Better Governance – Efficient outsourcing partners play a pivotal role in assisting hedge funds to navigate risks and enhance governance practices expertly. Their valuable service involves adeptly managing and mitigating operational risks while meticulously monitoring Net Asset Value (NAV) and discrepancies stemming from Fund Administrators’ inputs. This comprehensive process encompasses tasks like calculating dividends, swap accruals, and other non-trading calculations, alongside routine daily and month-end checks. The primary goal is to swiftly identify and rectify potential errors, thus minimizing the chances of financial complexities or regulatory issues emerging during audits. This consistent dedication to compliance and regulatory standards nurtures a deep sense of confidence within hedge funds, highlighting the integrity and professionalism that characterize their partners’ operational approaches. 

FinServ Consulting’s Role in the Middle and Back Office Industry 

FinServ Consulting’s managed services team provides efficient trade, cash, and position reconciliations, allowing front office and operations teams access to reliable, updated, and error-free information.  Accurate positions and NAV data allow portfolio managers and traders to confidently focus on order generation, including sizing and position allocations. 

In addition, our service offering includes daily P&L checks, tax lot reporting, swap financing and dividend accrual assistance, hands-on systems entries, and overall guidance with the goal of ensuring efficient month and quarter-end accounting closes.   Any discrepancies or differences with fund administrators, prime brokers, and other counterparties are resolved quickly and remediated in real-time.   

FinServ Consulting places significant emphasis on five critical service areas, enabling the delivery of quality reconciliations and back-office reporting. This is achievable due to FinServ’s extensive expertise in various aspects of hedge fund operations and a deep understanding of systems and technology. 

Conclusion

Outsourcing middle and back-office operations offers hedge funds a strategic advantage by allowing them to focus on their core business, access to specialized expertise, utilize time zone differences for non-working hours support, receive prompt responses, and benefit from tailored solutions. It enhances risk management practices, improves operational efficiency, and ensures better governance, ultimately supporting hedge funds in their pursuit of excellence in the highly competitive financial landscape. 

Private Equity (PE) firms’ operational efficiency is critical in determining their success, especially against shifting market conditions. PE firms typically have complex inter-departmental processes managed through Excel spreadsheets, email communications, and other disparate applications. While Excel and Outlook are essential tools, an Enterprise Task Management system is far more effective in organizing tasks, providing a centralized place to see the status of critical path items, and creating an optimal Private Equity foundation for your overall success.  

FinServ has spent 18 years working with our clients to enhance their business processes. In the past few years, we have focused on assisting our Private Equity clients in Private Equity in leveraging task management software to address some critical areas of their operations. From this experience, we have gained great insight into how a PE firm’s internal operations can be classified into six main stages and how task management tools can optimize their operations on a day-to-day basis: 

Through our work with several Private Equity clients, we have found that the success of implementing an Enterprise Task Management system comes down to a few critical success factors. 

• Ease of Use & Implementation – Sophisticated workflow tools can provide great automation to operations. However, these tools are highly complex and take many months to implement. They often require very technical resources to set up and code solutions. Task management tools offer a simple, intuitive setup that results in implementing a solution in days or weeks, allowing users to see results quickly. 
• Super Users Drive Adoption – Business users can quickly learn how to set up their projects in a Task Management tool, becoming early adopters who share their successes with other groups. Users have set up issue-tracking projects that have quickly spread to several other departments when they share their success stories. 
• Cross-Departmental Collaboration – One client was struggling with the coordination of onboarding employees between their HR and IT departments. The HR team leveraged the Task Management tool to share the new hire process with the IT team. The IT team created its project, which tracked each detailed step of setting up a new employee, including communications with external parties. The new process resulted in a streamlined process where every new employee gets what they need to succeed, resulting in a great first impression of a process often filled with issues at many other firms.
• White-Glove Support – Even if a system is simple to implement, it does not mean every user can handle it independently. Our firm focuses on providing users with all the support they require, including helping them to model their project if desired and providing them with helpful best practice approaches to everyday task management items. When a client has a question about how to do something in the system or something is not working the way they expect, we respond immediately, ensuring they maintain their enthusiasm for the system. Eventually, the users become self-sufficient, but early on, we make sure they have a large degree of handle holding and support.  

