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I know y’all are ready to go! Here’s your assignment for March 5 – March 25. Please download the attached document that includes a checklist and discussion questions. Schedule a meeting with your team to review these questions, talk through the real consideration you have to contend with, and then come back to share how it goes on this discussion board. The faculty and your cohort members will be here to discuss it all with you!
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1. Which data point seems trickiest to collect and analyze?
Currently the metrics that we collect and analyze for retention and recruitment are varied depending on the position. Exempt and nonexempt position are not treated as the same. Nonexempt employees tend to live more local to each clinic so the local area and economy is a factor. We utilize the annual pay scale as published by NWRPCA as well as metrics from the Economic Research Institute to determine wages. A look into employee surveys and discussions, one on one and Employee Engagement, to determine best practices of what employees are seeking. No two employees want exactly the same thing and employees grow in the company their priorities change over time.
Exempt employees are primarily long term driven so local competition as well as near large metropolitan area competition needs to be paid attention to. Development and career driven topics are the most important for this group. Rewards are not the most important but when in discussion it could be brought up.
The most important data point is performance. When am employees performance starts to drop a mitigating circumstance tends to have arose. Either they are actively looking for other employment, have been approached by a recruiter, or have a personal issue with current staffing at the center.2. What strategies is your team going to implement to incorporate this data effort into your retention planning?
That is the tricky part, implementing the data. We are currently 99% staffed and hire only one a month out of 65 FTE. Due to all the variance between exempt and non exempt it is a challenge. Retention is really an individual focused effort.
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Thanks for your thoughtful reflection, Brad. The variance between exempt and non-exempt is definitely complex for all of the reasons you noted. And people’s personal reasons for satisfaction are of course always going to vary. But I think the idea of a “culture of retention” is identifying what core values are important to you across the board, and letting staff personalize them as necessary. An example would be identifying “Ongoing Development” as a general retention priority for the organization, and then offering different strategies for different folks (e.g. financial support for education, career development plans, a peer mentor program, etc.). That way everyone would be engaging with the org in their development, but it would be personalized to their needs. Do you have any data that could help you identify common themes and/or values that you could hang a little structure around?
Clearly you’re doing a lot of things right if you’re staying 99% staffed, so I’d love to know what you’re hoping to add by putting the workforce data into practice. Do you want to know which retention strategies may be working? Do you want to know what groups of staff (by team, site, discipline, etc.) might benefit most from a larger-scale retention strategy? Do you want to capture feedback from happy individuals as part of your internal communications plan? There are lots of ideas for how to actually use some things, but they’ll all be tied to your goals.
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Our biggest retention asset is location. We are roughly 35-45 minutes South of Bend and we are the largest employer in our community. That being said our compensation and benefits package is very employee friendly. Perhaps the biggest asset is our staff. Leadership is transparent and communication is open. I recently started an employee engagement group to have more input from those not in every meeting. Workforce data is more to stay on top of what is going right and to identify trends like you mentioned earlier, that provider that may be coming to an end of obligation for loan repayment or scholarship requirements, what will keep them or replace them. What is working and what is not. Trends are what I look at and annual statistics so I am prepared. Such trends as “moving months” during the summer when school is out so parents feel less guilty about relocating. We just completed our Employee Opinion Survey with 84% participation. Our overall scores have gone up in comparison. I conducted a stay interview in December and plan another in July. I walk the floor four to six times a day talking with employees. Involvement with all employees I think is key to retention. I would really like to review our Data Profile to better understand where we are as a company,
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1. Which data point seems trickiest to collect and analyze?
After reviewing it looks like support ratios and staffing structures will be our more challenging data points to collect and analyze as they are not an automated report readily or easily accessible.2. What strategies is your team going to implement to incorporate this data effort into your retention planning?
HR will strive to be more involved with the medical and operations teams on their care team efforts so we know what the current make up of those teams are and what they are working to get to so we can better plan and prepare for staffing needs.-
Hi, Lisa– thanks for posting! Yes, the support ratios and staffing structures tend to be considered “Clinical Affairs” by a lot of systems, even though they have far-reaching impact on workforce. If I had to pick one of the two for you to really consider going through the work of getting, I’d select Support Ratios. That one can go a long way toward understanding the daily practice experience and will help your org understand real strengths and challenges you can use in both recruitment and retention efforts. Even meeting with the medical/operations team(s) just twice a year will give you a sense of what’s happening and create connections without being a huge additional effort. You got this!
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1. Which data point seems trickiest to collect and analyze?
Since we have a very small staff, 3 midlevel providers and 3 medical assistants, most of the data is tricky since only 1 turnover has a huge impact on the numbers, but I am shifting gears to analyze number of visits, shift vs after hours, also breaking down the after hour visits by case difficulty, amount of time spent at night vs recovery time.2. What strategies is your team going to implement to incorporate this data effort into your retention planning?
Unfortunately, call during the tourist season has been and will continue to be a major stressor on both providers and medical support staff that is not going to go away since we continue to increase by at least 25% annually for the last several years. I am hoping to continue to look for ways to decrease the stress as well as present a clearer picture of what the demands of the job are.-
Chris– great ideas!! I think the examples you identified really help give you some data backup of the daily experience (although everyone’s in it, they often have their own opinion about how it feels). They also help you have clearer communication during the recruitment phase, and will hopefully help you think on more ways that you could balance the overall pace of the job with increased benefits of time or other things in non-tourist season. Since you already know that stress during a specific time is a big influencer, you might also think about testing out some strategies to help folks with burnout. These strategies could be about practice (e.g. scribes) or about the environment (e.g. creating a quiet, dim space where people can retreat for 5 minutes) or really anything else. It’s a great question to get staff feedback on, but just be careful about who/how you ask given that you won’t be able to do everything asked. You’re doing all the right things, keep at it!
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