Uncovering the workforce experience gap: Implementing experience management in healthcare staffing

We live in an experience era. Whether it’s 5 stars for your Uber journey, a thumbs down for your dinner or a smiley face on your online holiday booking, it’s become second nature to rate our experiences. These customer insights are powerful, and the vast majority of sectors have been quick to capitalise on the collection and utilisation of this data – so why haven’t we seen this experience management revolution in healthcare?

The staffing crisis, which has been both enduring and globally systematic, means health care providers are increasingly competing for staff. Higher rates of pay are a quick fix for securing short term cover but not effective in addressing the root causes of poor staff retention. The impacts of this can be hugely damaging, leaving critical services understaffed, resulting in the overwork and burn out of employees.

The workforce experience gap exists when there is dissonance between what workers expect from an employer and how effectively they meet those expectations. Leaders of healthcare providers may think they’re serving the needs of the workforce, while the people at the coalface feel entirely differently.?

As the leader of temporary healthcare staffing businesses, I have first-hand experience of how agency healthcare professionals are sometimes treated differently to their permanent counterparts. We saw it the pandemic when they were, at times, the last in line for PPE, and we see it now on occasions where they receive little to no induction when working at a new site. I believe the agency experience is a barometer for the wider employee experience. This goes a long way to explaining why we are where we are in terms of staff morale and wellbeing in the healthcare sector

When the employee experience is poor, these workers, temporary and permanent, are likely to vote with their feet - and sadly, not always to competing healthcare providers.?According to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, a total of 22,549 nurses, midwives and nursing associates left their permanent register between January and December 2021. As for why so many left the profession, 18% cited there was too much pressure and 13% believed the workplace culture was having a negative impact on them.

It's also worth noting those leaving the profession are younger than ever before. According to this Nursing Times article, two thirds of nurses who left the NHS in England in the last year were under the age of 45.?Not only does this leave the NHS shorthanded now but impacts succession planning and the pipeline of future leadership talent.

What data is published and available tells us ‘what’ is happening but with little clarity as to ‘why’ – until now. Without understanding the drivers of workforce behaviours during their tenure, employers are powerless to challenge the status quo.

For the last two years, Acacium Group has sought a deeper understanding of the healthcare professional’s experience, equipping our clients with the knowledge they need to create better environments for the people who work for them, and securing better outcomes for the people they care for.?

As the first global healthcare workforce solutions provider, Acacium Group are uniquely placed to capture candidate and workforce feedback at scale. We serve more than 600 healthcare providers across the UK, deploying more than 25,000 healthcare professionals every week.

Harnessing big data, we are able to compare the experience of every staff group for employers of healthcare professionals across the UK. This data has uncovered common themes, identified barriers to change and established best practice processes from which others can learn.?We’ve called this programme Viewpoint.

What is Viewpoint?

Partnering with the world's leading customer experience management software, we’ve adopted and evolved a methodology to capture insights throughout the worker journey. Viewpoint enables us to consult with our clients on how best to improve their employee value proposition, as well as highlight how we can enhance our contribution to the candidate experience.

Using a cloud-based survey system, workers provide instant feedback at key touchpoints throughout their journey. This includes the interview stage, the first few days of a new role and during the early stages of an assignment. The entire workforce is asked for quarterly ??feedback, capturing insights all year round.

Like other popular feedback collection methods, Viewpoint is simple and user friendly, designed to maximise the amount of feedback collected. The larger the data set, the more viable the insight. Ensuring surveys are accessible to all workers is critical in gaining full visibility of their experience. As a result, we’ve ensured Viewpoint surveys can be delivered in 18 languages.?

By collecting and analysing feedback from clients and workers at all levels, the programme sets out to not only facilitate a dialogue between employers and employees – but pinpoint the most effective opportunities to improve the workplace and the employee experience. Our data and insights have proved invaluable to us and our clients but of course, without action it means nothing.

Turning insight into action

Over the past two years, we have sent more than 315,000 surveys to healthcare workers operating across 11 Acacium Group businesses. This data captures their experience working within more than 600 individual UK employers. Their experience spans primary care, private sectors hospitals, NHS Trusts, Public Health England, nursing homes and care in the community, providing an unparalleled insight into healthcare worker sentiments UK wide.