The Task Management Tool Marketplace and Deciding What Tool is Right for Your Firm

Different types of task management software tools are available in the marketplace. While some are free and relatively simple, others need to be bought and can be deployed firmwide. We have found that the best Task Management tools provide these core capabilities:

Outside of the key benefits from our extensive work in this area, we have found that there are three main benefits of using task management software for a PE firm: 

Greater Transparency:  

Given that PE firms receive information from various sources – third-party vendors, market data providers, disparate internal systems, and ad-hoc data dumps – it is essential to translate all the relevant information into clearly defined workflows in a task management system. The structured workflow enhances operational efficiencies and provides greater transparency, which is especially important when multiple tasks require inter-departmental cooperation, e.g., when a deal closes, in addition to the Deal Execution team, Tax, Legal, Valuation, and Cash Management teams, etc., need to be notified. Different teams can track their combined workflow and easily compare each other’s progress in the task management system.   

Task management systems can also accommodate the underlying dynamics of a workflow by providing capabilities such as approval tasks, dependencies, etc. For example, if the post-deal closing workflow cannot be started until a deal is closed, the workflow can be structured for the post-closing workflow to be triggered only after a deal is closed. Similarly, approval tasks can be created so that unless a task has been approved, the user cannot progress to the following task. Typically, these are ‘soft blocks’ that can be overridden but are crucial in preserving the workflow structure.  

Greater Integration:  

Private Equity firms use multiple tools to track their operations. For example, many PE firms track the Deal from inception to its funding in Salesforce or other CRM systems.  

Most of the clients we have implemented task management systems used to track this info in their email systems which could have been more efficient and decentralized.  After our implementation, the task management tools connect with different software, such as Salesforce, to ensure the Deal information flows automatically into a central place where all deals and statuses are tracked.  When a Deal is funded, it flows into the task management system in a pre-defined workflow and alerts the relevant teams to complete the assigned tasks.  

Where email can come in handy is to notify a person when they have something important to take care of in the task management system. Task management systems provide more intelligent connectivity with email communications. Through their built-in integrations with Outlook, Gmail, etc., emails can provide detailed information from the task management system and link the user directly to the task they must act upon.  

Some PE teams, like Investor Relations, constantly receive emails from investors and prospects. Many task management tools allow emails to be forwarded to a specific project. They can intelligently scrape critical information from the email to automatically create a task for the IR team to act upon. By providing the ability to translate emails directly into tasks, the task management systems significantly reduce the manual effort required to distill the information into actionable items and assign it to individuals as needed. 

Task management tools can also integrate with file-sharing software such as SharePoint Online. Private equity internal operations rely heavily on spreadsheets housed in a central location, e.g., SharePoint. Task management software can integrate with SharePoint, allowing users to attach their files, located in SharePoint, to the workflow as needed. Users can easily be redirected to the SharePoint file through the task management software whenever they need to access the files while completing their tasks. Task management tools can maintain the same privacy rights as SharePoint, thus protecting the security of sensitive documents. 

Greater Reporting:  

Practical task management tools report essential metrics in real-time, allowing users to draw insights about any workflow’s progress. For example, a task management system can produce graphics and visualizations on multiple metrics, such as the number of tasks completed, the number of tasks assigned to a specific user, etc. This allows an executive to quickly see projects or processes in trouble or critical staff members whose workload is too heavy. 

Teams can use these reports to easily track the overall project’s progress and gauge individual members’ performance. For example, through sorting and filtering capabilities, the task management systems allow the users to filter the tasks by an assignee and check if they have completed them on time. Additionally, if a task remains incomplete beyond the due date, it will be highlighted, and the assignee will be notified accordingly. 

Moreover, these reports can easily be exported from the system. Flexible reporting options allow users to customize the reports according to their needs. This provides a quick and effective way to fully understand the workflow’s progress and ensure that delays can be identified promptly.  

