Employee Engagement

Recognizing employees is an important part of showing them their efforts count and in building an effective team at your healthcare organization. Employee recognition can truly make a difference in motivating your staff to provide the best patient care. Here are eight ways to get creative with healthcare employee recognition.

As we near the end of the year, healthcare human resources departments are looking for new and inventive ways to promote safety and improve quality scores at their organization. As our nation shifts toward value-based payment models, employers are applying new methods to reduce length of stay and readmission rates, streamline discharge transition processes and improve diagnostic procedures.

The following are four common best practices presented by five case studies in U.S. healthcare institutions.

Now that the healthcare industry has shifted from quantity to quality of care, having a highly motivated healthcare workforce can affect both patient satisfaction and your organization’s bottom line. While having a generous compensation plan can certainly help attract and retain staff, money isn’t the only motivator that matters. With a carefully planned employee incentive program, you can help your people grow to higher levels of performance and excellence, which translates to better patient care.

Employee engagement is challenging in today's workforce, but it is especially critical in the healthcare setting. With the changing healthcare climate, hospitals and healthcare facilities are under greater pressure to improve clinical care while lowering costs, implementing change, and reducing employee turnover. High levels of employee engagement can significantly impact these areas. Research shows a strong correlation between strong healthcare employee engagement and patient satisfaction, patient safety and quality, and improved clinical outcomes.

“Employee engagement” is a term often used in the human resources world; but in a healthcare setting, can it apply to physicians, too? The answer, increasingly, is “yes,” especially as more hospitals bring on physicians as employees instead of just granting them privileges; a step that brings those physicians under the purview of HR professionals, says David Rowlee, Senior Vice President and Practice Leader of Integrated Healthcare Strategies.

Employee retention is important to every employer, but for healthcare organizations, it’s critical. Holding on to highly skilled employees is a challenge and will only get more difficult as demographic trends shrink the pool of healthcare employees at the same time as demand for healthcare grows.

Retaining good employees is an issue in every industry, but with long hours and emotionally draining work, retaining healthcare workers has its own special challenges. Then there’s the costs of replacing doctors, nurses and other employees with specific skill sets and certifications. It soon becomes clear that retention is, by necessity, a high priority for many healthcare organizations.