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In today’s labor market, retaining high-quality staff is just as important as recruiting them as human resource leaders look to healthcare workforce management software to streamline modern scheduling, leverage analytics, and build relevant sustainable workforce strategies.
Voluntary employee turnover rates for healthcare occupations in various industries — especially in the medical center and hospital space — have either gradually risen or skyrocketed over the past several years. Healthcare organizations can get stung by these high turnover rates, especially for nurses, medical assistants, and other occupations.
Reducing Turnover with Healthcare Workforce Management Software
Employee retention remains No. 1 on the list of priorities for several medical practitioners and organizational leaders who are also in need of an optimized healthcare workforce management software. It’s more important than ever for a medical practice to retain the best possible team to power daily operations. The overwhelming majority of medical establishments in the United States have formal employee appreciation programs to reduce worker turnover and maximize savings.
There are many ways to show appreciation for employees. Awarding them for high-quality work, recognizing their accomplishments with shout-out cards, and other cultural and social work initiatives that show respect and honor are all great options to consider. Retaining valuable employees can be much easier with these programs in play. Employee appreciation programs usually result in lower turnover rates across nearly every occupational position.
A healthcare organization can also retain high-quality staff by addressing management and senior leadership issues. Poor management is usually the biggest reason for voluntary employee turnover in the industry. Managers and leaders should show their employees they care about their needs. Feedback, career discussions, effective communication, and involving employees in decision-making are all principles managers should use in leading by example.
Human resource leaders can use valuable tools integrated within a healthcare workforce management software platform to engage employees. How? Promote and host town halls, webinars, roundtables — and send direct emails. These are all great way to address concerns.
Eventually, healthcare leaders will find that the key to success in revenue-cycle employee management can be accomplished by bringing together senior leaders, physicians, and front desk staff to the same table, so to speak. A lot of useful and interesting engagement takes place when this happens, as key performance indicators (KPIs) are developed and fostered. Conversation on how to best utilize HR technologies, cultural improvement, and career paths can also help save money and improve healthcare quality by enabling the existing workforce to do its best.
The bottom line is: Hiring the right people with the right skills is everything. People with the right training help figure out the root cause of a problem so healthcare organizations can find a solution. Retaining employees requires both appreciation and career development. To show employees how their work impacts the organization and where their work could lead them in the future, healthcare organizations should consider formal awards, informal thank-you notes from peers, and peer coaching. These can all be implemented through healthcare workforce management software.
As a healthcare professional shortage persists and organizations are under pressure to cut costs, improving each piece of the internal healthcare workforce management puzzle will be increasingly important in the years to come. Every piece of the puzzle has to work together for healthcare workforce management to work. Strategies include recruitment, scheduling, and retention, so optimizing each component will ensure healthcare organizations develop a comprehensive and sustainable staffing strategy.
Scheduling Optimization, Analytics, and Healthcare Workforce Management Software
While healthcare organizations need efficient scheduling to cut labor costs and improve quality, healthcare workforce management software is the plug-and-play tool for accomplishing this goal and so much more.
The challenge of creating workable schedules is the same whether you have a dozen employees or tens of thousands. Human resource and department leaders must balance paid time off, no-shows, and personal schedules while staffing departments appropriately.
There are also legacy worker management and scheduling systems from the past that can exacerbate current-day problems, and many hospitals and practices haven’t upgraded their systems. In most cases, healthcare employee systems implemented 10 to 20 years ago haven’t changed. Still, some organizations find that their legacy worker software and procedures don’t fit their new needs after a merger or acquisition within the industry. Data may be housed in five or six different databases, or there might be time management data within one system and scheduling and labor forecasting in another system — and those systems don’t communicate or even work with each other.
In short, it’s difficult for healthcare organizations to utilize their existing skill sets, schedule the right combination of providers for caseloads, or even let staff know when they’re eligible for extra shifts without investing in the right healthcare workforce management software. Organizations could improve their staffing and track individual transactions by department. Since there’s a lot of information in workforce systems, especially time and scheduling, you need transactional-level detail to see which departments might be overspending, what employees are contributing to that overspend, and whether your staffing decisions were right.
Analytical tools and predictive workforce optimization can be used to enhance and fine-tune schedules once healthcare organizations have transaction-level data. To track productivity, scheduling, and other staffing levels, some human resources leaders are gathering employee and scheduling information from disparate systems — but this isn’t efficient over the long term. A data-driven dashboard can enable department heads and nursing leaders to see real-time information and create schedules so they know whether an employee can fill a gap. This type of platform requires medical organizations to not only look at the data and analytics, but also how nursing and other department leaders are able to see the information and understand how they can influence changes in scheduling to use core staff more effectively.
An effective healthcare workforce management software system puts all this information in the hands of those who can modify schedules quickly and efficiently with dashboards, analytics, and much more.
Streamlining Recruitment and Healthcare Workforce Management Software
Recruiting is the first step to tweaking and optimizing your healthcare workforce management software platform. To fill open positions, talent acquisition specialists and human resources staff need to have strategies to attract high-quality candidates. In today’s job market, it’s very inefficient when the HR email inbox gets overloaded.
Anecdotally speaking, more than 30 percent of hospital executives, administrators, and human resource leaders most likely don’t have enough candidates to fill open positions. In fact, many companies routinely say that job-seekers didn’t meet quality standards or skills standards even when there are job openings. The majority of hospitals are waiting up to six months to fill leadership positions, and some are waiting up to a whole year.
The more vacancies there are, the harder it is to deliver care safely and profitably. An efficient surgery schedule, lean programs, or quality or safety initiatives become harder to implement when key positions go unfilled. Recruiters should use communication methods that make candidates feel comfortable. By breaking down the formalities of the recruiting process, recruiters can connect with candidates sooner and establish positive relationships — all with a robust healthcare workforce management software solution.
Organizations can bridge the communication gap by using popular technologies, such as text messaging. It’s possible to find the right candidates with the right qualifications faster and navigate the competitive job market — not just with text messaging, but instant messaging. Nonetheless, for many healthcare organizations and medical practices, emails and phone calls work better than text messages.
What’s more: Many of today’s human resources healthcare professionals are texting, emailing, and phoning talent acquisition specialists to discuss employment opportunities quickly and discreetly. It’s not uncommon for applicants to reply to a text within minutes, which lets acquisition providers jumpstart the hiring process.
Overall, healthcare organizations need to understand how candidates interact with others on a professional and personal level. At the end of each day, the patient experience is everything. If a job candidate’s attitude and personality aren’t optimal, what will the patient experience be like?
Third-party systems such as healthcare workforce management software can help organizations successfully recruit exactly who they need. Recruiters can reach out to candidates and track messages using text messaging and phone-call tracking systems.
A Comprehensive and Sustainable Strategy
With the help of healthcare workforce management software, healthcare organizations can deliver high-value care to their patients when they invest in high-quality solutions. Controlling healthcare staffing costs is a top priority for all healthcare executives in 2023 and beyond.
It can be tough for financial and human resources leaders. Cost-cutting can conflict with ensuring optimal staffing levels. But utilizing a comprehensive and sustainable workforce management strategy, healthcare organizations can improve and modernize their recruiting, scheduling, and retention methods.
VCS Software
VCS Software is your all-in-one solutions platform for healthcare workforce management software whether your business, hospital, or organization is large, medium or small. VCS solutions fit your exact needs since organizations can start with core products and use add-on modules for additional capabilities as needed. Contact us to start building a tailored solution that best suits your organization.