Conclusion

Private Equity firms have complex internal operations and continue to rely too heavily on spreadsheets, email, and disparate application software to track their internal operations. These methods could be more inefficient and error-prone, and valuable energy and time are often spent searching for the data to verify its accuracy.  

Adopting a task management system can streamline the workflows across multiple teams and provide greater visibility of each team’s performance. Centralizing all tasks in one system makes it easy for line-level staff or senior executives to get the information they require quickly.  Greater transparency ensures that any bottlenecks can be easily identified and addressed, strengthening organizational transparency and efficiency.  

Whether you are implementing Workday for the first time or are an existing Workday user, proper support is needed to ensure your Workday experience is a success. To realize the system’s full potential and adequately support your business users, Workday must be supported by resources capable of taking on many tasks. These tasks can vary from answering how-to questions, troubleshooting issues, administering recurring events, updating calendar/schedule periods, liaising with Workday, and analyzing/deploying Workday release features.

When building your support team or enhancing it, it is essential to look for the following key characteristics. These characteristics are attributes of individuals who know Workday in and out and how the industry operates. These attributes will result in a support team that can efficiently handle any Workday request.

1. Resources with Industry Experience – Support personnel with experience in the industry are more efficient than newer resources without the requisite background. In addition, these resources can understand and diagnose issues quickly and accurately as they have been through similar situations before.
2. Less Specialization – Resources knowledgeable in multiple Workday modules provide more comprehensive solutions to issues. In addition, cross-module expertise enables these resources to know what components are related, how they impact each other, and what is part of any total solution.
3. Documentation Skills – Resources that know how to create well-written documentation provide value beyond configuring Workday. The documentation they produce will be invaluable to retaining institutional and contextual knowledge, mitigate against staff turnover, and provide a knowledge base for others to leverage.

Resources with Industry Experience

It is important not to fixate only on what resources know in Workday. Knowing the ins and outs of the industry is just as valuable. This knowledge is gained only through experience and provides a perspective on how things are supposed to work regardless of the kind of system.

For example, it is quite common for terminating employees at Asset Managers to be subject to a Garden Leave policy where the terminated worker is essentially paid not to work for a set amount of time after their termination. Workday does not come pre-configured with the means to put someone on Garden Leave; it will be up to your firm to configure this. Resources with experience administering and using Garden Leaves will know how to configure it properly. In Workday, the easy part is setting up the Garden Leave itself so that the terminations could go on leave and not terminate until the end of their Leave. However, there are additional considerations to review regarding whether Garden Leave terminations should be included in active headcount, where they should sit in your organization, or whether they should be visible to employees outside of HR. Support resources knowledgeable about Garden Leaves would know how to configure Workday optimally, focusing on the pitfalls to look out for and specific reporting requirements.

This is just one specific example; however, with so many moving pieces for a feature commonly used by Asset Managers, it is critical to vet resources on their knowledge of Workday and how they have applied Workday to meet HR policies at other firms in the same industry.

Less Specialization

Having less specialization in a specific Workday component may seem counterintuitive, but in our experience, it is quite the opposite. Sure, a specialist in a particular Workday module can expertly configure its module. However, this specialization comes at a cost where they cannot configure other modules or realize the more significant impact a request may have on other areas of Workday.

As a result, a specialist may not be able to implement a comprehensive solution. Or, their lack of knowledge of other Workday components would introduce complexities when handoff and coordination are required between multiple resources.

For example, in Workday Financials, you can set up a Punchout where Workday integrates with a vendor allowing you to purchase items (like office supplies or computer hardware) directly from the vendor, and the order information would flow directly into Financials. Setting this up would involve creating a Purchase Order, matching the invoice, capitalizing the asset (if applicable), and setting up a depreciation schedule. Again, a resource that was knowledgeable in multiple Workday components would be able to advise you on what to watch out for and the best path to implement the solution.

