Category Archives: Workforce Engagement

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) workers stage largest-ever strike

Posted on by • Posted in Employee Compensation, Employee Staffing, Employee Staffing Shortage, Labor Organizing, Labor Shortages, Labor Spend Management, Labor Strike, Nurse Retention, Nurse Staffing, Nurses Shortage, Nurses Union, Workforce Engagement, Workforce Providers, Workforce Retention, Workforce Strategy • Leave a comment

https://mailchi.mp/d62b14db92fb/the-weekly-gist-february-10-2023?e=d1e747d2d8

Monday’s walkout of tens of thousands of nurses and ambulance staff was the largest in the NHS’s 75-year history.

Labor demonstrations have been ongoing across the past few months, as workers demand higher pay and better working conditions amid rampant national inflation and increased workloads.

Specific demands vary by union and nation within the United Kingdom. Welsh nurses called off their strike this week to review a proposal from Wales’ Labour Party-run government, while the Royal College of Nurses, the UK’s largest nursing union, has countered a nominal 5 percent pay increase proposal with demands for a five percent pay raise on top of inflation, which topped 10 percent in Britain in December. 

The Gist: A glance at our neighbors across the pond shows that the US healthcare system is not the only one currently experiencing a labor crisis.

The UK’s nationalized system has also failed to shield its workers from the combined impact of COVID burnout and inflation. But the NHS, as the UK’s largest employer and perennial object of political maneuvering, is more susceptible to organized labor actions. 

In contrast, American healthcare unions, which only covered 17 percent of the country’s nurses in 2021, must negotiate with local employers, whose responses to their demands vary.

While this may enhance the bargaining power of US health system leaders, it also heightens the risk that we will fail to adequately secure our nursing workforce, a key national resource already in short supply, for the longer term. 

Viewpoint: It’s the Great Aspiration, not Resignation

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https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-management-administration/viewpoint-it-s-the-great-aspiration-not-resignation.html?utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter

Those who left their jobs during the Great Resignation did so out of more than just frustration, but instead used it as an opportunity to follow their dreams and aspirations, writes Whitney Johnson, CEO of Disruption Advisors, a talent development company, in the Harvard Business Review April 6.

The pandemic forced many people to reevaluate many facets of their lives, from where to live to how to spend more time with family. Ms. Johnson argues that workers’ thoughts on changing the way they work is a good thing, giving workers agency to discover new aspirations and proactively seek them. 

“The Great Resignation appellation is, I believe, mistaken. Most workers are not simply quitting. They are following a dream refined in pandemic adversity. They are aspiring to grow in the ways most important to them,” she writes.

Even for those who have been forced out of the workforce, like working mothers and caregivers, Ms. Johnson argues that it will lead to a boom of innovative new businesses, created by those resourceful workers who find another way to work outside the realms of traditional industry. 

She also states that this “great aspiration” is beneficial for employers too, who can make the most of a fresh pool of talent, full of newly motivated employees who are dedicated and searching for meaning. 

A new divide is making the workforce crisis worse

Posted on by • Posted in Employee, Employee Burnout, Employee Engagement, Employee Flexibility, Employee Job Design, Employee Resentment, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Job Design, Job Work Patterns, Talent Management, Virtual Work, Virtual Workforce, Workforce Engagement, Workforce Hybrid Schedule, Workforce Strategy • Leave a comment

https://mailchi.mp/bfba3731d0e6/the-weekly-gist-july-2-2021?e=d1e747d2d8

How the Hybrid Workforce will Drive the Future of Work

Health system executives continue to tell us that the top issue now keeping them up at night is workforce engagement.

Exhausted from the COVID experience, facing renewed cost pressures, and in the midst of a once-in-a-generation rethink of work-life balance among employees, health systems are having increasing difficulty filling vacant positions, and holding on to key staff—particularly clinical talent. One flashpoint that has emerged recently, according to leaders we work with, is the growing divide between those working a “hybrid” schedule—part at home, part in the office—and those who must show up in person for work because of their roles. Largely this split has administrative staff on one side and clinical workers on the other, leading doctors, nurses, and other clinicians to complain that they have to come into work (and have throughout the pandemic), while their administrative colleagues can continue to “Zoom in”. There’s growing resentment among those who don’t have the flexibility to take a kid to baseball practice at 3 o’clock, or let the cable guy in at noon without scheduling time off, making the sense of burnout and malaise even more intense. Add to that the resurgence in COVID admissions in some markets, and the “help wanted” situation in the broader economy, and the health system workforce crisis looks worse and worse. Beyond raising wages, which is likely inevitable for most organizations, there is a need to rethink job design and work patterns, to allow a tired, frustrated, and—thanks to the in-person/WFH divide—envious workforce the chance to recover from an incredibly difficult year.

Should hospitals mandate the COVID vaccine for employees?

Posted on by • Posted in Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Leadership, Patient Safety, Policy, Vaccine Mandate, Workforce Engagement • Leave a comment
The Weekly Gist: The Unmasked! Edition
What the COVID-19 vaccine means for your workforce

As we’ve talked to health system executives about the challenges of rolling out COVID vaccines in their communities, one topic keeps coming up: how difficult it’s been to get hospitals’ own workers fully vaccinated. One system told us recently that only 55 percent of their frontline caregivers have opted to get vaccinated, despite early and easy availability, and ongoing encouragement from the hospital’s leaders.

Healthcare workers, it turns out, are just like the general population, bringing the same diversity of perspectives and concerns about vaccination to work with them from their own communities. Vaccine hesitancy is not a new issue for hospital staffers; getting the workforce to take the flu vaccine is an annual struggle for many hospitals.

But given the risks of COVID-19, why not just mandate that hospital employees get the vaccine, as other employers have started to do? We commonly hear two concerns.

One is a labor relations worry: will mandating vaccination cause workers to quit, or make it harder to hire staff in an already difficult market for talent? And given growing concerns about unionization of healthcare workers, will mandatory vaccination become a flashpoint issue?

The second concern is medical liability: can we force workers to get a vaccine that hasn’t been fully approved by the FDA? Would that expose the hospital to legal challenges down the road, if there turn out to be long-term complications from the vaccine?

Our own view is that the first concern is overblown—we suspect vaccine mandates are going to become more and more common as the economy reopens. As to the second, we’re more sympathetic. But once the FDA does grant full approval for the vaccines, we’d hope hospitals will get tougher about vaccine mandates (with the necessary exemptions for health, religious, and other concerns).

At the end of the day, hospitals are in the patient care business, and they should view vaccine mandates—whether for COVID or for influenza—as a patient safety issue, not a workforce engagement issue.