Retaining and growing a highly skilled healthcare workforce requires careful planning and commitment. Innovative healthcare leaders are keeping employee development top of mind, especially given its benefits in healthcare such as improved morale, productivity, efficiency and decreased turnover.
When professionals think of employee development, it’s easy to compartmentalize the process into annual staff training or professional development activities. However, there’s more to supporting employee development in healthcare than that.
When you use effective onboarding, communicate to employees about their career growth, offer educational opportunities and give recognition, you’re setting up the organization for success and fully supporting employee development.
Use Effective Healthcare Onboarding
Supporting employee development in healthcare starts from day one when a new employee is onboarded into the organization. Effective onboarding familiarizes new hires with their role and the company’s policies in order to equip them to perform their duties successfully.
If your healthcare organization is short-staffed, then a leader’s first instinct may be to get new employees in as soon as possible to relieve other employees’ workloads. However, this often leads to a lack of early productivity and increased turnover.
According to the article Onboarding Best Practices in Healthcare, an excellent onboarding experience can increase early productivity by 70% and improve retention of new hires by 82%.
Make sure your new healthcare employees are happy and engaged from day one with the following onboarding best practices:
- Sort out technology details early
- Communicate early and consistently
- Break up training sessions over multiple days
- Assign a mentor so new hires have a go-to person for help
After new employees begin to get the hang of their new roles, then it’s imperative to learn about their career goals and how to best accomplish them within your organization.
Ask Healthcare Employees About Career Growth
Ongoing conversations, rather than just an annual performance review, allow for healthcare employees to regularly discuss their career goals.
One way to accomplish this is to offer clear, step-by-step individualized career mapping that shows how professionals can get from their current state to the next level. Then, offer the development opportunities necessary for employees to advance their careers.
Your employees will feel supported in pursuing and reaching their career goals, which leads to more loyalty toward your organization. In order to fully support staff development in healthcare, you must also offer learning opportunities.
Offer Training and Development Opportunities
Training and development in healthcare organizations are key for employee retention and enhancing overall skills. According to the Gallop/Amazon 2021 report, 53% of healthcare workers say they are very interested in or highly interested in upskilling.
The healthcare industry offers many pathways towards skill advancement which can help retain top talent. For instance, you can engage employees in cross-training to help them see themselves in a future role within the organization. On the other hand, you may discuss with an employee how to enhance skills in a current role and prepare them for future opportunities in management or leadership roles.
Skill advancement is most commonly met with professional healthcare certificates, like those that Emerge Education helps healthcare organizations offer. These healthcare certificate programs can range from patient care technicians and professional coders to healthcare IT technicians and IT security specialists.
Whichever choice an employee decides to make, their upskilling needs will be met and they’ll be a happier and more engaged employee in your organization.
Give Plenty of Recognition and Appreciation
Healthcare professionals are driven by the act of helping people. Oftentimes they work long, hard hours without hearing many thanks from patients. This is why giving authentic recognition and appreciation to healthcare employees is a necessity.
In O.C. Tanner’s 2023 Global Culture Report, the degree to which recognition is embedded in an organization’s culture was shown to have a significant impact on cultural outcomes such as burnout, engagement and inclusion.
Healthcare leaders understand recognition, just like compensation and benefits, is a fundamental part of the employee’s experience at work. Here are a few examples of building recognition and appreciation into your healthcare organization’s culture:
- Symbolic rewards: Rather than “classic” rewards choose a symbolic reward that triggers an emotional response and shows you care.
- Peer-to-peer feedback: Peers see the hard work they do every day, so their specific positive recognition can go a long way.
- Opportunities/tools that can help employees relax: Healthcare employees need a break from working long, high-stress hours. The more you can help them relax, the better.
Although it takes an initial investment to provide frequent recognition and appreciation to healthcare employees, your company will see the future payoff in employee retention, increased engagement and attracting top talent.
Improve Employee Experience With Skill Development
The more you can support your employees, the more likely they’ll remain loyal to your organization. Supporting employee development in healthcare largely has to do with helping employees reach their career goals and recognizing your employees’ hard work.
If you need help providing workforce development opportunities to your healthcare employees, then reach out to the experts at Emerge Education. Our workforce development specialist will assist you with program selection and customized solutions to fit your healthcare organization’s exact needs.
