Breaking the Silos: How to Create a Culture of Collaboration in Healthcare

How do you build a culture that fosters recruitment and employee engagement in your organization? There are many right answers depending on the industry and the company. In the healthcare industry, different health providers and caregivers must work together to deliver care. So, a collaborative culture that encourages information sharing, acknowledges employees’ contributions and allows employees to own their work will make your employees more effective.

Your organization’s culture determines how leadership and other employees work together. But, before you think of making your organization more collaborative, you’ll need to understand where your company is on the competitiveness-collaborative spectrum. You’ll also need to understand whether your company prioritizes creativity over logic, or conversely. 

Leadership IQ’s leadership styles test reveals that, generally, people prefer leadership styles that provide more autonomy and freedom than those that prioritize structures and rigid instructions.

Why You Should Rethink Your Approach to Employee Satisfaction

Post-COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry has been facing a high employee turnover rate. An analysis by premier Inc shows that staff turnover in some departments is up to 45% in the last two years. Also, more experienced healthcare workers are leaving or retiring early, compelling health facilities to work with less experienced staff.

Employee burnout is a leading cause of the high turnover rate in the healthcare sector. According to a 2021 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post, more than half of healthcare workers report burnout. 

Some health facilities increase wages and benefits to attract and retain workers. However, doing so only offers short-term benefits, is unsustainable in the long run, and doesn’t address the underlying reason workers want to quit in the first place.

To deal with this issue, some health facilities are adopting radical approaches to improve staff retention. Some of the different strategies include: making leadership more approachable by removing some of the multi-layered corporate structures, understanding the leadership styles that work best with individual employees, and using automation to improve employees’ working experience.

How to Foster Collaboration in Your Multi-Faceted Healthcare Organization

Company culture is the underlying reason people in your organization act the way they do. It permeates every aspect of your organization, from hiring to decision-making to performance reviews. Your company culture is also at the root of whether employees consider your organization a great place to work and is critical to your organization’s ability to attract and retain staff.

A Glassdoor survey revealed that 77% of candidates consider a company’s culture before they decide to apply for a job. And this is a major deciding factor. As much as 56% of those surveyed said that a company’s culture plays more role than salary in job satisfaction. 

Here are some ways to build a great company culture within your healthcare organization according to The Ultimate Medical Academy.

1. Design an Engaging Employee Orientation

Employees form an opinion about your organization’s culture from your onboarding process and training procedures. If you design an engaging employee orientation, you can help your new employees instantly get a feel of your work culture and bond quickly with other team members.

Some recommendation on how to add a personal touch to the onboarding process includes:

• Walk new hires around the facility
• Introduce them personally to co-workers
• Get them a small gift
• Send a welcome video message 

2. Invest in a Formal Mentorship Program

Your mentorship program can pair new hires with more experienced employees for a year or more. When done right, a mentorship program is a great way to provide new employees the much-needed guidance and feedback on their performance. In addition, the mentors can extract value from the opportunity to lead, which can increase their job satisfaction.

3. Build Trust with a Team-First Culture

Introducing team-building activities in your employee onboarding, training, and company events can help team members feel more connected with each other. You can incorporate activities where employees have to work together to succeed. This will help them build stronger relationships, which makes collaboration easier.

How Automation Helps to Create a More Collaborative Workplace Culture

Automation can help you deal with some of the underlying causes of the high turnover rate in the following ways:

Automate Processes to Reduce Workload

Healthcare professionals spend much of their time dealing with mundane tasks. Automating some processes, such as scheduling and discharging patients, can increase efficiency and free up workers to engage in more direct patient care. Automating manual tasks also allows employees to spend time doing what they’re best at and enjoy, which will increase job satisfaction and decrease the turnover rate.

Improve Employee Scheduling

Automation software gives employees greater control and flexibility in their work schedules. When workers can put in time off requests from their mobile devices and view their schedules and earnings in real time, they have more time for other life activities.

Using software to manage your payroll and scheduling will also reduce errors and make administrative tasks easier. By automating time tracking, deductions, taxes, and special hours calculation, you can become more efficient at employee management.

Reduce Turnover Impact

Employee turnover usually reduces the quality of care given to patients or residents. While you can take steps to reduce turnover, you cannot wish it away. So, you’re better off preparing for it. 

Workforce management software can help you automate best practices processes so your quality of care stays relatively the same even with staffing shortages. For example, hospitals can automate standard discussions during multidisciplinary rounds (MDRs) so they can rely less on case managers to run effective MDRs.

Make People Operations Easier with Empeon

Creating a collaborative culture in your healthcare organization starts with your onboarding and training processes. Putting in extra effort to give your new hires a great start will increase their job satisfaction and retention rate. Integrating technology into your workforce management will help improve employees’ work experience.

Empeon provides a comprehensive HR and payroll software solution that automates employee management from recruitment to onboarding to retirement. Contact us today to see how you can build a customized employee management platform that works for you