Before evaluating the effectiveness of your employees, it is important to understand who you are as a company. This is achieved by asking your leadership team a few key questions: (1) What are your core values? Do they accurately reflect your existing culture? (2) Do you convey who you are to existing employees? (3) Are your goals and vision transparent and understood by your staff?
These steps are critical because the U.S. job market currently suffers from a severe talent shortage, which is especiallyprominent in the healthcare industry. Modern Healthcare (2015) reported, “Healthcare is one of the few industries in which there are more job openings than unemployed workers.”
To complicate the matter, there is a turnover problem in healthcare. Compensation Force’s recent Comp Data Surveys of more than 30,000 companies indicates that the turnover rate among healthcare workers has exceeded19%.
An employer will spend the equivalent of six to nine months of an employee’s salary to recruit and train a replacement. In a complex working environment, as in the healthcare industry, it may require up to two years for an acceptably motivated and qualified employee to become fully productive (Training Industry Quarterly, May 2017).
Working with your existing resources can help maximize your success and reduce your risk of losing good people. Exploring employee differences in thought, experience, soft and hard skills and personality is a good place to start.
Diversity expands the breadth and depth of perspectives, ideas, values, and interests, allowing them to increase the resources available to a company’s deployment. Diversity can help to expand the reach ofa company’s services, its problem-solving skills, and its teamwork.
Understanding and properly allocating the strengths of existing staff benefits both employers and employees. Employers achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness, while employees have more opportunities to excel and grow.
To quote the legendary business author Jim Collins, “The key to great long term performance is to “get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.”
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Lisa Rock, founder and President of National Medical Billing Services, has more than 30 years of experience in healthcare management and specifically the ambulatory surgery center industry.With more than 500 employees working in multiple locations, National Medical Billing Services has won numerous awards and honors, most notably as a Best Places to Work Company by Modern Healthcare, Becker’s ASC Review, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the St. Louis Business Journal.