Inside DMF Hospital’s 2-Year Engagement Transformation
Employees
Headquarters
Industry
Dr. Mohammad Al-Fagih Hospital is a leading private healthcare institution in Saudi Arabia, managing a demanding environment of over 1,000 physicians, paramedics, nurses, and administrative staff. Between 2024 and 2026, the hospital underwent a remarkable transformation in how it measures, understands, and acts on employee sentiment.
By replacing a manual process with a modern employee engagement platform, Dr. Mohammad Al-Fagih (DMF) achieved the following in just two years:
- Metric Gains: Overall engagement climbed from 7.4 to 8.2, and eNPS rose by 28 points (from +10 to +38).
- Targeted Action: Instead of relying on broad findings, the hospital utilized segmented data to drive corporate initiatives alongside unit-level action plans.
- A New Rhythm: Engagement is no longer an annual HR checklist at DMF. Today, new employees learn about the survey on day one, nursing staff complete it without prompting, and the executive committee uses the results to evaluate the hospital's overall organizational health.
DMF had been measuring employee sentiment since 2013. But as the hospital grew past 1,000 staff (rotating shifts, multiple departments, dozens of managers), the internal survey process became impossible to run well.
The manual process left the HR team with little time to actually analyze what the data meant. To build an engagement culture that could outperform global healthcare standards,
In 2023, DMF’s leadership set out to find a platform that solved all three problems at once:
- Industry Benchmarking: Because Saudi organizations rarely publish their survey data, DMF's leadership had no external reference point. When HR presented results, they couldn't answer the board's most pressing question: how do we compare to others in our industry? The new platform needed to provide verified industry comparisons to give internal results meaningful context.
- Deep Segmentation for Targeted Action: Hospital-wide averages were not enough to act on. The hospital needed a platform that could filter and segment results by department, manager, job role, age group, and tenure so that leaders could design specific interventions at every level of the organization.
- Third-Party Trust: When surveys were run internally, employees were naturally cautious about speaking freely. The hospital needed an external platform to hold the data independently, so employees could be confident their identities were protected.
Engagesoft emerged as the clear choice in late 2023, aligning with DMF's need for reliable benchmarks, deep segmentation, and absolute trust. This decision set the stage for the transformation journey ahead, shifting the hospital's focus from collecting data to driving change.
With a new platform in place, DMF kicked off a two-year effort to make engagement a core piece of their everyday culture. They broke the rollout down into manageable cycles, ensuring that feedback from the staff actually turned into action across every department.
Cycle 1 (2024): Building Participation From the Ground Up
When the survey launched, the Head of HR personally visited departments, speaking with nurses and administrative staff to encourage participation.
DMF built the survey into its general orientation program so every new employee joined already knowing what it was and what the hospital had already changed because of it. The automated reminder system handled follow-ups across the entire workforce without burdening the HR team.
Departments with strong participation were publicly recognized, and the HR team shared dashboard screenshots with all directors in real time so each leader could see exactly where their department stood and act on it immediately.
When results came in, Engagesoft's dashboard gave the HR team a segmented view of engagement filtered by department, job role, manager, nationality, age group, and tenure, all in one place.
The third-party anonymity provided by Engagesoft also encouraged employees to speak more openly than in previous internal surveys.
The first cycle confirmed where the hospital was strong and surfaced two clear corporate priorities: leadership quality and employee wellbeing.
Cycle 2 (2025): Turning Insight Into Org-Wide Action
Every decision this cycle ran through Engagesoft dashboard's filtering capability. Where the data pointed to a pattern across the hospital, the team moved at the corporate level. Where it pointed to a specific manager or department, they handed the report directly to that leader and let them own it.
Each manager received their own filtered report and was asked to build an action plan. For larger departments, the HR team visited in person. When the platform’s alerts flagged the same issues across multiple check-ins, HR would meet that manager directly to walk through the findings and agree on next steps together.
Open-ended responses added a second layer: comments were grouped by theme and cross-referenced with exit interview data, surfacing issues the reasoning behind scores that the numbers alone couldn't fully explain.
At the corporate level, three areas emerged that needed more than a quick fix:
- Leadership: DMF built a program combining monthly workshops with a digital platform, and trained internal coaches so the capability would remain inside the organization long term.
- Wellbeing: DMF launched a multi-week Health and Wellness Campaign covering ergonomic assessments across every workstation and shift, alongside personal budgeting workshops after open-ended responses flagged financial stress. By the next cycle, organizational attention to wellbeing climbed from 6.3 to 7.3.
- Compensation, DMF conducted full salary reviews against market rates every two years, with particular attention given to paramedics, who scored lowest on compensation. The hospital also created dedicated career paths for high-turnover roles and met with department managers to revise work schedules and give paramedic staff more flexibility.
Cycle 3 (2026): Engagement as the Operating Rhythm
By the third cycle, participation no longer required the same personal effort the first cycle demanded.
The hospital's nursing staff completed the survey without prompting. Managers discussed their team's data as part of normal performance conversations. Department heads built their own action plans as a matter of course.
The 2026 results held and extended the gains from 2025, with eNPS reaching the seventies. DMF's HR team continued using the dashboard to monitor shifts, including a closer look at senior leadership perception scores that had softened slightly, which immediately triggered a new round of listening and action planning at that level.
The Impact: Gains Across Every Dimension
Between 2024 and 2025, DMF recorded meaningful progress across every major engagement indicator.
Work autonomy and independence recorded the largest single gain at +1.2 points, driven directly by the leadership program.
Compensation climbed +1.0 following a structured salary review cycle and new career paths for high-turnover roles.
Organizational attention to wellbeing rose +1.0 after the hospital-wide wellness campaign.
eNPS Went From +10 to +38 in Two Years
By 2026, only 8% of employees said they would not recommend DMF as a place to work, a figure that pushed the hospital's eNPS well above what healthcare organizations typically record.
Part of this came from a cultural insight the HR team identified early. In Arabic culture, scoring 7 out of 10 feels generous.
In eNPS, a 7 makes someone a passive and a 6 makes someone a detractor. DMF worked with Engagesoft to add plain-language score descriptions directly to the eNPS question and made eNPS literacy a standing item in leadership meetings so every manager could explain the metric to their teams.