Nursing retention is a big priority for healthcare organizations in 2024. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, employee burnout, disengagement, and stress have led to a lot of turnover and retention turbulence. This can cast a long shadow on your organization in terms of efficiency, employee morale, and the cost of providing high-quality patient care.
At Work Institute, we specialize in providing organizations with the tools and systems they need to boost employee retention and re-engage staff. Use these nursing retention strategies in healthcare to drive more stable retention and growth.
Strategies for Employee Retention
Layering multiple employee retention strategies together can help hospitals achieve maximum results. The more you can do to proactively improve employee engagement and employee retention in healthcare, the better.
Leadership Innovation
Assess your organization’s current leadership styles and approaches to evaluate its effect on employee retention. Address potential weak points and incentivize strategies that cultivate positive workplaces and employee buy-in. Consider different leadership styles you want your team to cultivate, such as transformational leadership, servant leadership, or collaborative leadership, and put good practices in place for organization-wide transparency.
Improvement Engagement Among Employees
Proactively improve engagement among your nursing staff. Tactics for this include:
- Creating feedback channels so nurses at all levels can participate in initiatives or discuss concerns
- Having trust-building and rapport-building activities, especially during scheduled hours that don’t feel like an imposition
- Protecting work-life balance and making sure all employees have the resources they need
Why Retention Matters
Retention is critical for every business organization, but it’s even more essential in the healthcare industry. Your industry relies on having a staff of experienced nurses who can diligently provide reliable, high-quality work every day—no matter what niche of the healthcare industry you serve. When organizations are facing tight budgets and an increasing workload, like many healthcare providers across the country are feeling, adding new projects to increase retention can feel overwhelming.
However, there are significant advantages that come from prioritizing and achieving higher retention, both for individual staff and the organization as a whole.
- Employees, specifically nurses in an organization with a healthy culture, are more positive, engaged, and focused. This increases their own job enjoyment, but it also increases the quality of their work.
- Organizations with more stable, long-term retention incur fewer turnover-related costs like recruiting, onboarding, training, short-term traveling staff hires or outsourcing, and potential employee lawsuits.
- Turnover makes the workplace turbulent, and this is stressful for the remaining employees. Lowering turnover makes their workdays more predictable, reduces the load, and, in turn, makes them more likely to stay.
- Organizations win when they retain legacy employees who are extremely knowledgeable about niche specialties and organization-specific processes.
- Employee retention boosts patient care and patient satisfaction. You can better protect your hospital’s brand reputation.
Prioritize retention strategies in healthcare now to make your teams stronger, your organization more profitable, and your employees happier.
Your Experts in Healthcare Employee Retention
Turn the tide against high employee turnover and disengagement with these and other retnion strategies in healthcare. Work Institute is here to help expand your employee retention in healthcare efforts.
Contact us today for more suggestions or to start building your organization’s custom employee retention strategy plan.
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