Recruiting healthcare workers is a challenge in today's environment, and retaining them is even harder. But Providence has figured out a way to cut turnover by engaging new employees with "stay interviews."
At the recent Becker's CEO+CFO Roundtable, Greg Till, chief people officer at Providence, discussed the organization’s innovative approach to workforce retention through stay interviews. Recognizing the growing challenges of turnover and burnout in healthcare, Providence has implemented stay interviews as a proactive strategy to improve retention and create a supportive environment for employees.
Providence’s stay interviews are focused on establishing a connection between new employees and their leaders from day one.
"In healthcare, probably like a lot of you, we experienced most of our turnover in the first year of employment,” Mr. Till said. "What this is really about is making sure that those caregivers in the first year have a conversation with their core leader before they start and ensuring they're meeting their core leader on day one, and then every couple of weeks checking in with those caregivers on how it's going."
During these check-ins, leaders ask employees:
- What has been your experience so far?
- What aspects of your job are working well?
- What hasn't been the way you expected?
- Where do you need extra resources or assistance?
The stay interviews provide leaders with valuable insights into employees’ daily experiences and help pinpoint issues that could lead to disengagement if left unaddressed. By creating a structured forum for employees to voice their needs, Providence has managed to identify and resolve common challenges before they escalate. This approach allows leaders to address employee concerns promptly, such as providing additional training, adjusting workloads, or improving communication within teams.
"The questions are important, but even more important than that is just the intentional and purposeful connection between the core leaders and the caregivers themselves," said Mr. Till.
Providence has also benefited from boomerang employees over the last few years; those who left the system for other organizations and realized they really wanted to come back. In the next year, Providence aims to hire around 45,000 employees and Mr. Till sees the stay interviews, alongside mentorship, implementing "radical flexibility" and leveraging technology as essential to retention.
One of the emerging programs is a co-care model partnering floor nurses with virtual nurses to monitor patients and distribute medications.
"They've transformed the way our nurses are partnering with technology and partnering with each other on the floor," said Mr. Till. "Those [virtual nurses] could be anywhere in the country. That's one of the really innovative things we're doing at Providence."