24 Jul 7 Evidence-Based Strategies for Workplace Excellence
In The Healthcare Environment
Building a culture of excellence in the workplace, especially in a dynamic environment like the wards, can prove tricky when you feel as if you have no starting line or reference point, right? A lot of leaders vie for accelerated, lasting results, but have no idea how to encourage their team to achieve this without adding more pressure into an already boiling-over pot. Hence, we’ve put together a list of 7 evidence-based strategies you can use to encourage excellence in the healthcare workplace.
Proactively strategising with your team and other leaders, and then implementation is the most efficient way to get the results you want without forcing things too much. Some of our favourite tried-and-true strategies include:
- Communication
- Rewarding accountability and high achievement
- Leading with integrity, respect for employees, and genuine care
- Collaborative goal and vision-setting
- Upskilling staff
- Creating a distinctive team and company culture
- Encouraging creativity
Some of these may seem like blanket terms. Most of us have read or heard that we should set goals and communicate. Rest assured, this post takes a deep dive into each of these strategies, backing them with evidence and suggesting ways you can implement these strategies in a healthcare setting. Let’s dive in!
Communication Is Key
We all know that poor communication costs valuable time and money, but did you know that it’s reported to be one of businesses’ biggest profitability killers? The Society for Human Resource Management published a piece headed by David Grossman that asserts “400 companies with 100,000 employees each cited an average loss per company of £48,325,200 per year because of inadequate communication to and between employees.”
Most healthcare environments’ workers are great at communication, seeing as everyone has to work together to achieve the best health outcomes possible. What you might have overlooked is communication beyond the professional context. Communicating more than the essentials –“Mr. Smith is coding,”– could have a huge impact on reducing turnover rates and creating better workplace culture and satisfaction.
More communication also aids in mitigating a condition many nurses suffer from in their careers: compassion fatigue. A paper by the Journal of Nursing Management conducted a meta-analysis using 21 studies that found compassion fatigue is widespread among clinical nurses, with a prevalence of up to 52.55%. It results in decreased productivity, avoidance of work, frequent sick leave, and depression.
The condition is a direct result of not getting enough support from their organisation. To this end, 17.5% of first-year nurses leave their job within that first year, and up to 57% leave within two years, with most new nurses citing “limited support”, as their reason for exit, reports FirstUp.
The solution? Push for programs that support nurses, like talk therapy and support groups, and create a company culture of empathy and compassion–more on that later. You might also try scheduling one-on-one meetings now and then, without an agenda, to ask how someone really is and offer support where you can.
Reward Accountability and High Achievement
Everyone craves approval and recognition. We want to know our work is making a difference, especially from people we respect, like supervisors and managers. Project.co’s Employee Engagement in Healthcare Report says that only 30% of people say they frequently receive recognition at work. Almost 20% of people said they never, or seldom, received any recognition.
Yes, good employees are often incentivised enough by their need to progress professionally and their pride, but sometimes everyone needs a tangible contribution to up their input. This is where employee incentives come in. This could look like more time off, more recognition from management, or more money (and that’s okay).
Genuinely Caring Leadership
One of our biggest values is leading with integrity. We believe that trust– between candidates, recruiters, employers, and institutions– is what makes the delicate healthcare recruitment ecosystem thrive. It’s also what makes great workplaces so prosperous. Trust is directly correlated with good leadership.
You can show employees that you genuinely care for them by, well.., genuinely caring about them. If they raise an issue with you, truly hear them out and stand by their side if they decide to escalate it. Don’t constantly micromanage them, don’t hover. Instead, try to build relationships, whether that’s through one-on-one meetings or team-building activities. You can show that you trust your workers by letting them plan, manage, collaborate, and make decisions on their own, stepping in if they ask you to. This could reduce your turnover rate by as much as 40%.
Collaborative Goal and Vision-Setting
When everyone shares a common goal, it’s easier to champion a cause. This is more accessible when workers at all levels come together to create measurable, controllable goals they would like to achieve. Ask yourself and your workers what they would like to see improvement in by the next year or quarter, then come up with quantifiable measurements (key performance indicators/KPIs) to ascertain success.
A few KPIs you could come up with include:
- Average Hospital Stay
- Average Patient Wait Time
- Medication errors
- Staff-to-patient ratio
- Overall patient satisfaction
- Infection control
- Patient follow up
Think about what KPIs could be more specific to your department and how you would like to measure success.
Upskilling
Professional development is one of the largest contributors to better health outcomes and higher employee satisfaction. It keeps current and up-to-date with industry best practices, ensuring you and your employees get the most out of their work.
Some of the ways you could help your employees upskill are with:
- Corporate training
- Online courses (Coursera)
- Further education (Master’s and top-up courses)
Consider subsidising these courses, as this way financial hardship won’t be a factor in deciding whether to upskill. Did you know? The LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2024 says 7 in 10 workers say learning improves their sense of connection to their organisation. The paper further reports that 80% of workers say learning adds purpose to their work.
Team Culture
Having a shared set of values, purpose, and beliefs when working together can make or break a team’s ability to amalgamate and execute ideas well. This set of values and ideas is often referred to as team culture, and can up motivation, engagement, and commitment, increasing organisational success. A strong team culture usually equates to loyalty and a spirit of excellence. Without feeling as if they belong to a team, people can experience a sense of exclusion that will negatively impact their overall job satisfaction.
To ignite the spark of team spirit, try to foster transparent communication, promote collaboration to achieve a shared sense of purpose and create a shared mindset, communication pattern, work ethic, and overall atmosphere of excellence, fostering a sense of organisational allegiance.
Creativity
In their 2013 study, Linking Two Dimensions of Organizational Creativity to Firm Performance: The Mediating Role of Corporate Entrepreneurship and the Moderating Role of Environment, Bratnicka & Bratnicki point out that workplace innovation (creativity and implementation) is beneficial to employees, leading to higher job satisfaction and stimulating organisation commitment and thereby employee retention.
So, how does one implement creativity in a high-paced workplace like the wards? It boils down to rewarding creative ideas. You should promote collaborative working styles that approach innovative healthcare through continuous quality improvement. Creativity and constant experimentation, learning, failing and adapting to changing circumstances will aid in weathering the UK’s stormy economic and healthcare service climate.
Appreciate that some ideas could fail and that that’s okay. Be sure to communicate your tolerance for failure to administrators and healthcare employees. There are many inherent issues in England’s healthcare service delivery model, and allowing creativity and innovation could be the only real answer to solving its many pervasive problems.
Dare to Be Excellent
As you’ve learned, there are numerous ways you can innovate your leadership approach to encourage creativity, allegiance to your organisation, continuous professional development, high achievement and resilience in the face of emotional burnout/compassion fatigue.
All of these strategies have proven to mitigate high employee turnover and improve retention rates– cutting recruitment costs tenfold!
If you would like help cutting recruitment costs while maintaining quality of care delivery, contact Proximity Healthcare. We’re a healthcare employment and recruitment agency committed to integrity and excellence in RN, HCA, and practitioner staffing.