Documentation Skills

The most overlooked attribute when evaluating Workday resources is the mindset and ability to document everything and do it well. Documentation is critical as resolving Workday issues is often an involved process involving researching the subject, implementing the solution, and testing multiple scenarios. Furthermore, many types of problems and projects repeat themselves (i.e., an employee thinks their Time Off Balance is incorrect, Performance Cycles happen twice a year, annual Open Enrollment, and new time off plans). Documentation can prevent having to research and resolve the same issues more than once.

Proper and well-written documentation will preserve the work done, allowing you to retain institutional knowledge, lessen the impact of any resource turnover, and enable work to be done more efficiently. The team will spend less time re-examining common issues, attempting to understand past decisions, and more time resolving the actual problem.

Retaining knowledge of your existing setup is particularly relevant across the alternative investment client base, where firms often devise complex allocation rules to determine the true profitability of each business line.   These rules result in a ‘fully-loaded’ P&L by business line and can be used in some cases to determine the compensation of portfolio managers, traders, or other essential employees associated with the business. In some cases, firms will want access to this P&L but not have it truly posted in the general ledger and instead use it for reporting purposes. This necessitates customized reporting that may exclude or include these allocations depending upon the view of the person running the report. When troubleshooting or modifying these reports, it may take a resource that is unfamiliar with the setup much longer and may lead them to recommend modifications that are not appropriate. It may also require lengthy explanations from the business that is not the best use of time and could otherwise be avoided.  

Conclusion

Successfully supporting Workday is not easy, as there are many types of users to deal with and a wide array of issues to resolve. Therefore, selecting the proper staff to support Workday is in your best interest. Your support personnel must be capable of working with multiple Workday components, documenting solutions and decisions well, and having knowledge of the business to create solutions that fit within the industry. By recognizing and evaluating resources against these critical traits, you will be well-positioned to field the right Workday support team for your organization.

FinServ’s long history servicing the world’s top Alternative Asset Managers, combined with our deep Workday expertise, make us a natural option to help you find a world-class Workday support team.

Large healthcare companies can have hundreds of business locations and thousands of departments across these offices, housing thousands more employees. Large occupancy and physician compensation costs must be carefully budgeted and tracked for strategic planning; however, the FP&A data collection process for these line items can be particularly onerous, often using outdated systems and Excel manipulations.

The implementation of business intelligence tools with existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems makes data collection more efficient and timelier, leading to improved reporting and decision-making.

Implementing Business Intelligence Tools

FinServ’s client, a large and rapidly growing healthcare organization, recently implemented a SAAS Facilities Management software for more efficient space utilization and planning to enable the client to track moves/adds and changes to departmental space at every location. Prior to the implementation, the departmental space usage was tracked in an Excel file, so the data quickly became stale as departments changed locations or moved from one floor in a building to another. Since occupancy costs are budgeted and allocated to each department based on square footage, the stale square footage numbers became meaningless with respect to budgeting and allocating actual occupancy costs to the respective departments.

The project was a significant undertaking. Floor plans for hundreds of locations had to be obtained and converted from PDF to CAD format, and the space on each floor required confirmation from the respective clinical managers in each department. The successful implementation allowed the company to update moves/adds/changes to the real estate portfolio on a timely basis, providing efficient data collection and reporting on departmental occupancy costs in the FP&A process. This allowed management to make more timely decisions on the use of space. The software also enables the organization to manage its vacant space and incorporate that information for the planning and budgeting for new providers.  Combining this information with operational statistics such as patient volumes allows management to forecast profitability by location and make decisions to expand or close locations based on that profitability. The company can now decide on the quality of staff at specific locations using clinical data on patient volumes and satisfaction to make staffing and compensation decisions.

Overhauling the Compensation Process

Our client’s physician compensation process was similarly complicated and outdated. The methodology of compensating physicians is also constantly changing. At one point, physicians were compensated on the P&L they generated, which forced physicians to spend time managing their costs, such as the number of clinical staff they required to support them. Physician compensation, or “Phy Comp” was also tracked and calculated in Excel, which was unsustainable for a rapidly growing company.

