The Solution in Healthcare to the 'Great Resignation" is Easier Than You Think

Now two years into a global, viral pandemic, many healthcare leaders are facing tremendous challenges with staffing and moving their organizations forward after resignations due to burnout and low morale became widespread. Coupled with an ongoing labor shortage in healthcare, leaders need practical ways to attract and retain top talent.

A healthcare leader recently shared that her community-facing organization changed from office-based work to remote work in Spring 2020 upon the onset of COVID-19 restrictions. During this change, she felt confident her actions would protect everyone’s jobs and streamline operations. But over one year later, during the summer of 2021, she discovered that some of her team members had feared being laid off but did not feel confident in raising their concerns with her. She was disheartened that those fears lingered for more than a year before she was finally informed by one of the braver members of her team. After this discovery, she engaged us to help her engage her people more effectively.

In October 2021, Time Magazine reported, “Work stress didn’t magically appear for the first time during the pandemic,” but according to Malissa Clark, who studies employee well-being at the University of Georgia, “there wasn’t this huge other factor looming above everyone’s head” before COVID-19 hit. Clark said, “Uncertainty can feed into burnout… as can blurring the boundaries between work and home life or struggling to parent and homeschool children on top of working. In other words, the pandemic has been a ‘perfect storm’ for burnout.”

If healthcare leaders and their leadership teams want to attract and retain the best and the brightest, then they need to change their methods. In an August 2021 FastCompany article, leadership consultants Lindsey Caplan and Josh Levine said, “To slow the inevitable losses of employees, organizations should adopt new strategies that forego the one-size-fits-all benefits of the past that any company can offer, and start providing the one thing everyone wants but no one can copy: personalization.”

They go on to say, “When an individual develops a meaningful connection to an object or an experience, it becomes personal. A child’s first stuffed animal, a couple’s favorite restaurant, an old friend. The same can happen at a job with a project someone puts their heart into, a manager who went to bat for an inexperienced employee, a message from the CEO on a workiversary.” ?This is how certain healthcare leaders in the past have been successful in building an ‘employer of choice’ brand that has attracted the best and the brightest. Linda Hunt, retired President & CEO for Dignity Health’s Southwest Region, in her previous role as CEO of St. Joseph Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix always engaged employees individually about their personal situations.?She asked about their grandmothers, their children, their animals. Then she really listened so she could ask again the next time she saw this employee.

The same is true of concerns and fears. I’ve seen for decades if people feel safe to speak up, you will enjoy a work environment where innovation gets ignited. Caplan and Levine believe that “By fostering meaningful connections between workers and their work, managers will begin to see the emergence of that mythical creature it seems every organization wants: the highly engaged employee.”

According to McKinsey’s 9/21/21 article, Women in the Workplace, “Women leaders are meeting this moment and taking on the work that comes with it. They are doing more than men in similar positions in supporting the people on their teams—for example, by helping team members navigate work–life challenges, ensuring that their workloads are manageable, and checking in on their overall well-being.”?It’s time for men in the workplace to further adopt skills and capabilities traditionally labeled as ‘women’s strengths’; collaboration, connections, compassion, and empathy to negotiate the uncertainties of the new healthcare work environment.

Since the invention of the iPhone in 2007, leaders have been moving with so much intensity that they fail to connect the dots, communicate expectations, and set people up to be successful in their roles.

Dr. David Rock was the first to link the workplace and leadership with neuroscience. He built the SCARF model to summarize what people most need in the workplace:

Status: our relative importance to others. People need to feel and believe they are important to the team's efforts.

Certainty: our ability to predict the future. This is where the pandemic wrecked even more havoc.

Autonomy: our sense of control over events. I suggest leaders put in parameters or guardrails. You are authorized to expedite a procedure under these circumstances.

Relatedness: how safe we feel with others. The bonding that occurs naturally between managers and their teams and among the team members in productive work environments.

Fairness: how fair we perceive the exchanges between people to be. Compensation is not necessarily a motivator but inequity in pay certainly can cause invaluable employees to leave their job and organization.

In my experience, if employees have a strong emotional connection with their work and colleagues, buy-in to a shared vision, and understand why their role is important—not just feeling as if they are a small cog in a big wheel—then they will give 100 percent of their effort, commitment, and loyalty.

More importantly, regardless of the issues that arise, people will be able to negotiate expectations in a positive, win/win manner. In my experience, people don’t really care about perks such as free food and ping pong tables. What people want most is to be successful at work.

Help your people be successful, feel heard and seen, and know they are valued by using these seven simple, practical approaches:

1. Align people with their strengths so they are in the flow and work doesn’t feel like work.

2. Give them a sense of purpose so they know they are part of something bigger than themselves. Leaders can’t take for granted that healthcare workers understand the critical nature of their roles. These tireless workers deserve to be reminded and recognized regularly.

3. Help them understand how their role is critical to the Mission and Purpose of the organization, the patients, the team, and the projects.

4. Help them succeed by giving them clear, specific outcomes with due dates, and qualitative as well as quantitative metrics so they know how to succeed.

5. Help them help you grow your organization by getting everyone out of reactive, maniac mode and seek opportunities to think and act strategically.??This allows everyone to have time to look at the big picture and come to these challenges from a balanced perspective.

6. Help them be life-long learners so their work feels more like play because they get to be curious while learning.

7. Celebrate their successes in big and small ways.

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By building and fostering this kind of work environment, you will become known as the ‘employer of choice’ and be able to attract, retain and develop the best and the brightest.

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Katharine Halpin left her CPA career in 1997 to focus on the people side of work.?Since then, she has helped organizations ignite innovation, inclusion and growth of leaders, teams and entire organizations using The Halpin Method.?These results arise because she helps leaders engage their people more consistently and more effectively.