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Tag Archives: Recruiting
Cartoon – Made It Through Your Recruitment Process
St. Louis hospital offers nurses summers off to retain staff
The pediatric unit at Mercy Children’s Hospital in St. Louis will give nurses summers off work in an effort to retain staff, KMOV reports.
The nurses who choose the seasonal staffing option would still work full-time — three shifts per week for the pediatric unit’s nine-month busy season (September through May). The nurses can take off from June through August, while keeping full-time benefits, and return to their jobs in September.
“It’s exciting to see what the nurses, coming back to the unit after having three months off and doing whatever they want to do, the excitement they are going to have, the rejuvenation for their practice, maybe having a new spark, interest [or] excitement for nursing,” Justin Travis, the nurse manager for pediatrics at Mercy Children’s, told KMOV.
Seasonal staff will receive a stipend every two weeks to cover insurance costs. They also can use accrued paid time off to pay themselves during the summer and work extra hospital shifts as needed, Mr. Travis said.
The hospital is recruiting pediatric nurses for the positions. The contract year would begin in September, meaning the nurses’ first summer off would be next year.
Hospital officials said they may expand seasonal staffing options to other departments if it works in pediatrics
Cartoon – We’ll Keep You in Mind
Successfully transitioning to new leadership roles
Leadership changes are more common and important than ever. But most companies don’t get it right.
Every leadership transition creates uncertainty. Will the new leader uncover and seize opportunities and assemble the right team? Will the changes be sustainable? Will a worthy successor be developed? These questions boil down to one: Will the leader be successful?
Why are leadership transitions important?
Hardly anything that happens at a company is more important than a high-level executive transition. By the nature of the role, a new senior leader’s action or inaction will significantly influence the course of the business, for better or for worse. Yet in spite of these high stakes, leaders are typically underprepared for—and undersupported during—the transition to new roles.
The consequences are huge
Executive transitions are typically high-stakes, high-tension events: when asked to rank life’s challenges in order of difficulty, the top one is “making a transition at work”—ahead of bereavement, divorce, and health issues.2 If the transition succeeds, the leader’s company will probably be successful; nine out of ten teams whose leader had a successful transition go on to meet their three-year performance goals (Exhibit 1). Moreover, the attrition risk for such teams is 13 percent lower, their level of discretionary effort is 2 percent higher, and they generate 5 percent more revenue and profit than average. But when leaders struggle through a transition, the performance of their direct reports is 15 percent lower than it would be with high-performing leaders. The direct reports are also 20 percent more likely to be disengaged or to leave the organization.
Successful or not, transitions have direct expenses—typically, for advertising, searches, relocation, sign-on bonuses, referral awards, and the overhead of HR professionals and other leaders involved in the process. For senior-executive roles, these outlays have been estimated at 213 percent of the annual salary.4Yet perhaps the most significant cost is losing six, 12, or 18 months while the competition races ahead.
Nearly half of leadership transitions fail
Studies show that two years after executive transitions, anywhere between 27 and 46 percent of them are regarded as failures or disappointments.5Leaders rank organizational politics as the main challenge: 68 percent of transitions founder on issues related to politics, culture, and people, and 67 percent of leaders wish they had moved faster to change the culture. These matters aren’t problems only for leaders who come in from the outside: 79 percent of external and 69 percent of internal hires report that implementing culture change is difficult. Bear in mind that these are senior leaders who demonstrated success and showed intelligence, initiative, and results in their previous roles. It would seem that Marshall Goldsmith’s advice—“What got you here won’t get you there”6—is fully applicable to executive transitions.
Leadership transitions are more frequent, yet new leaders get little help
The pace and magnitude of change are constantly rising in the business world, so it is no surprise that senior-executive transitions are increasingly common: CEO turnover rates have shot up from 11.6 percent in 2010 to 16.6 percent in 2015.7Since 69 percent of new CEOs reshuffle their management teams within the first two years, transitions then cascade through the senior ranks. Sixty-seven percent of leaders report that their organizations now experience “some or many more” transitions than they did in the previous year.
The costs hospitals can control: 7 insights from clinical leaders on talent turnover, recruitment and retention
High levels of employee turnover is costly in any industry, but as the demand for talented medical staff increases, issues with employee retention and recruitment can be particularly problematic for hospitals and health systems.
Hospitals are labor-driven entities dependent on talented frontline providers for fiscal success. In order to keep operations cost-effective, administrators must successfully recruit and retain highly skilled staff members or shoulder the financial burden of high turnover. The cost of turnover for just one experienced registered nurse can reach $88,000, according to a 2017 study published in SAGE Open Nursing. When factoring in the cost of recruitment, onboarding and lost revenue, the cost of physician turnover can reach as much as $1 million per physician, according to a 2012 study published in Recruiting Physicians Today.
High costs associated with turnover are likely to become even more palpable for many hospitals as the percentage of Americans over age 65 continues to increase, driving up provider demand. According to a 2017 projection from the Association of American Medical Colleges, the United States may face a physician shortage as high as 104,900 by 2030.
“The demand for talent, particularly for clinical executive talent, has never been greater,” Gail Wurtz, MSN, MBA, RN, vice president and account relationship executive with healthcare leadership solutions company B.E. Smith, told a room of more than 20 clinical healthcare leaders during a May 11 executive roundtable discussion at Becker’s Hospital Review Health IT + Clinical Leadership in Chicago. “You and the clinical staff you lead are the key to providing superior patient care, which supports your organization’s future success and services.”