The implementation of Business Intelligence tools with the company ERP systems gave the company the transparency to work relative value units (“wRVU”), which are standard units of measurement used to establish values for health care procedures or codable direct patient care experiences. The transparency of this data enabled the company to move to a production-based compensation plan for physicians, which allows physicians to spend less time managing their costs and more time dedicated to patient care.

The company is also moving towards value-based-pay incentives as more data around the patient care experience has become available in the ERP systems. The company has also undertaken a project implementing a compensation system to automate salary and bonus calculations, documenting processes and controls for IPO readiness. All these project improvements will streamline the FP&A processes with respect to Phy Comp.

Forward-thinking healthcare companies are also adopting the Financial Services model of offshoring support functions of their ERP systems to low-cost locations like India. These cost-effective managed services offer excellent support to resolve issues through the client support ticketing process quickly.

Technological improvements to ERP systems result in improved transparency of clinical data from billing systems. This allows for a more granular process in using detailed data for financial analytics and forecasting and can significantly impact financial results when utilized effectively by management.

Conclusion

FinServ Consulting, LLC has technical expertise with respect to systems, data collection, and US GAAP accounting to add value to healthcare companies, including the FP&A and ERP domains. Our team is well-positioned to help ensure the success of your next project. If you would like a full picture of FinServ’s methodologies or capabilities in running a project for your healthcare organization, please contact FinServ Consulting at info@finservconsulting.com or call 646-603-3799.

Employee engagement surveys measure employee passion for the job, commitment to the organization, and alignment with firm values. FinServ assisted a leading healthcare services company to select and implement a new employee engagement survey platform. The client owns multiple hospitals, Ambulatory Service Centers (ASCs), and outpatient clinics across the United States. Likewise, participation in the annual engagement survey is an important part of the healthcare site accreditation process. Additionally, the survey results directly lead to tailored action plans for each site location.

Since COVID-19, it has become even more crucial for healthcare organizations to monitor the well-being of their employees. As the pandemic stretched on, the healthcare industry witnessed high burnout rates amongst its employees and the FinServ client wanted to ensure that they were supporting employees through the unprecedented difficulties placed on medical professionals.

Engagement Survey Questions – Examples

The survey questions focused on the employees’ overall satisfaction with the organization. These questions corresponded to the following categories:

• Workplace Satisfaction: The first set of questions targeted an employee’s satisfaction with the organization and their work team e.g., “Are you satisfied with your work team?”
• Growth Opportunities: The second set of questions focused on whether each employee’s work is meaningful to him/her and if they have ample opportunities to learn and grow. For example, one of the questions stated: “Do you find your work meaningful?” 
• Compliance Regulations: The final set of questions surveyed each employee’s familiarity with the compliance regulatory requirements followed by the client e.g., “Do you know the name of the Chief Compliance Officer at the organization?”

These questions were intended to provide valuable feedback to the client, which would be useful in retaining its valuable talent.

Key Success Criteria – New Engagement Management System

Given its complex structure, the client required a survey system that would meet both its core business requirements and regulatory Clinical and Compliance functions.

The client determined three key success criteria for the new EMS:

• User-Friendliness: The new system must be extremely user-friendly and easy to administer. As the client intended to conduct multiple surveys for the different units through a single platform, the new system needed to efficiently administer surveys at different points in time for various organizational units.
• Analytic Capabilities: The system should consider the unique nature of the client’s organizational structure and provide great flexibility in collecting and interpreting the survey results. This not only would provide the client easy access to the historical data but will also customize the analysis based upon each team size, providing an ‘apple to apple’ comparison.
• Reporting Capabilities: The system must possess data analytics capabilities, which could compile historical survey responses within the system’s repository and utilize them over time for accurate comparison. This would provide the client a unique opportunity to compare their employee responses over time and focus on any outliers. 

These questions were intended to provide valuable feedback to the client, which would be useful in retaining its valuable talent.

FinServ’s Vendor Selection Approach – New Engagement Management System

The FinServ team conducted a methodical vendor selection process using standardized processes and cumulative expert experience to ensure that everything from selecting the vendor to the survey rollout was seamless.

