Door County Medical Center deemed a ‘great place to work’

Rich Palzewic

Staff

August 24, 2026

STURGEON BAY – Nearly 90% of Door County Medical Center (DCMC) employees would recommend the organization as a “great place to work.”

That’s according to a recent internal employee engagement survey designed to gauge satisfaction and workplace culture.

DCMC Chief Quality Officer Nancy Daoust said the survey is one of the strongest indicators of overall employee experience and organizational culture.

She said the responses reflect a culture built through teamwork, support for one another and a shared commitment to DCMC’s patients and community.

“We are very happy with the results, but we also take a look at how we can do better and improve,” she said. “We celebrate the positives but don’t sweep the negatives under the rug.”

Daoust – who has been with the organization since 2008 – said some form of the survey has been conducted for as “long as I can remember.”

“We typically conduct the survey twice a year,” she said. “We do a full engagement survey once a year, and then at the six-month point, we do what we call a ‘pulse check.’ That is a shorter, smaller survey. In other words, we survey our employees every six months.”

Daoust said the full engagement survey is either conducted by a third-party vendor or administered internally through an anonymous survey tool.

“It alternates every year,” she said. “One year, a third-party vendor will administer the survey, and then the next year, DCMC will conduct it.”

Though it might seem “obvious,” Shannon Rass – an employee engagement and wellness coach at DCMC – said there are various reasons for the survey.

Because employees “make an organization tick and are the most valuable resources,” she said DCMC wants to make sure it is keeping a pulse on how employees feel when they come to work.

“It helps us identify trends and things we might not identify through those individual conversations or team meetings,” she said. “We also want to make sure we’re maintaining our standards, so that’s why the frequency of conducting these surveys is important for us.”

Daoust said the same principles that apply to personal life can carry into the workplace: Happy employees tend to have a better attitude. 

“How our employees feel about their workplace and how they feel while they’re here impacts the quality of care [they] provide,” she said. “That said, we want to make sure all our employees feel supported and have the resources they need to provide the best care for our patients.”

More on the survey

Daoust said the twice-yearly survey is voluntary and anonymous, giving employees the choice of whether to participate. 

Rass said in the latest survey, 525 employees participated – “a good, healthy amount.”

“On our full survey, we ask 40 questions,” she said. “Those are answered from ‘strongly agree’ down to ‘strongly disagree.’ If they don’t agree or disagree with the question asked, there is also a ‘neutral’ choice. Sometimes, people don’t feel positively or negatively about certain questions. Additionally, sometimes we ask two open-ended questions to give us a bit more detail.”

Rass said the “pulse check” survey is designed to be brief, while repeating some questions year over year.

“We like to keep that survey to about 10 or 15 questions,” she said. “The reason we ask some of the same questions is so we can track results over time – we ask them for a specific reason.”

Employees selecting either “agree” option counted toward the 90%, Rass said, while those selecting either “disagree” option did not. 

“If ‘neutral’ was selected, it didn’t count toward anything,” she said. “One reason we use a third-party vendor is to benchmark ourselves against other healthcare organizations. From our experience and what we know, we feel the 90th percentile is a good number.”

Seeing the value in conducting the survey twice yearly, Daoust said the results have stayed consistent in the past few years.

“I would say the number has hovered right around 89-91%,” she said. “It’s been very consistent, and we haven’t seen wild swings, one way or the other.”

Daoust said 2026 could have been a year when employee satisfaction dipped, given the demands of implementing EPIC – a software platform that helps healthcare organizations store, manage and share patient information electronically – in February, as it was a “huge endeavor.”

“There was a lot of stress and anxiety related to the change,” she said. “Our employees did an amazing job through the implementation, and it was nice to see that even through that huge implementation, we were still able to do very well on the survey. It’s nice to know our culture at DCMC allows us to weather these storms. COVID-19 was another example of this.”

Still work to be done

Though 90% satisfaction is a healthy approval rating, Rass said the 10% is what “gives us pause.”

She said that’s where DCMC looks at the trends over the course of several years.

“Are there certain areas that are not rating as positively?” she said. “This is where leaders come in, and if a certain mark has fallen, we complete action plans with teams. We try to focus on the positives and the momentum moving forward.”

Daoust said organizations “fall behind” when they only celebrate the positives and don’t learn from the negatives.

If DCMC only focused on the positives, she said the organization wouldn’t improve in areas of need.

“There is always room for improvement,” she said. “The action plans we create are made specific to areas within the organization that might have lower scores, or maybe it’s a certain population of people. If you’re not feeling like you can say DCMC is a great place to work, we want to know why and how we can make it better for you. We take the scores seriously.”

Daoust said DCMC isn’t shying away from areas needing improvement, with collaboration between teams and growth and development emerging as two areas of concern. 

“Even in those areas, our scores are still very good,” she said. “The numbers seemed really low to us, but when benchmarking the numbers [to other healthcare organizations], we were within the average.”

Once areas of need are identified, Daoust said employees are also asked for input.

“Basically, we asked them, ‘How do you want us to address [your concerns and goals] for growth and development?’” she said. “We found that DCMC employees want to have conversations with their leaders about growth and development, so we can implement things to make sure those conversations are happening.”

Both Daoust and Rass said DCMC plans to continue the surveys, with most questions remaining consistent.

“Maybe some of the wording might change to avoid confusion, but it’s helpful to have the same or similar questions so we can check on what’s trending,” Rass said. “We try not to make a lot of drastic changes in the questions if we can control that. One little change in how you word something may change people’s perceptions.”