The Chaos of COVID: 10 Ways to Improve Retention and Reduce Turnover

It is referred to as the “Great Resignation” or the “Big Quit.” It started around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers began rethinking their careers and quitting their jobs in search of something better.¹ Economists suggested the slowdowns and lockdowns of COVID-19, along with the wage stagnation and the lure of a better life, were some of the causes of this event.² Many people opted to start remote working positions.³ These shifts created significant personnel issues for most companies.

The healthcare field was similarly impacted by this event. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported nearly 600,000 healthcare resignations in November 2021.⁴ That same month also had 4.53 million workers nationwide quit, which the BLS indicated was the largest monthly total in 20 years. For 2021 as a whole, the US experienced a 47.2 percent turnover rate, with healthcare and social services at 39.4 percent and professional services at 64.2 percent.⁵

Regardless of the various reasons, it is clear that companies—including healthcare organizations—must take steps to retain their talent and bring on quality employees.

Retention vs. Turnover

We must first understand the difference between retention and turnover. Both are unique human resources (HR) metrics that can provide a temperature on employee and company health.

Retention – Retention examines employee stability. To calculate this metric, we need to track a group of the same employees during a certain time period. First, you count the number of employees employed during the entire time period divided by the number of employees at the start of the time period.⁶ You multiple the result by 100 to get a percentage.

As an example, let’s imagine we start a year with 200 employees. By the end of the year, 25 of these original 200 employees have left the company. Our equation would divide 175 into 200 (0.875) and then multiple this by 100. Our retention in this scenario would be 87.5 percent. To some industries, this would be a good rate.

Turnover – Turnover is a great metric to examine how a company’s onboarding process is working. Depending on the company, onboarding can be considered the time from when the employee starts at the job until when they are a productive member of the workforce. To calculate, you need to examine the number of employee separations divided into the average number of employees during a certain time period. Then, you take the result and multiple it by 100 to get a percentage.⁷

For an example, let’s say we have a company with 200 average employees during a year-long time period. In that year, we experienced 50 terminations. Fifty divided by 200 is 0.25, and multiplied by 100 is 25 percent. This is the turnover rate.

A Case Study

In order to understand how it impacted healthcare organizations, we examined data from a national release of information (ROI) and health information management (HIM) business associate organization. This company has approximately 900 employees who live 44 states. Of these employees, about half primarily work in hospitals, clinics, or other facilities, and the other half work remotely. In Tables 1 and 2, you can see the turnover and retention rates as reported for 2018 to October 2022.

Table 1: Turnover Rates for Case Study Organization

Table 2: Retention Rates for Case Study Organization

These rates show 2020 was a significantly poor year for both retention and turnover. This was a combination of both the great resignation effect, the pandemic, and a larger merger of with another organization. Mergers usually always impact employees and culture.⁸ The following are some steps the case study organization made and continues to help strengthen its culture.

Five Tips for Reducing Employee Turnover

Tip 1: Assess better candidates. Reducing turnover starts in the hiring process. While we all tend to believe we are good judges of character and skill set, there is a growing industry for candidate assessment tools.⁹ Employers screen for behavior, computer skills, and other tangible skill sets like math and knowledge. These tools provide the hiring manager with objective data about their potential employee.

Tip 2: Convey candidly with the candidate. During the recruitment process, both the recruiters (if applicable) or the hiring manager should be candid about the position. We all want to paint a rose-colored picture of the job and requirements. Yet, often our job descriptions are so out of date that the “other duties as assigned” category represents 50 percent or more of the daily work.¹⁰

We would recommend going over a typical day for the employee. Talk about the job location (if applicable). Talk about the team. Provide a clear description to the candidate so they best understand if the organization is a right fit for them. Detail the working environment: How many employees? Where is parking?

Tip 3: Train for recruitment. This is a tip to utilize your HR team. Many hiring managers were promoted up and not hired with MBAs. They may not know some good tips or tricks with recruitment. We recommend utilizing your HR team to review the company procedures, employee handbook, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and other benefits. We also recommend training hiring managers to listen for understanding and ask questions for clarification.¹¹ Hiring managers should be aware of red flags, and they should be able to ask about them.

Tip 4: Engage with managers. Everyone in the recruiting and hiring space should be engaged with each other. They should also engage with the candidate once an offer has been made. Many managers leave this engagement for HR, but the candidate will feel more welcome if the hiring manager and their team are involved and engaged with them before their first day. This engagement helps to reduce first day jitters.

