This month’s installment in our return on investment series is about the return on investment possibilities of healthcare recognition programs. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing posted some startlinghealthcare industry turnover facts on their website recently. The most surprising facts to me were that the average voluntary turnover rate for first-year nurses is 27.1% and the industry average turnover rate is 13.9%. Susan M. Heathfield, resident HR expert on About.com lists recognizing excellent performance as a best practice for increasing employee retention.
Clearly from this research, employee recognition needs to be given consistently to healthcare professionals throughout their career-not only after a milestone anniversary is reached. There are a number of ways that healthcare employers can achieve consistent recognition in the workplace in order to maximize retention and return on investment.
First of all, an employee recognition program should provide supervisors and administrators with an easy but formal way to recognize employees. This means that the recognition program should be developed according to the preferences of administration team members. Determine if it would be easier for your management team to carry around point certificates or award cards and distribute points and recognition by paper-based methods or if they would prefer to add points to an employee account online and then congratulate the staff member and recognize them in person.
Second of all, an employee recognition program should allow co-workers to nominate peers for formal recognition awards. Peer to Peer recognition programs are growing in popularity and especially in hospitals and clinics where successful teamwork can translate into happier patients and better profits, they can be an invaluable component of the recognition program.
Lastly, recognition programs for healthcare providers should provide recognition according to employee preferences. Some employees love to be the center of attention and for this group, public recognition is the best way to recognize them while providing positive reinforcement to other staff members. On the other hand, some employees may prefer to receive recognition in private from their direct supervisor and/or administrator. Some of my clients have made it standard practice to find out what kind of recognition an employee would like to receive by including this in a questionnaire given to employees when they are hired.
By providing consistent recognition to your healthcare staff, you can maximize the impact of your recognition program and increase retention in the long term. Be sure to check back next month when I discuss the return on investment possibilities of customer loyalty reward programs.
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