The workforce crisis is one of the most pressing — arguably the most pressing — issues plaguing the healthcare industry, and the problem isn’t going away unless healthcare providers across the country start taking real steps to make sure their workers feel heard and supported.
Last month at a conference in Chicago, AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw shared some of the employee retention strategies his health system uses to help ensure its staff members want to keep coming into work. He stressed the importance of gathering employee feedback and using it to give them the changes they need. This month, MedCity News followed up with AdventHealth to get a better picture of what these strategies look like in practice.
AdventHealth’s workforce numbers 92,000 caregivers across nine states. It’s unreasonable for the health system’s executives to expect they know all the right answers about how to best support these employees, Shaw pointed out in November.
“I asked my group of 450 executive leaders to prioritize what they thought our team of 85,000 frontline employees would want from a benefits package. And then I had our other team go out and do a survey of about 5,000 of our frontline employees and ask the exact same question. Lo and behold, when we put the two things side by side, we found we weren’t nearly as smart as we thought we were,” he explained.
Shaw encouraged health system leaders to recognize the fact that their reality is different from that lived by the people who show up on the front lines each day to deliver care. Once executives acknowledge this, they can make decisions that prioritize workers’ desires and daily challenges.
To understand what these desires and daily challenges are, hospital management needs to solicit feedback from all departments within their organization — and actually listen and make use of what staff members are saying.
For example, AdventHealth sought feedback from its workforce and recognized tuition assistance continued to come up as a priority. The health system dug deeper into this topic and found out that the majority of its employees who were receiving tuition assistance were leaders pursuing a Master’s degree or second Bachelor’s. Additionally, the vast majority of workers who were receiving tuition assistance were also in a financial position to pay the tuition upfront and wait to be reimbursed later in the semester, said Olesea Azevedo, AdventHealth’s chief administrative officer.
This left a large part of AdventHealth’s workforce unable to take the next step in their career due to upfront cost barriers, she pointed out. Since discovering this dilemma, the health system has established a partnership with Guild, a company that helps employers provide tuition-free education and upskilling courses to their staff. Now, all of AdventHealth’s team members can utilize debt-free education assistance with no up-front out of pocket costs.
Shaw also pointed out that it’s important to show staff members that their feedback is being used to make changes.
“Don’t bother to ask unless there’s something you’re going to do about it. Because asking those kinds of questions without follow through is kind of the death knell because the next time you ask, nobody is going to think you’re serious,” he declared.
In July, AdventHealth made a change to its employee policy as a direct result of staff members bringing up their concerns, Azevedo noted.
The health system introduced paid parental leave, and now all full-time AdventHealth team members have access to 4 weeks of parental leave paid at 100% of their base pay. This benefit applies to workers of all genders, as well as parents who adopt.
Photo: AndreyPopov, Getty Images
