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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!
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.
You’re making a great connection here– sometimes retention is really about recruiting the right people, and figuring out which issues have made the most impact in recruiting. Issues I’m hearing here are related to communications on compensation, finding the people most attracted to the unique benefits package you offer, understanding how you’re supporting your staff, and identifying potential new ways to communicate/mitigate the challenges of practicing in your community.
Given all that, I’d say some of the metrics we’re going to explore in the next session might be most useful since they’re more tied to your organizational experience. Some potential data points to examine would be:
– Cost of Benefits: How can you attach a monetary value to all benefits, and use that package to provide a better picture of compensation that isn’t just straight salary comparison with your competitors?
– Team Composition & Support Ratios: How are your work flows and team designed to make the practice experience better for everyone? How can you demonstrate that your organization is built to make the work as positive as possible?
– Training & Education Benefits: Inventory the benefits available to everyone on staff to learn more about their work, identify peers inside and outside of their organization, and feel better prepared for the work? What percentage of people make use of those benefits? How can you encourage people to use any educational benefits available to them?
– Isolation: How demographically similar or different are your staff from each other and from peers in your geographic area? Are there any natural groups that form (e.g. 65% of staff are over the age of 55)? Are there any individuals that are demographically different and more isolated from the team? Obviously you know them and know their personal stories with each other, but just looking at the top line numbers can sometimes help you think through interpersonal pieces in a fresh way.Ah, the agonies and ecstasies of applying data strategies to smaller organizations! Yes, the use cases of this kind of data are definitely different between smaller and larger organizations. I’ve found the best approach is to spend some time with your goals for using data at all. Are you interested in using the workforce data to find identifiable retention issues? Are you doing it to be able to better tell your story, either internally or externally? Are you doing it to improve communication and opportunities for engagement? Are you doing it actually for recruitment purposes, so you can be clear about what it’s like to work there? The goal you have will help you identify which data points are most relevant to your organization and how you might use them. Your personal relationships and knowledge will always be the most important thing with such a close working environment; the data is just there to help you do things like communicate about what you see/know. So give the goal issue some thought, and once you have that clear, we can talk through specific data points or strategies that might be most helpful in your case.
Yadira asked a great question in our office hour today: “Has anyone done a NHSC event before?”
I’m happy to say that lots of health centers hold NHSC events in October of each year during Corps Community Month (https://nhsc.hrsa.gov/corps-community-month.html). Many organizations take time to host external events like health fairs & award ceremonies, as well as internal events like brown-bag discussion groups. No matter the type of event, it’s important to use it as an opportunity to identify alum & current NHSC participants, and engage in conversation about the common mission of NHSC and health centers.
If your organization has hosted an NHSC event, tell us about it on this thread!
Once you’ve worked through the assignment, come to this thread and answer one or both of these reflection questions. Our goal is to help you implement some of these data collection & analysis practices, and part of that effort is talking through potential roadblocks! Let’s think on it together.
1. Which data point seems trickiest to collect and analyze?
2. What strategies is your team going to implement to incorporate this data effort into your retention planning?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!
Here’s the homework assignment for week 2! You heard Suzanne mention that social media and connecting with folks who are already connected to the health center has been a big part of their recruitment strategy. Download the word doc for more information about how you can make a social media plan for your own recruitment. When you’re done working through it with your team, you can post it back here to share with your peers and ask for further ideas.
Thanks again for joining us yesterday for the first session of this Learning Collaborative! The recording is available here: http://nhchc.adobeconnect.com/ptvg9pd12kkz/
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!