Stability is key to a successful healthcare organization because consistent staffing ensures better patient care. Retaining healthcare employees is crucial, as the field typically faces high turnover, leading to higher costs for training new staff. By improving retention strategies, healthcare organizations can lower recruitment costs, boost employee loyalty, and provide smoother patient care.
Here are the seven best strategies to increase healthcare talent retention. Refining the work environment, enhancing professional development, and evaluating staff’s compensation and benefits packages are great ways to start.
1. Foster a Positive Work Environment
The first step to enhancing healthcare staff retention is to foster a positive work environment in every way possible. There should be open communication channels with your medical and administrative staff daily. Hold a 10— 20-minute team meeting before opening each day to ensure everyone is on the same page. During a shift change, hold another meeting during downtime for the morning staff to inform the afternoon personnel of what’s going on for the day.
Recognize achievements that every staff member makes. For example, a medical representative who has made a great impact on patient-centric care can be recognized as an employee of the month. Don’t forget to recognize achievements among administrative staff, too. Maybe there were fewer no-show patients during one month because of the increased efforts of an administrative staff member placing reminder calls and sending out reminder text messages. Shout them out during a work meeting, and if you’d like, give them a small reward, such as a $20 gift card to their favorite store or restaurant.
Last but not least, don’t forget to bestow opportunities for collaboration. Mentorship programs, cross-training initiatives, and interdisciplinary team meetings for cross-departmental discussions are all great collaborative efforts to enhance operational efficiency and improve patient care. In-house or externally planned team-building activities can also ensure a cohesive work environment.
2. Invest In Professional Development
Help employees gain continuous learning and professional opportunities to improve healthcare employee retention. Companies that show their employees matter to them in different ways enhance worker loyalty by representatives staying with one company for long-term career development rather than switching to multiple healthcare organizations.
Partner with organizations that offer training and certification for various medical positions. For example, an entry-level administrative assistant interested in nursing can start a college program and eventually be onboarded with your healthcare organization.
Discover the top medical conferences throughout the nation. This will ensure that your healthcare organization’s doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel are informed of the latest industry trends while networking professionally with other individuals in the field.
3. Provide Competitive Compensation and Benefits
Evaluate your current compensation and benefits package for each position in your healthcare organization. Compare them to industry standards. Are you paying your employees a little higher or lower than these average standards?
A great way to ensure you are paying your employees what they are worth is by looking at the national average pay for all positions on the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For example, physicians and surgeons can make about $115 per hour.
What does the benefits package look like for your full-time employees? Ensure you offer competitive health insurance, retirement, 401(K), and paid time off benefits. Better benefits mean that the employees would be more willing to stay with your healthcare organization to keep them.
4. Embrace Flexible Scheduling
Work-life balance is an important factor to consider for workers in any industry, especially in healthcare. Some healthcare professionals work longer than the standard 8-hour shift, sometimes working 12 to 16 hours or more at a time. If understaffing issues are that bad, certain medical personnel may have to sleep and bathe at the facility before returning to work the next day.
Flexible scheduling is the hallmark of a satisfied medical professional. Allow your employees to self-schedule based on their availability within reason. If individuals have to switch shifts, allow them to do so for them to handle their responsibilities outside of work. Helping employees achieve this work-life balance can increase job satisfaction and improve patient care measures.
5. Recognize and Reward Contributions
Let’s discuss rewarding employees’ contributions to the healthcare organization. You can go the extra mile by offering some employees time off for their exceptional work ethic. For enduring patient rushes due to pandemics or natural disasters, give staff members a bonus for their extra hard work during these difficult times.
6. Enhance Onboarding Processes
Onboarding processes should be streamlined to help integrate new nurses and other medical personnel into the team quickly and efficiently. Have a new nurse shadow a veteran nurse so they can learn the ropes of daily operations in patient care. The shadowing should only be for about 2-3 days to help the new hire get the hang of everything before trying to perform tasks independently.
For the paperwork portion of onboarding, get it done virtually. This reduces money spent on printing papers out and streamlines virtual paperwork storage once the new hire completes each required piece.
7. Collaborate With a Nurse Staffing Agency
A healthcare hiring strategy should also include working with a nurse staffing agency. This is the best approach for managing unexpected workforce shortages and fluctuations in patient demand. Traveling nurses are essential for handling unexpected employee callouts, workers on family leave, and if any candidates exited the company recently. Working with traveling nurses can reduce recruitment expenses for onboarding and training part-time or full-time personnel as they can fill in whenever needed.
