Digital technologies have dramatically transformed the customer and patient experience over the past 20 years, but almost nothing has changed for the employee experience. Hundreds of new patient-centered innovations are launched annually, but meanwhile, the back office of healthcare where workforce and employee management is led has seen virtually no innovation and is still heavily dependent on manual paper-based processes, data silos, 30+ year old HR systems and even fax machines! We need to be unlocking the potential of the healthcare workforce.
Only 19% of clinicians reported their organizations had made investments in the past year to improve their employee experience.
Given the lack of prioritization and investment into employee experience, it should be no surprise that the US healthcare industry is facing turnover of almost 40% of the workforce in the last three years. In order to solve this turnover crisis in healthcare, healthcare leaders need to prioritize and invest in new technologies that capture relevant data points, in real time, and guide their decision making to implement successful employee experience strategies.
The HR and workforce management tools primarily installed in healthcare organizations today hail from the industrial era and are poorly suited for knowledge workforces, particularly clinical talent.
These systems are not adaptable for modern healthcare workforces. Healthcare leaders are going to need to invest in new technologies that are designed specifically for knowledge workers. The best place to look for inspiration into how these new technologies function is to look at how companies have adopted customer experience tools and strategies and see how they can be adapted for employee workflows.
Modern Healthcare Talent Management Solution Features
Healthcare executives need to go beyond employee engagement and satisfaction metrics to create a full-fledged employee experience strategy. This process requires investing in mapping each role within their organization to the “jobs to be done” and performing a full analysis of:
- how those jobs are being done today
- where the friction is within each of those workflows
- determining how that friction can be measured and then reduced and/or removed.
Common examples of friction in the healthcare workforce include things like being asked to fill out the same information on three different forms, delays in paperwork causing clinicians to wait to treat patients, and being forced to print multiple different schedules to review and send back to multiple departments with conflicts highlighted. These tasks can be removed from a clinician’s workload so they can spend more time on patient care. Healthcare systems have anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of different clinical roles that need to be mapped out, analyzed, and managed around the employee experience. This is where technology plays its role in the employee experience strategy since manually managing all of this information is impossible for humans to do in a cost effective and timely manner.
New technologies for healthcare workforce management need to incorporate several critical features:
- Personalization: Solutions must be personalized to meet the needs and preferences of individual clinicians. This means using data-driven insights, machine learning and other AI technologies to develop tailored recommendations for each clinician.
- Real-time data collection: The solution should collect data in real-time, allowing healthcare workforce leaders to identify issues as they arise and address them quickly. This means using digital tools to capture data from various sources, including electronic health records, scheduling software, and other HR systems to create a comprehensive view of the employee experience for each clinical employee.
- Actionable insights: The solution should provide meaningful insights based on the data collected. This means analyzing the data in a way that allows healthcare leaders to identify trends, patterns, and potential solutions. It also means providing clear guidance and support for developing and implementing action plans based on the insights obtained.
- Collaboration: The solution should facilitate collaboration between employees, managers, and other stakeholders. This means providing a platform for communication, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
- Continuous improvement: The solution should be continuously updated and improved based on user feedback and changing needs. This means soliciting feedback from employees and other stakeholders and using that feedback to guide product development and improvement.
- Focus on employee wellbeing: The solution should prioritize employee wellbeing and work-life balance, recognizing that these factors are critical to employee satisfaction and productivity. This doesn’t mean providing options for therapy or yoga classes – it means empowering clinical employees with the ability to manage these factors for themselves without fear or losing their job or being demoted.
Healthcare Workforce
The healthcare workforce is facing a turnover crisis, driven in large part by a lack of investment in the employee experience. To solve this problem, healthcare leaders need to prioritize and invest in new technologies that capture relevant data points, in real-time, and guide their decision-making to implement successful employee experience strategies. The solution should be a modern talent management platform that integrates seamlessly with existing HR systems and other data sources, providing actionable insights, personalization, collaboration, and a focus on employee wellbeing. By adopting new technologies built specifically for employee experience management, healthcare organizations can improve the employee experience, reduce turnover, and ultimately deliver better patient care.
