Home Health & Hospice Week

The Department of Labor targets health care worker shortage.

If high staff turnover rates are plaguing your home care company, the weapon to fight them might be right under your nose.

The higher your turnover rates, the higher your recruitment and training costs. "Our nation's health care system is facing a major crisis," said Emily Stover DeRocco, assistant secretary of the Department of Labor's Education & Training Administration, at the Maryland Healthcare Work-force Summit in Annapolis Aug. 18. "This $600 billion industry is in desperate need of skilled workers," DeRocco stressed.

The DOL is targeting the health care work-force shortage with a new attack plan, the High Growth Job Training Initiative. Under the measure, DOL and its partners will gather information, conduct analysis and planning, and will implement resulting strategies, DeRocco said in her prepared remarks for the conference attended by more than 650 employers, plus government reps.

The DOL already has completed its information-gathering, and will move on to analysis and planning with three regional forums this fall. The forums will include workforce system executives, education leaders and experts from the health care industry who already are modeling innovative workforce programs, DeRocco said.

These forum participants will help DOL identify "solutions to pursue," and the agency then will fund $15 billion in testing and implementing the model solutions, she announced.

While those big-picture plans might help home care providers in the long run, many companies need help with turnover rates today. To tackle recruitment and retention woes, providers should tap one of their most valuable resources - existing employees, advised home care veteran Betty Gordon in a recent teleconference sponsored by Eli.

Follow these four steps to unleash your recruitment & retention power, said Gordon with Simione Consultants in Hamden, CT:

1. Convene a task force. 

Decide which type of worker you want to assess - registered nurse, home health aide, etc. Hold one "task force" meeting, asking a representative sample of those types of workers to attend for an hour or so, Gordon recommended. Making sure you have a good mix could mean including workers who are single, have families, work other jobs, are younger, are older, and so on.

Elicit from these attendees their prime motivating principles. Often they include compensation, job flexibility, appreciation and respect, among others. Motivating principles often vary among disciplines and from region to region. Your job is to figure out which factors motivate your staff, "not what factors motivate the whole world," Gordon stressed.

2. Develop a survey.  

Based on the feedback you receive from your task force, zero in on the important motivators. Turn these principles into statements with a numbered scale for a survey. For example, one agency asked "How do you feel about your pay rate?" with a "1" being excellent and a "4" being poor. And be sure to include space for staffers to write in extra comments.

Distribute your finished survey to all your employees of that discipline and include a deadline for return. To facilitate responses, offer an incentive or reward for completing the survey, Gordon counseled. Anything from a fast food gift certificate drawing to a shot at being involved in developing new policies and procedures could increase responses.

3. Analyze the data.  

Take a look at the survey results for each of your principles - you'll want at least a 30 percent response rate. If your scale includes a rating system of excellent, good, fair and poor, questions with more fairs and poors than goods and excellents are your weaknesses, while the ones with higher scores are your strengths.

4. Formulate strategies for retention.

Sure, you won't be able to give everyone million-dollar salaries and every Friday off, but you can go a long way toward furnishing employees with motivations to work for you that are important to them. For example, if your employees say better health insurance benefits are important, you can offer options where staff can choose higher benefits in exchange for a reduced pay rate. Or you can reward employees with added benefits after they reach certain employment timeframes.

And don't forget to formulate plans for maintaining and improving those factors that your organization already does well. If yet those slip, you could lose staffers right and left.

An Eye Toward Recruitment 

After sussing out existing staff's motivators and taking steps to enhance those, it's time to apply your knowledge to recruiting, Gordon explained. Stressing the good points about yourself, as discovered through your survey, can woo recruits to your organization. You can even use specific figures you gather.

For example, one of Gordon's clients included a job satisfaction question with a scale in its survey, and 97 percent of respondents scored it as excellent or good. Use a figure like that in recruiting and job ads, she suggested.

Using quotes from the comment portion of the survey also can give your recruiting efforts a boost. "I love my job" and "I can schedule work around my family's needs" were two quotes her client gathered and used.