During the roundtable event, clinical leaders split into groups to discuss issues related to turnover, recruitment and retention. After these mini-discussions, designated leaders relayed the most crucial elements of their group’s discourse to the larger group.
Here are seven insights from the roundtable.
“Location, location, location.”
1. During the discussion, an administrator from a 300-plus bed hospital in the Midwest described physician recruitment as all about “location, location, location.” While the leader’s hospital is located in a city of less than 30,000, it is located within driving distance of a major metropolitan area. The hospital tries to market its proximity to the big city when recruiting top talent.
2. The CMO of a Midwestern children’s hospital said his organization is not located in what is generally considered a “destination community.” The hospital’s location proves challenging for physician recruitment. The leader said his organization addresses these issues in a number of ways, including investment in medical residents.
“We’ve done some innovative things to tap into resident talent,” the CMO said. “We invest in them during their training with stipend programs and three-year [employment] guarantees upon residency completion, which have worked out pretty well for us.”
The CMO said the three-year mark is a critical turning point for his organization. “Within the first three years, we have a reasonably high turnover rate,” the CMO said. “Once they’re employed with us for three years, they get really engaged and they stay.”
3. Ms. Wurtz said a B.E. Smith survey of 800 hospital leaders published in January reflect executives’ comments about the importance of location when recruiting talent. In the survey, 33 percent of respondents identified location as their organization’s greatest challenge to staff recruitment, making it the most identified challenge in the survey. Twenty-four percent of respondents said access to high quality talent was their organization’s greatest challenge, making it the second-most identified challenge.
Prioritize retention to combat turnover
4. In the B.E. Smith survey, which participants completed in November and December of 2017, 35 percent of respondents said they were contemplating a job change in 2018. Ms. Wurtz said this finding highlights the importance of implementing retention programs within organizations to “foster a culture of continuity” and staff engagement.
5. During the discussion, a nurse leader who heads the intensive care unit at a medical center in the Southwest said her organization is piloting programs to hold onto top nurse talent. “There’s been more of an emphasis on new nurse hires at my organization rather than a focus on retaining top nursing talent,” the ICU leader said. “We’re looking to do more to hold onto leaders that are seasoned.”
6. The assistant director of clinical support for an academic health system based in the Midwest said her discussion group believes mentorship programs should receive more attention and resources to help develop leaders from within. Such programs could help mitigate potential overreliance on outside recruitment for leadership positions.
Focus on the nurse-physician relationship
7. During the roundtable, multiple leaders discussed the importance of creating an environment of inclusion and collaboration to facilitate positive relationships between providers — specifically nurses and physicians. As a nurse leader, the ICU director from the Southwest said strong nurse-physician relationships require both provider groups to keep the perspective of the other in mind.
“When we have good relationships, those can help retain talented employees,” the ICU director said. “For my part, I know I think very often about, ‘Do I like to work with this doctor?’ But I don’t often think, ‘Does this doctor like to work with me?’ To be successful, that kind of thinking has to go both ways.”
For more insights into hospital workforce recruitment and retention trends, click here.
Cartoon – Still Having Employee Retention Problems
Cartoon – Modern Employee Compensation
Cartoon – The Real Question
The evolving CFO role, in quotes
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/the-evolving-cfo-role-in-quotes.html
As healthcare evolves, so too are the roles of hospital and health system CFOs.
The CFO role is becoming more strategic as organizations face additional financial pressures and navigate the shift to value-based care. CFOs today generally play a greater role in operations and are seen as business partners by CEOs.
Four panelists provided thoughts on this evolving role during a session at the Becker’s Hospital Review 6th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable in Chicago. Here are quotes from the panelists.
Jim McNey, senior vice president and CFO of North Kansas City (Mo.) Hospital, addressed the development of Centrus Health, a physician-led clinically integrated network including City, Mo.-area physicians across NKCH, the University of Kansas Health System, Merriam, Mo.-based Shawnee Mission Health and Kansas City Metropolitan Physician Association. In these types of scenarios, he said the CFO almost acts like a “salesman.”
“You have to sell these ideas to people who may not be receptive. … You’ve got to go out. You’ve got to get educated. You’ve got to stay current on what’s going on. …You can’t ever quit learning.”
Britt Tabor, executive vice president and CFO/treasurer of Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Erlanger Health System, noted the move away from the traditional CFO role.
“What I’ve seen … is there’s [now] dramatic input of the CFO from a strategic and operation standpoint. I’m meeting with two or three physicians a week talking about the business model of the health system.
“As pressures have come, we’ve hired a lot of doctors. I do think physicians are getting the idea that we’ve got to balance the quality, the patient care and the business scene,” he added.
Angela Lalas, senior vice president of finance for Loma Linda (Calif.) University Health, talked about the skills necessary for today’s CFO.
“We’ve [previously] looked at finance professionals as number crunchers and more focused on historical. Now it’s more communication and interpersonal skills [are the] top needs for finance professionals to become impactful and effective.”
Brad Fetters, COO of Prism Healthcare Partners, a healthcare consulting firm, described the finance discipline as “becoming more sophisticated.”
“What I mean by that is the leadership used to be kind of the scorecard — they were in the room to make sure the numbers jived up — then somebody else was working with physicians and influencing. What you’re seeing now … in other industries … [is] when CEOs abruptly leave … they promote the CFO because they’ve gotten more strategic, there [are]softer skills around influencing and changing behaviors. That’s what you’ve got to do with this information so those successful CFOs are in the room kind of influencing everybody.”
HENRY KOTULA 