FinServ’s standard vendor selection process is typically divided into three main stages:

• Step 1 – Investigate: The FinServ team documented the current and future business requirements of the client. The project team held generic demos for long list vendors to validate current vendor landscape capabilities. Based on these inputs, a short list of vendors were invited to participate in a Request for Proposal (RFP).
• Step 2 – Assess: FinServ reviewed and scored each vendor’s RFP response using a quantitative score based on weighted question priority, supplemented by an overall qualitative assessment and cost analysis for each participant. The client selected finalist vendors for participation in a formal scripted demo process using the clients most important and/or complex workflows as evaluation criteria.
• Step 3 – Recommend: Detailed reference checks were conducted and FinServ prepared an recommendation presentation for the client executive selection review committees including a “winning” vendor, cost analysis, and proposed service level tier to target.

Under FinServ’s guidance, the client was able to make a thorough and educated decision to find the best long-term partner for their business under a tight timeline to both select, implement, and deploy their engagement survey.

Deploying the Annual Survey Questionnaire

After negotiating the final contract, FinServ worked closely with the client to construct the engagement survey and survey deployment process itself. Survey system administration historically posed a challenge. The client wanted to streamline the process to make it easy for employees to participate, but employee information was spread across three different Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) across its multiple facilities. FinServ spearheaded the client’s data migration onto the survey administrator.

After the data was uploaded into the system, FinServ took painstaking measures to verify the data. This included verifying the number of records, required fields and attributes, date formats, and removing the duplicate values to match the original data. This exercise ensured that the data upload into the new system was carried out smoothly and eliminated any inconsistencies providing the client with a robust data set to rely on for their new survey administrator. Additionally, FinServ’s expertise in data migration and data handling ensured a smooth enrollment of each survey user in the client’s system.

Finally, due to the client’s hierarchical organizational structure, emphasis was placed on creating the managerial hierarchy for different organizational units. The hierarchy was designed to ensure that each manager could view the aggregate response of only their team. FinServ worked closely with the survey vendor to implement stringent anonymity conditions. The client had historically struggled with post-survey analysis and ensuring the complete anonymity of the responses. This resulted in employees being hesitant to record honest responses, making it difficult for the client to implement meaningful reforms. In the new system, hard restrictions on how granular responses could be analyzed were implemented. E.g., managers would be unable to see individual responses for a team comprising of less than five members to ensure confidentiality and response safety. This allowed the client to get the analytical insight and depth they needed without compromising survey integrity and employee confidentiality.

Benchmarking Survey Results

Employee engagement benchmarks are critical to providing context for the employee responses to the survey questions. Using the benchmarks tied to the client’s survey results to a portfolio of other healthcare companies, FinServ’s client was able to add additional context to the survey data collected in order to identifying areas of weakness/strength across the organization to help structure leadership, cultural, and organization incentives.

The Outcome

The client was extremely happy with the smooth rollout of the engagement survey and the high survey participation rate. In addition, the benchmark selected by FinServ for the engagement survey proved to be a successful choice; the client was delighted with the reports created from the responses and found the benchmark a useful criterion to compare the survey responses. The client identified multiple opportunities to act on employees’ feedback and involve employees in co-creating actions to continuously improve their work experience.

In addition to designing and launching the engagement survey, FinServ additionally engaged to help the client design two other surveys in the portal. These included an engagement survey and a compliance survey targeted only at physicians. FinServ supported the creation of those surveys and the overall setup of the portal, which enhanced the efficiency of the client’s survey cycle. This ensured that the client could easily launch any of the surveys electronically, drastically reducing the time and cost associated with administering the surveys on paper. This also ensured that the client would be unlikely to rely on any other third party for designing and launching the surveys from now onwards, which added a long-term value to the client’s business operations.

Conclusion

Overall, employee engagement surveys can help the organizations retain their talents, especially in the wake of ongoing Great Resignation. Given how crucial engagement surveys are, it is critical that they are administered properly. By leveraging its vast expertise, FinServ can help your organization select an optimal engagement management system best suited to your unique needs.

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services: info@finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.