Almost everyone has been struggling with employee retention, especially during the dreaded Great Resignation! We’ve learned that the secret to achieving your healthcare hiring goals in this market is to retain your top employees while adding new ones; it’s basic math that far too few employers fail to pull off.
Many nurses, who serve as the backbone of your entire clinical team have struggled with burnout during COVID. One-third now say they’ll leave their positions by the end of 2022. These numbers should make any hospital administrator shake in their shoes. But the reality is that these numbers can be turned around.
We can, and must, turn things around. In this blog, we’ll discuss how to improve your nurse retention rates and overall employee morale.
How to Retain Your Nursing Workforce
Did you know the average turnover cost of a single bedside RN is $44,400? Now couple that number with the nursing shortage and you come up with the perfect storm for healthcare hiring today.
Every industry facing a retention problem knows how costly it is. But nowhere more than in healthcare nursing, where the most experienced professionals are often the go-to resource for the “why” behind why things are done in a unit. Not only are training and onboarding costs going up when a nurse leaves your facility, you will lose some of the precious historical knowledge that makes you—you.
In the current hiring environment, we’re facing challenges that include the reality that the grass really is greener for experienced nursing staffers. Sign-on bonuses alone make leaving a job a lucrative proposition for a nurse these days. Your job is to find ways to counteract the attractiveness of these offers. How can you do it?
- Offer a more flexible work schedule. Nurses are not immune to noticing that the rest of the world has gone remote. While this may not be possible in most nursing roles, offering flexibility in scheduling may help offset the allure of an alternative schedule somewhere else. What if you shortened work shifts and offered floor nurses a telemedicine rotation? Maybe there’s an administrative rotation that allows them to step away from a unit setting and work from home?
- Bring in travel nurses or per diems to help reduce mandatory overtime. Or, since some nurses want the OT, perhaps sitting down with each nurse.
- Level up your salaries. Here’s a thought. If your healthcare facility pays a hefty hiring bonus to new nurses, what about offering a retention bonus for the nurses that stick around. When you eliminate the attractiveness of earning more money elsewhere, does it lessen the chances that a recruiter will steal your skilled talent away?
- Meet with your nurses and talk about care development. When was the last time you created a career roadmap for your clinical teams? Probably never, right? Work with your employees at every level to create a goal to improve and advance. You will give them a reason to stay on board.
If you’re still struggling to retain your nurses, maybe it’s time to partner with a quality healthcare staffing first like AG Globe Services today! We help healthcare organizations find the talent they need. Contact us to find out more.