As a global business, we can also compare the experiences of healthcare workers at home and abroad. This is becoming more relevant with the increasingly mobile nature of the global healthcare workforce. More often now, people in skilled roles are looking to move around the world to enhance their career and seek a better work life balance. These insights are helping us define what best practice looks like the world over.

Generating this amount of data requires a dedicated resource to make sense of the numbers. Our Experience Management team was launched in 2021 and is responsible for the collection and management of this valuable experiential data.??

Having an experience management function in-house is enabling us to becoming even more customer-centric, allowing us to offer value to our clients in a way that has not been possible before. They are afforded full visibility of their end-to-end candidate and worker experience. This allows them to effectively benchmark themselves against anonymised comparable competitors, identify opportunities for improvement and implement best practice off the back of these actionable insights.?

The following headlines give you some idea of the power and potential of this data. Some of the most common frustrations include;?

An inability to access internal systems

Over a third of new starters surveyed (34%) are dissatisfied with the limited ability to access internal systems and patient records.

For nurses specifically, this means they are unable to issue medication. This means the provider is paying for a qualified individual who is unable to deliver a full service, putting more pressure on permanent staff and not representing the best use of financial budgets. For the candidate, it often means picking up less favourable tasks on shift. Many agency workers reported to feeling a sense of frustration at the inability to do their job effectively in providing the best patient care. They also were concerned it would reflect poorly on them, meaning they’re less able to make a good first impression.

Poor inductions damage worker engagement

23% of temporary health care professionals are dissatisfied with the induction they receive when starting a new assignment. Not only do poor inductions leave staff feeling unwelcome and unvalued, but also less confident when dealing with new sites or systems. This could have a direct impact on the quality of patient care.

However, it’s important to note that the vast majority of temporary workers have positive experiences when working alongside substantive teams.?

High levels of satisfaction with colleagues and healthcare environments

83% of temporary healthcare professionals reported they were satisfied with the overall working environment. This is a testament to the positive treatment of temporary workers by hospitals and healthcare providers in a variety of settings, of which 82% of temporary health care professionals were satisfied by the support received by on-site staff. 72% of all comments given about permanent teams were positive.

When comparing feedback from our 25,000 temporary workers whilst on assignment with healthcare providers, we found the top 10 providers;

• Had an overall temporary healthcare professional satisfaction rate of 89%. This is 9% higher than the baseline average.
• ?Support by on-site staff was the highest satisfaction metric at 94%, 12% higher than the baseline average.
• Satisfaction with the overall working environment is 93%. Again, 9% higher than the baseline average.
• ·As per the data above, the lowest satisfaction rates at these sites were regarding difficulties accessing systems and patient records. However, this was still rates at 78%, 12% higher than the baseline average.
• ?77% of comments about on-site staff and supervision staff were positive.

Compared to the above, the bottom 10 providers in terms of workforce experience;

• Had an overall satisfaction of 66% which is 14% lower than the baseline average and 23% lower than clients in the top 10
• Access to equipment and PPE was 15% lower satisfaction compared to the baseline average and 24% lower satisfaction compared to the top 10
• Support by on-site staff and supervision was 25% lower satisfaction compared to the top 10 clients
• The lowest satisfaction was access to systems and patient records - 20% lower than the baseline average and 31% lower satisfaction compared to the top 10 clients.
• Comments about on-site staff supervision are 67% positive. This is 10% lower than the top 10 providers.

Viewpoint offers a holistic approach to listening to the voice of candidates, temporary workers on assignment, service users, and our healthcare providing clients. The above insights are just some of the things we have observed from the data of a sample of 56,700 healthcare professionals over the last two years.?I have no doubt these insights will prove transformative for the organisations we work with going forward.

For me, experience management is a fascinating topic, particularly within the healthcare sector where so many staffing challenges could be addressed by simply listening and responding to the needs of the workforce. I intend on keeping a close eye on how this data evolves. I will be working closely with our Experience Management team and customers to see what learnings can be applied to our organisation, and those of our clients.?

I also intend on sharing some of the broader themes on this platform. So, if this interests you, make sure you are following us to be notified of these articles. I am interested to know what you make of this data. Does it surprise you? How do you utilise data in your organisation and what have been the impacts??If you are a hirer interested in learning more about what we’ve discovered using Viewpoint, please message me directly.