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How Employee Engagement Impacts Your Healthcare Workforce Efficiency

In the year 2018, employee engagement is absolutely essential to the fundamental operations and efficiency of any size or specialty healthcare organization. Employee retention is imperative to maintaining a knowledgeable, trained, and experienced workforce throughout all business relations and patient interactions. To achieve this, it is absolutely critical that employers continue to find new and innovative ways to engage their full-time and contingent workforce employees from the bottom all the way to the very top.

Not only is creating an employee engagement strategy necessary for every business and corporation across a wide range of industries, it is even more impactful for industries with high turnover rates, such as the healthcare industry. Implementing an effective strategy coupled with designing a clear contingent workforce program is the secret sauce to successful healthcare management. Healthcare administrative teams work tirelessly to ensure their healthcare providers remain engaged in their jobs in order to develop and retain an efficient and skilled workforce.

Benefits of Effective Employee Engagement

Employee engagement occurs when employees feel dedicated, committed, interested in, and fascinated by their work. When employees are engaged and inspired by the work they do, they have a more enjoyable work experience and tend to perform at a higher level.

The benefits a healthcare management team could expect to experience from a higher rate of employee engagement are less provider turnover and attracting higher-quality talent to the company. With an established workforce who feels appreciated and therefore stays actively engaged, your organization is more likely to yield positive workplace environment reviews and a reputation for excellence.

How Do Companies Foster Employee Engagement?

Healthcare organizations are coming to realize that the key to employee engagement is to improve the overall daily experience of the average employee. This can consist of anything from maintaining a positive workplace culture, offering professional development workshops, to enhancing your employee incentive and reward program, even the integration of up to date and cutting-edge technologies. Simple and easy actions like the aforementioned can be taken by companies to improve and build a more effective employee engagement strategy.

A recent article by Forbes looked at six different employee engagement strategies that employers use to help keep their employees engaged and active in workplace functions. Among these methods were:

• Eliminate Workplace Tension
• Find Your Worker’s Most Positive Attributes And Capabilities
• Empower Your Employees To Innovate And Discover
• Give Your Employees A Chance To Show Leadership Abilities
• Share Your Successes With Your Employees
• Provide Consistent Leadership And Support For Your Employees

While these six methods are excellent ways to approach employee engagement, your overall employee engagement rate will improve more meaningfully if used in conjunction with basic improvements to fundamental aspects of their daily workplace interactions and functions. Your employees will arrive at work feeling energized and not only ready to perform their duties but more anxious to engage and grow within their workforce capacity. Try implementing a few of these ideas and observe the results.

Employee Engagement and Your Bottom Line

Several studies have shown that an engaged workforce contributes greatly to the bottom line of a business or corporation. Some of these studies go as far to say that an engaged workforce literally drives the bottom line of a business or corporation. While the results of these studies are merely just food for thought because all businesses are different, they should provide enough motivation for employers across all industries to begin to implement methods to build upon in order to maintain engaged full-time and contingent workforces. If not for the purpose of driving the bottom line, at least for the purpose of improving the daily lives of the employees who show up to work every day and perform their duties.

To find out if your organization has the most effective and engaging contingent workforce strategy in place, request a consultation today.

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5 Things Your Contingent Healthcare Providers Care About In 2018

In the year 2018, contingent healthcare providers make up a large percentage of the healthcare workforce. Contingent healthcare providers are any workers that are hired by a healthcare organization on a short-term, per diem or on-demand basis. Although they may work full-time hours for a period of time, they are excluded from the full-time payroll of any given organization. As healthcare organizations look to avoid contributing to employee benefits like healthcare and retirement plans, the pool of contingent healthcare providers continues to grow larger.

Because contingent healthcare providers make up such a large part of the modern-day healthcare economy, it is especially important to pay close attention to their needs and concerns to ensure exceptional employee engagement and long-term satisfaction among this contingent workforce.

Here are five concerns that contingent workers have in 2018 that employers should take note of for effective healthcare workforce management:

1. Performance Feedback
   

   It is no secret that Millennial workers feel differently about employment and work in general as opposed to their previous generations. However, among performance feedback, there is a stark difference in expectation. Millennials want more feedback regarding their performance more often than previous generations, who prefer less, more informal performance feedback even less frequently. Millennials want to hear how they are performing so that they can continue to build off their prior experiences.

2. Onboard Training and Employee Orientation
   

   Although contingent healthcare providers are not part of the permanent, full-time workforce, they still want to feel like they are a part of the team. They want to be trained as soon as they are hired and they want to quickly become acclimated to the workplace environment and culture that they will be working in. Employee orientation programs are absolutely essential to the overall engagement of your contingent employees. If they feel disconnected, your organization’s employee performance metrics will likely reflect this lack of feeling valuable or a part of the team.

3. Professional Development

   
   Professional development is another concern for contingent healthcare providers. Since they are not on the official full-time payroll of your organization, they look for other perks and benefits since they are missing out on healthcare and retirement plans. Professional development and skill development programs not only foster communication, collaboration, and interaction between full-time healthcare providers and your contingent employees, they also improve the overall engagement of your healthcare workforce.

