Practice Management Alert

Follow these recruitment and retention tips to ensure smooth sailing Attention, billing managers: If high staff turnover rates are plaguing your billing office, 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 healthcare 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 Workforce Summit in Annapolis on Aug. 18.
 
The DOL is targeting the healthcare workforce 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 implement resulting strategies, DeRocco said in her prepared remarks for the conference attended by more than 650 employers, plus government reps.
 
While this initiative might help you in the long run, many billing offices need help with turnover rates today. To tackle recruitment and retention woes, you should tap one of your most valuable resources - existing employees - consultant Betty Gordon said in a recent teleconference. 
 
Follow these four steps to unleash your recruitment and retention power, said Gordon, with Simione Consultants in Hamden, Conn.: 1. Convene a task force. Hold one "task force" meeting, asking representative employees to attend for an hour or so, Gordon said. Make  sure you have a good mix of employees, 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 said. 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, you could ask, "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 and include a deadline for return. 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 [...]