5 ways to reduce staff turnover

Job satisfaction has often been equated with efficiency and productivity in the workplace. So what makes employees happy and successful at work? They need fair compensation, a safe environment, support from managers, empowerment to do their jobs the right way, time off to recharge, etc.

The same is true for healthcare workers. In a recent blog post, Jackie Larson, Senior Vice President, Client Services, Avantas, wrote: "Not giving care staff the things they need to feel energised and positive about their crucial role in the continuum of care can create a butterfly effect with terrible ramifications."   

Turnover is the eventual outcome of unchecked poor staff satisfaction, says Larson, who also cites recent studies showing that “staffing issues” is one of the top five causes of turnover.

She suggests these strategies to increase staff satisfaction:

1. Control over schedules

Some organisations employ self-scheduling or a combination of self-scheduling and a traditional scheduling methodology. Regardless of whether an organisation uses this methodology, what's important is for management to seek employee input in the schedule creation process. The key with this however is to ensure that the result is a balanced schedule that will meet patient demand. Schedules should provide employees the opportunity to function at the top of their scope while enjoying a healthy work/life balance.

2. Reduced floating and cancellations

Both of these staff dissatisfiers can be reduced by better aligning staff resources to patient demand. By looking at volume trends, you can identify some very basic patterns in patient volume. For example, Unit A sees a general rise in patient numbers through the week, peaking on Wednesday and Thursday and falling back down during the weekend. Obviously, Monday will require less staff than Wednesday, so your scheduling should try to mirror this.

3. Reduced last-minute recruitment

In addition to the idea discussed in the previous section, a proactive open-shift management methodology that rewards staff for picking up shifts weeks in advance can be implemented. Pairing this with the development of multiple layers of contingency staffing sources that can be deployed just before the shift can alleviate a lot of the unknowns that lead up to “staffing chaos” resulting in last-minute recruitment calls.

4. Fair and equal application of policies

Few things are more frustrating than feeling you are being treated differently than your coworker. Favouritism, even the suspicion of it, is an incredibly destructive force. An organisation’s staffing policies must be the same across the system and uniformly put into practice. Beyond ensuring fairness, the standardised application of policies is also a financially responsible practice. Variance creates inefficiency.

5. Providing transparency

Transparency can mean a lot of things. With scheduling and staffing, transparency can refer to the posting of open shifts, the ability to view schedules online, and submit trades and other staff requests 24/7. Transparency also means the breaking down of silos. These silos can exist between peer groups, hospitals and practice sites across the system, and between different groups, e.g., Nursing, Finance, HR, etc. Transparency provides organisations with the framework to more effectively communicate, implement change when needed, and operate as a single entity instead of a collection of departments.

Source: AMN Healthcare
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