How to Improve Employee Retention in Healthcare: 5 Tips

Healthcare organizations across the U.S. are dealing with high turnover rates, employee burnout, and other unique staffing challenges. If your facility is having a difficult time keeping quality employees, you’re probably looking for ways to boost staff satisfaction, engagement, and wellness to maintain the effectiveness of your team.

Improving employee retention in healthcare isn’t easy and staff quickly coming and going can be disheartening for those who choose to stay. In this article, we’ll explore techniques that can help you stabilize your clinical workforce and improve the quality of care you’re able to provide.

Why Employee Retention Is Important

The importance of employee retention is multifaceted. First, low retention negatively impacts an organization’s financial stability. Hiring, recruiting, and onboarding new staff is expensive and can cost hospitals millions of dollars each year. This has the potential to create serious imbalances in an organization’s budget.

Even more critical than the financial cost, though, are the impacts of employee turnover on an organization’s care quality. Poor employee retention in healthcare settings can decrease the safety, effectiveness, timeliness, and efficiency of a patient’s medical treatment. In order to improve health outcomes, healthcare organizations need to investigate the reasons behind their high turnover rates and take action to improve staff loyalty.

How to Retain Your Best Employees: 5 Strategies

An employee’s choice to stay or leave your facility often comes down to whether they feel safe, supported, and valued. What are some creative ways to retain employees? These five strategies can optimize your employee-employer relationships and help you build a stable workforce of qualified caregivers.

1. Make Thoughtful Hiring Decisions

One way to preemptively address employee retention is to make sure that you’re proactive throughout the hiring process. Create a job description that helps you attract the qualified candidates whose experiences and skills closely align with your organization’s values and needs.

Next, regularly review and adjust your employee salaries and benefit offerings to stay competitive with industry standards. Inadequate pay rates can lead to decreases in job satisfaction and cause employees to look elsewhere.

2. Provide Opportunities for Growth

Even with a well-developed recruitment strategy, you might still be wondering how you can further improve employee retention in healthcare. Ask yourself: Does your organization offer growth opportunities? Supporting employee professional development can greatly impact their willingness to stay.

Create training programs that support leadership development and assist employees in climbing the clinical ladder. Developing a mentorship program to guide and support newer staff can help them achieve their career goals within your organization, rather than leaving to pursue them elsewhere.

3. Welcome Varying Perspectives

Employees want to be heard. It’s imperative that their perspectives are included in your organization’s decision-making processes because they have a unique view of how policies look in real time. Maintain transparent communication channels between your management teams and staff, such as open-door policies and periodic leadership performance reviews.

Another way to value different perspectives is to welcome diversity and prioritize cultural competence throughout your organization. You can do this by:

• Learning about the diverse backgrounds of your patients and staff.
• Acknowledging and valuing cultural differences.
• Taking action to reduce the effect of unconscious biases.
• Addressing any disparities in health outcomes.

4. Prioritize Wellness and Safety

Employee wellness is key when addressing employee retention in healthcare. It’s essential for staff to feel that their physical safety and emotional health are being prioritized. Conducting employee feedback surveys can help highlight workplace safety issues that might not otherwise be apparent to hospital leadership. After receiving staff suggestions, be sure to take meaningful action to address any raised concerns.

It’s important to remember that emotional wellness is equally important as physical health. Ensure staff get adequate mental health days off, and provide serenity spaces to help them de-stress during rest and meal breaks. Enlisting the support of a wellness coach can motivate employees to achieve work-life balance and pursue health goals while staying on with your team.

5. Cultivate Meaningful Connections

Keep in mind that strong teamwork goes beyond sending out surveys and feedback forms. Clear communication channels between leadership and clinical staff can help employees feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

Invest in building a strong company culture that:

• Maintains ethical standards.
• Promotes a supportive and respectful work environment.
• Encourages collaboration and teamwork.
• Removes guilt and blame.
• Recognizes the achievements of team members.

Studies show that developing a positive company culture can lead to increased job satisfaction. Investing time and effort here can make a direct impact on your employee retention rates.

Find More Ways to Keep Your Employees Happy and Healthy

Improving employee retention in healthcare is the first step in optimizing your organization’s care quality. Now, you might be looking for additional ways to support your employees. Follow along in our free newsletter for more evidence-based healthcare staffing tips to help your organization boost staff satisfaction, engagement, and wellbeing.