As the workforce shortage persists, it’s more important than ever to attract qualified professionals and keep them engaged. Discover eight keys to an effective team-building and retention strategy, and learn how to use technology to streamline and improve every aspect of it.
1. Source the right professionals
The right professionals are out there, but you need to find them. If your team doesn’t have time to identify the most popular job boards and keep job descriptions up to date on each, you can use technology to automate that process for you.
Look for technology that helps your team easily create organization-branded career pages that capture the attention of interested professionals quickly. Share benefits and information about what makes your facility special. Offer a “quick apply” option to reduce the bounce rates associated with longer applications and collect relevant information from candidates who might not have a resume.
Consider using an applicant tracking system (ATS), since they can make it easy to create and manage templates for jobs you frequently need to fill. Ideally, your ATS should also be able to scan resumes for keywords, pre-screen candidates with qualifying questions, allow candidates to apply without a resume, and securely store candidate information for easy retrieval during future openings.
Additionally, invest in your organization’s social media presence. Sixty-six percent of Gen Z and 81% of college graduates use social media as their primary source for career advice; however, negative healthcare content dominates the conversation. A full 78% of Gen Zers who said no to careers in nursing stated that they could have been attracted to the profession had they seen more positive content.
2. Make the hiring process easy for everyone
Hiring can feel like a full-time job on top of a full-time job, especially in facilities that don’t have dedicated HR departments. For candidates, it often feels like a black box.
Technology that offers an online hiring portal enables managers to check on a candidate’s application progress, while providing candidates with an easy experience that allows them to complete the entire process from their mobile devices. It also streamlines communications by keeping all records in one place.
To reduce hiring time, look for technology that enables you to customize workflows for your facility and integrates background and drug screenings so that you can ensure compliance. Streamlining the interview process is critical too — allow candidates to interview either in-person or virtually and make sure that everyone on the hiring team can share and view interview notes. If your technology also provides offer-letter templates with electronic signatures, it'll be that much easier for candidates to accept your offers.
3. Create a comprehensive, streamlined orientation program
Just because you've made an offer and your candidate has accepted it, doesn't mean they’ve completely bought-in. An employee’s experience with your facility involves many touchpoints, and orientation is a chance to make a positive impression. Ideally, the paperwork portion of orientation should happen in the same online portal through which your employee applied. Form and documentation management should be built-in so that your team doesn’t have to track items manually. Your technology should also provide customizable forms, prompt new hires to fill out all the necessary paperwork before their first shift, and make it easy to follow up on any missing items.
4. Be extra attentive during the first 90 days
According to a survey by OnShift and McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, 40% of turnover in long-term care and senior living occurs within the first three months of employment. When new employees join your organization, have a plan in place to welcome them and keep them engaged. Start by capturing new-hire feedback about the onboarding process. That will not only make new employees feel seen and heard from day one, it will also help you improve your onboarding process. Continue to monitor new-hire satisfaction by scheduling regular check-ins with managers, during which managers can make them feel welcome, monitor satisfaction and performance, and help resolve any issues to establish a culture of communication and trust.
5. Prioritize employee engagement
Are your employees engaged or just putting in their time? If you don’t know or if the answer is the latter, start focusing on engagement as soon as possible. Employees who are engaged are less likely to turnover—21% less likely according to Harvard Business Review.
Look for technology that can deploy regular employee satisfaction surveys so you can get a pulse on employee sentiment. Your goal should be to make providing and responding to frequent feedback a part of the company culture. This will enable your organization to address problems right away.
Once you know how your employees are doing, use technology to track their performance and monitor performance trends, so you can quickly identify your best employees, along with those who may need additional coaching.
The best technology will enable you to recognize and reward successes while reducing the time it takes to manage rewards and incentive programs. It will also make communication with the entire team easier so everyone feels connected and in the loop, while helping your leadership team disseminate important information swiftly.
6. Offer your employees schedule flexibility
Today’s employees want more flexibility, and that includes 94% of healthcare workers. But 30% of early-tenure nurses and 25% of mid- and most-tenured nurses are neutral to dissatisfied with the flexibility options at their places of work.
Senior care leaders agree: In our 2024 Workforce 360 report, schedule flexibility stood out as a pivotal strategy in increasing employee engagement and retention rates.
Consider offering your employees the ability to self-schedule, select the length of their shifts, or select shift-start times. A McKinsey study found those were the most desired flexible scheduling options across nurses of all tenure.
The right technology can help you 1) find out what kind of flexibility your employees want and 2) implement flexible scheduling in a way that maintains high quality of care for your residents.
7. Streamline workflows across your organization
No one likes to waste time or get bogged down by seemingly endless manual tasks. Analyze processes to pinpoint inefficiencies and look for ways to integrate disjointed systems and tools. Technology can help you streamline workflows, minimize or eliminate administrative busy work, and support employees at every level of your organization.
LECOM Institute for Successful Living used our award-winning technology, SAMI, to save $11,000 (annualized) from reduced administrative work. SAMI connects ShiftKey’s marketplace with our world-class workforce management software, which is purpose-built for post-acute care and includes breakthrough hiring and engagement tools you won’t find anywhere else. Schedulers in organizations using SAMI saved 90,000 hours, and facilities saved $1.3 million on administrative hours alone.
"I was a bit hesitant to use SAMI because I was afraid that it was going to end up being the easy button to flood our communities with external workers. But using SAMI has our team planning better, scheduling our employees more efficiently, and reporting PRN more accurately. In addition to relieving the pressure on schedulers, SAMI has been extremely helpful with optimizing administrative costs."
Jaime Babiak
VP of Operations
LECOM Institute for Successful Living
8. Foster strong relationships between management, direct caregivers and residents
The previous seven keys help you to foster better manager-employee relationships, strengthen connections and show your employees that you care. When you do that, you improve the well-being of your entire organization — and that includes your residents. Creating a culture of transparency, care and collaboration takes time and effort, but it’s well worth the work.
“The #1 focus of our communities is the temperature of the building, staff, and residents. We focus on people and that means listening to what they’re saying, hearing them, and opening up a little bit more. We spend a lot of time listening by using OnShift. It gives us the tools necessary to readjust what we’re doing based on the needs of our employees.”
Quintin King
President
Brightwater Senior Living
