The healthcare workforce is changing. The industry has experienced various forms of strain over the last decade, but the pandemic was a tipping point. While most organizations are now back to normal, recovery is far from over.
Healthcare workers still feel the after-effects of the last few years and have demanded change, and healthcare HR must respond with innovation. A few HR strategies for 2024 can help human resource management navigate these shifts and improve the employee experience.
Fostering a Human-Centric Workplace Culture
A human-centric culture revolves around thoughtful human capital management. Policies, procedures and strategies should be tailored to the workforce’s needs, and HR leaders can do this by focusing on three main pillars: flexibility, engagement and collaboration, and empathy-based management.
Flexibility leads to workforce resiliency, responding to challenges with strength and agility rather than collapsing under pressure. Indeed, healthcare workers bore the brunt of incredible pressure during the pandemic, working grueling hours with insufficient staffing and myriad other concerns.
Now, healthcare workers want a reprieve. They want safe staffing ratios and flexible schedules that promote work-life balance, and it’s possible to provide that with some creativity and innovation. It doesn’t mean throwing structure out the window but being open to options like alternative rostering models.
First and foremost, schedules should align with organizational needs and meet your patient and compliance requirements. But rather than applying standard shift cycles across the board, you might consider tailoring scheduling models to individual and group demands.
The research shows that flexibility benefits your organization. Organizations will likely see less nurse turnover and higher job satisfaction with shorter working hours and alternative but predictable schedules.
Collaboration is crucial to a human-centric workplace and delivering effective, quality care. Healthcare is complex, and so is navigating peer relationships at work.
From a healthcare human resources perspective, collaboration moves away from control and micromanagement. Instead, it allows teams to share information and ideas and develop solutions that fit within established frameworks. Employees can add to the solution using their unique skill sets and openly and honestly share their perspectives.
The key is to promote open conversations, problem-solving, shared decision-making, and safety. In these settings, teams can achieve collective excellence and quality outcomes rather than individual stardom or priority.
Empathy is the most critical factor in a human-centric workplace. It underpins flexibility and collaboration, fostering trust, loyalty, respect and acceptance. Approaching your staff with compassion helps model a human-centric culture that can filter through the workplace.
The first step is to accept that personal life inevitably bleeds into work life. Rather than make assumptions about behaviors, have conversations and identify the root cause when issues arise. Sometimes, reactions or behaviors at work come from personal life challenges, and asking questions to understand your team’s thoughts and feelings encourages openness and honesty without breaching trust. Show care for employees and be willing to help them find solutions to problems.
These approaches help staff feel connected, seen, heard, and valued, promoting a supportive and productive workplace. It also helps identify signs of burnout and promote overall well-being.
Promoting Employee Well-Being
Burnout and emotional exhaustion are still pressing issues for human resource management. In 2022, 46% of health workers experienced burnout. Numbers have fallen slightly in 2023 but remain high. In 2024, promoting employee well-being through screening, wellness initiatives and holistic health opportunities, including financial health, will be essential.
Screenings can help you monitor the health status of your organization and identify how well interventions work. For best results, use an integrated survey that covers multiple areas of the workplace and offers the opportunity for anonymity, confidentiality, or withdrawal.
A helpful resource is the well-being questionnaire recently launched by the CDC in partnership with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Designed for all workers, it supports healthcare leadership in identifying issues in the workplace and in an employee’s personal life. Initiatives for improvement can also be targeted and tracked over time.
Once you have data regarding your talent’s holistic health, consider wellness programs to change outcomes. Strategies to avoid burnout include adjusting schedules and shortening shifts to allow for more rest or creating flexible but predictable rotations.
You might also build a comprehensive benefits package that includes mental healthcare coverage. Provide information about local programs and encourage access to mental healthcare by offering time off for appointments. Prioritize confidentiality and avoid stigmatizing language and probing questions.
In addition, HR must emphasize health and safety in the workplace. Examine current practices and identify areas where you need to minimize physical and psychological harm at work. For example, you might consider the effects of staffing ratios on workload or the prevalence of harassment or violence in the workplace.
Finally, consider financial health as part of overall worker health. Financial stress significantly impacts well-being, causing poor mental health.
These days, it’s hard for individuals and families to get by on less, and many live paycheck to paycheck, struggling to cover emergency expenses. On top of that, average Americans, including healthcare workers, have wrestled with the recent inflation crisis that has left many scrambling to catch up on bills.
Start by guaranteeing that all employees earn a living wage. Provide opportunities for growth in the organization that allow your talent to increase their earning potential. Additionally, consider technology integrations that give employees access to earned wages faster or on demand without the cost of predatory high-interest rates of payday loans.
Leveraging Technology to Remove Management Hurdles
These approaches help improve the employee experience, but it’s also vital to consider the challenges that managers and leaders face. Middle management has a unique sandwiched pressure from leadership and managed teams.
On the one hand, they answer to stakeholders and deliver faster and leaner organizations. On the other, they must regularly solve team problems and deal with overwhelming nonmanagerial work.
These hurdles directly interfere with momentum, growth, and actual talent management. However, technology, such as automation and AI, can remove these barriers, giving HR managers more time to connect with teams.
Healthcare HR methods affect the entire workforce. Manual time tracking, for example, can be chaotic for payments, benefits, and taxes. Sorting the fallout from errors can take weeks to months, especially for large teams.
Implementing the right technology makes all the difference. Automation, for example, creates schedules on auto-pilot based on default information or pre-defined rules. These schedules link to time tracking and payroll modules, minimizing data entry errors.
In addition, you can automate time-consuming, low-level decisions, such as determining eligibility for paid time-off requests or answering routine HR questions. HR teams can use automation tools to build an efficient and simplified system with minimal input, allowing greater flexibility in day-to-day operations.
Recruitment, hiring, and onboarding are time-consuming yet constant requirements in HR for healthcare. That means streamlined HR onboarding is essential.
Automation is transformative here, too. With the right technology, HR teams can remove manual processes and paperwork and drive efficiency. Automatically send offer letters, collect payroll documents, track licenses and certifications, and capture signatures.
Embed welcome or training videos and organizational policies directly into onboarding streams for faster results. The automated workflow will seamlessly move new talent through the steps, ensuring you get signatures and meet compliance and legal standards.
AI technology offers another opportunity to simplify processes, especially recruitment and hiring. Combining automation and AI gives you a powerful, responsive workflow to attract interested candidates and automate follow-up.
For example, you can leverage generative AI to create job postings and optimize the language to reach high-value candidates. Then, create personalized outreach messages to engage candidates as they respond. Apply automation to screening processes for faster applicant review.
With the right software, you can set parameters or define the qualities of an ideal candidate that align with organizational values. Recruitment software helps screen applicants, sort resumes, and match candidates to open positions, relieving data overwhelm or fatigue. HR managers can build a talent pipeline and scale the process across an organization while saving valuable time.
Investing in People and Innovation
The healthcare trends of 2023 demonstrate a need for greater focus on people and innovation in 2024. Embracing technology helps support that goal and drives flexibility during times of change. With modern human capital management solutions, organizations can simplify the HR cycle, build a resilient workforce and process, and respond confidently to any challenge.