4. Competitive Compensation
   

   Competitive compensation is a concern for every current workforce employee whether they are a part of your full-time workforce or the contingent workforce. However, contingent healthcare providers are even more concerned about their compensation because they are not receiving any company benefits. This also ties into professional development programs because contingent healthcare providers will always search for additional perks and benefits to compensate for the lack of healthcare benefits and retirement options.

5. Room for Advancement
   

   Contingent healthcare providers often place their bets on eventually receiving full-time employment after investing time as a successful and effective temporary business hire. A contingent worker will almost always look at the current business structure of a healthcare organization and look for possible opportunities for advancement to receive a full-time employment offer. While this may not be a deal breaker for organizations that do not present a path towards full-time employment, it is certainly an added benefit for those that do.

In order to retain a stable, high-performing contingent healthcare workforce moving forward, consider their desire for continual feedback, opportunities for growth, professional development resources, competitive compensation, and the overall education, training, and onboarding that they desire to continue performing at top levels.

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7 Advantages to Bringing Your MSP In-House

In order to meet increasing industry demands and effectively address recurring issues surrounding cost, service quality and liability, many companies turn to a third-party managed service provider (MSP), rather than managing their contingent workforce processes in-house. There is justification for this decision, however, it may not always be the most efficient or cost-effective approach to managing your contingent workforce.

Where there was once only two choices – outsourcing your process management to a third-party or managing it in-house, both of which come with their advantages – there is now a third option, which marries the two strategies together giving you the most efficient hybrid solution to bringing your MSP in-house. which offers the best-of-both-worlds. In order to determine which approach makes sense for your organization, consulting with a healthcare management professional is recommended.

To be expected, there is often hesitation in making the decision to hand over access to all of your sensitive data to a third-party – and rightfully so. Maybe you’ve found yourself wondering if there could be a better way. As long as it wouldn’t put additional strain on your HR department and/or administrative staff and could still deliver the results you are looking for, you’d likely consider the option of keeping or bringing your MSP in-house. But it sounds pretty unrealistic, so is it even possible? Until now, the answer was a firm, “No.” With the introduction of the HMS model to contingent workforce management, the answer is now, “Yes!” And there are now many advantages to keeping or bringing your MSP in-house.

Here are 7 reasons why you should consider bringing your MSP in-house:

1. Eliminate the Middle Man. This is often the approach businesses look to take first in order to cut costs. With direct access to a large, talented pool of experienced providers who are ready to work and don’t require training, you can reduce the need for overtime and gain the ability to fill your most critical shifts where needed and as soon as you need to. This eliminates the strain on your internal staff, the impact of which is invaluable.
2. System-wide Visibility.  Having access to the information your business needs at any given time has clear advantages. It gives your staff the ability to streamline and simplify processes,  ensure best practices through simple automation, standardization, and gives you convenient access to your analytics all in one place. This puts you in control at all times which comes with immeasurable advantages.
3. Supplier Relationships. Establishing strong relationships with your staffing partners is critical to a successful contingent workforce strategy. When choosing to outsource your management to a third-party, those long-standing, valuable relationships must be let go as you are locked into using your third-party MSP suppliers. With a hybrid HMS approach, you get to maintain your invested supplier partnerships and have access to our strategic VMS partner talent pools. The advantage of this marriage allows you to fill staffing positions on demand with the supplier you trust and ensures you will never end up in a bind during critical times.
4. Improve Service Quality. Bringing your MSP in-house means more reliable service, less possibility of technical issues and disruptions in your service. The result is a more stable, dependable contingent workforce environment resulting in better service availability and performance expectations.
5. Standardized Rates. This is a concept more commonly being implemented which allows your organization to streamline hourly bill rates and increase efficiency with standardization across all terms of your supplier agreements including bill rates, cancellation terms, risk mitigation, direct hire and billing terms, etc. This gives your in-house team the ability to make quick decisions and saves the organization hard and soft dollars.
6. Streamlined Processes. The ability to simplify your credentialing, compliance, audit and maintenance processes through web-based, cost-deferred software technology means increased efficiency and improved accuracy. This is likely one of the more critical advantages to bringing your MSP in-house.
7. Flexibility and Scalability to adapt to changing business conditions.  Consulting with an industry expert who can easily conduct a needs assessment, run analytics and provide you with new sourcing strategies to improve efficiency ensures you are able to maximize your business productivity year after year. Quarterly reviews reveal the data we need to determine which shifts in strategies need to be made.

The benefits of bringing your MSP in-house can be maximized by selecting a partner that has vast experience in the MSP/VMS space, that will not only enable you to customize your operations but also allow you complete control of your processes and resources.

When evaluating and choosing a provider that will exceed your in-house capabilities while at the same time improving efficiency and profitability, there is much to consider.  But it will likely prove to be well worth the research and effort.

For help determining whether or not bringing your MSP in-house is right for your business, and if so, which managed services provider would be the best fit, requesting a vendor management consultation would be wise.

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