Best Practices for Retaining Top Healthcare Talent
In today’s economic landscape, there are a lot of job openings, especially in healthcare. While this is great for candidates, it can spell disaster for a practice quickly if their employees aren’t happy. With so many options available, it’s more important than ever to prioritize retaining your talent. Let’s explore some of the best practices for doing so.
Create a Solid Orientation and Onboarding Program
In order to retain employees, they need to feel as if they’re succeeding in their role. One of the best ways to help your new employees to feel successful in their position is to have a strong orientation and on-boarding program. Your orientation program should make clear the exact job expectations and tasks, review company policies and procedures, and thoroughly train on organization specific processes. Following orientation, it’s important to continue checking in with newer employees periodically, perhaps after 30, 60, and 90 days to check on continuing progress and continue to provide clarity where needed.
Hire the Right People in the First Place
Most often, when we think about hiring the right people, we think in terms of skills and experience. This is certainly important, but perhaps even more important is finding employees who are a good cultural fit for your organization. These are the people who will share your values and truly believe in your organization’s mission.
To find these employees, you must first begin by imagining your ideal employees. What behaviors do they exhibit? What are their values? What type of personality do they have? Then, you’ll need to use behavior-based interviewing to determine which of the candidates for your position fit best with that cultural ideal.
Behavioral-based interviewing refers to a questioning method designed to learn about how your candidates responded to past challenges in their employment. You decide the most crucial competencies for your particular position and ask candidates to discuss past experiences related to those competencies.
This allows you to more accurately predict the kind of job performance you can expect from each candidate, making your hiring process more precise. Remember to keep these questions phrased in the past tense so that your candidates discuss actual experiences, rather than hypothetical.
Inspire Motivation and Show Appreciation
Everyone likes to hear when they’ve done a good job and most people find such encouragement motivational. Never underestimate the value of telling your staff when they’ve done a good job. Equally important is giving your staff ample opportunity to recognize each others accomplishments. Intentionally put systems in place that allow for both kinds of recognition as an organized way to help your employees to feel as though they are seen and cared for
Know How to Spot an Employee Who’s on the Way Out and Get Them Re-invested
Hopefully, if everything else goes well, this won’t be the case very often. But the reality is that you can’t entirely avoid employees deciding to leave. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. But sometimes, by sincerely listening to employee concerns and responding to the best of your ability, you can save that valuable employee.
Each of the following warning signs may indicate that an employee is soon heading out the door:
- They’ve openly talked about their plans to leave
- They’ve recently experienced some sort of life change
- They don’t have a great relationship with their direct supervisor
- They don’t have many friends within the organization
- They’ve shared frustration with regard to their pay or work schedule
- Their job has significantly changed recently
- They haven’t received recognition for their contributions to the organization
- They seem tired, stressed, or overwhelmed while working
- They just don’t seem very engaged anymore
If you see these characteristics in an employee, it’s time to have a conversation with them to determine how they’re feeling about their job and what you can do to alleviate any concerns. Be prepared to hear some criticism, but remember that if this employee is someone you don’t want to lose, the goal is to determine how you can fulfill the needs they express.
The hiring process can be expensive and time-consuming. It’s obviously preferable to retain the team you have in most cases. With this in mind, it’s important to hire smart, on-board well, appreciate your team, and try to take swift action when you sense there may be a problem. The good news is, you don’t have to do any of this on your own. TalentCare, available through Henry Schein Solutions Hub, can help your organization to find the best candidates for your practice as well as provide peach of mind with their retention guarantee.
For more information on how we can help, visit henryscheinsolutionshub.com or calling 833-433-2482.
