TEAMWORK Survey

OVERVIEW  

The TEAMWORK survey is a validated, 33-question tool designed to objectively measure and benchmark levels of teamwork among nursing staff in hospital inpatient units.

• Quantifies key teamwork elements such as trust, leadership, and team orientation with an easy-to-administer, 5-point scale, allowing for targeted improvement strategies.
• Fills a critical need in healthcare workforce analytics, providing benchmark data to help hospitals increase staff satisfaction, retention, and care outcomes.

BACKGROUND  

Effective collaboration among hospital nursing teams is central to staff satisfaction, retention, and positive patient outcomes—all crucial concerns in modern healthcare. Despite the significance of these “soft” factors, healthcare organizations have lacked robust, practical tools to systematically assess and compare teamwork dynamics within and across nursing units.

Current assessments typically gauge overall job satisfaction or engagement without specifically measuring the teamwork factors most strongly linked to day-to-day clinical effectiveness and morale. Industry trends—such as persistent staffing shortages and growing emphasis on employee well-being—are creating an urgent demand for data-driven management tools focused on workforce optimization. The TEAMWORK survey directly addresses this gap by enabling organizations to assess, benchmark, and improve nursing teamwork with scientific rigor.

INNOVATION  

The TEAMWORK survey advances teamwork evaluation from subjective observation to actionable measurement by using 33 carefully designed questions to quantify key aspects of nursing team dynamics. Developed and validated in collaboration with leading hospitals, the survey translates complex elements like trust, role clarity, leadership, and communication into standardized scores for meaningful analysis.

Unlike broad employee engagement instruments, the TEAMWORK survey is tailored for acute care nursing environments and rigorously demonstrated to be reliable and valid. This allows healthcare organizations to pinpoint unit-specific strengths and improvement areas, make informed comparisons internally or externally, and deploy targeted strategies to build high-performing, satisfied teams. By providing clear, actionable feedback that links teamwork to overall organizational success, the TEAMWORK survey supplies healthcare leaders with a novel and essential tool to drive workforce excellence in a competitive, rapidly evolving arena.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

PROJECT LINKS:  

• "Improving Nursing Unit Teamwork"
• "An Intervention to Enhance Nursing Staff Teamwork and Engagement"
• "The Development and Testing of the Nursing Teamwork Survey"
• "What Does Nursing Teamwork Look Like? A Qualitative Study"
• "Nursing staff teamwork and job satisfaction"

DEPARTMENT/LAB:  School of Nursing

LICENSE:  

© 2019, The Regents of the University of Michigan Beatrice Kalisch, School of Nursing

These materials are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License CC BY-NC.

Adaptations are permitted as long as you attribute this original work and copyright statement.