Tip 5: Provide stellar onboarding. Statistics suggest that over 20 percent of staff turnover occurs within the initial 45 days.¹²

Five Tips to Improve Employee Retention

Tip 1: Engage your employees. Only about 13 percent of employees are engaged with their jobs.¹³ Engaged workers are “enthusiastic” and committed to their work. Disengaged workers feel no real connection to their jobs and do the bare minimum.¹⁴ Engagement can created by job enrichment, recruitment, training, compensation, and performance management.

Tip 2: Provide employee recognition opportunities. SHRM recommends leveraging employee recognition to improve recruitment and retention.¹⁵ Managers should consider gifts for the winter holidays and birthdays. For the case study company, they have a monthly company newsletter where they recognize employees.

Tip 3: Develop employees. Managers are responsible to develop employees to become better at their jobs and at the organization. You should leverage what you already know about your employees to help motivate and develop them. Mentor, network with, and delegate to them. Create job enlargement. Consider Individual Development Plans (IDP) and cross-training.

Tip 4: Right-size your organization. Normally, people think about layoffs—but right-sizing an organization may mean increasing your employee count. It can be a delicate balance to know what is necessary.¹⁶ Why hire a new employee for a six-hour PRN position versus just finding one or two current employees with downtime or who want overtime? You should get creative in finding new opportunities for underutilized employees. Examine the productivity of employees versus the time they are working in order to hold them accountable. Encourage employees to take advantage of ad hoc developmental trainings in order to become better and more efficient.

Tip 5: Procure promotions. Employees need to feel like this is a career and not just a job—they need to have room for growth.¹⁷ Hiring managers should start first looking within their department for talent before looking outside.

Continue to Adapt

The Great Resignation is likely not going to change in the near future. Employers will need to continue to adapt and become more mindful in order to increase retention and decrease turnover. Among the best practices for both is knowing the employees, acting responsible toward them, and giving them a “why” to come aboard and stay. Your HR partner can collaborate with you to help in this process by providing an outside perspective.

Notes

1. Boston-Fleischhauer, Carol “Reversing the Great Resignation in Nursing: More Things to Consider.” Journal of Nursing Administration 52.6 (2022): 324-326. Your Journals@Ovid Full Text. Web. 19 October. 2022. http://ovidsp.ovid.com/ovidweb.cgi?T=JS&PAGE=reference&D=yrovfty&NEWS=N&AN=00005110-202206000-00003

2. Briand, Paul. “How the ‘Great Resignation’ opened the doors of opportunity UNH panel delves into its causes and new career strategies.” New Hampshire Business Review, April 8, 2022, 12+. Gale OneFile: Entrepreneurship (accessed October 17, 2022). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A702499866/PPSB?u=klnb_fhsuniv&sid=bookmark-PPSB&xid=d093068b.

3. Jones, Christine. “The Great Resignation - What? Why? How to Overcome it.” Order No. 28968157, The College of St. Scholastica, 2022. https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.fhsu.edu/dissertations-theses/great-resignation-what-why-how-overcome/docview/2638940774/se-2.

4. Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor. Number of quits at all time high in November 2021. The Economics Daily. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/number-of-quits-atall-time-high-in-november-2021. Accessed October 15, 2022.

5. Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor. Annual total separation rates by industry and region, not seasonally adjusted. Economics News Release. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t16.htm. Accessed October 19, 2022.

6. Society for Human Resource Management. “How do I calculate retention? Is retention related to turnover?” https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-qa/pages/calculatingretentionandturnover.aspx. Accessed October 10, 2022.

7. Society for Human Resource Management. “How to determine turnover rate.” https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/how-to-guides/pages/determineturnoverrate.aspx. Accessed October 10, 2022.

8. Aristos, Deligiannis, Sidiropoulos Georgios, Chalikias Miltiadis, and Kyriakopoulos Grigorios. “THE IMPACT OF MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS ON CORPORATE CULTURE AND EMPLOYEES: THE CASE OF AEGEAN & OLYMPIC AIR.” Academy of Strategic Management Journal 17, no. 1 (2018): 1-13. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/impact-mergers-acquisitions-on-corporate-culture/docview/2024347402/se-2.

9. Barrick, Murray R, Brian W Swider, and Greg L Stewart. “Initial Evaluations in the Interview: Relationships with Subsequent Interviewer Evaluations and Employment Offers.” Journal of Applied Psychology 95, no. 6 (2010): 1163-172.

10. Blakely, Rachel. “4 reasons your job description could make or break your hiring process.” https://hire.trakstar.com/blog/4-reasons-job-description-make-break-hiring-process. Accessed October 20, 2022.

11. Maurer, Roy. “Recruiting 101: 5 tips for better interviews.” July 19. 2022. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/5-tips-for-better-interviews.aspx. Accessed October 10, 2022.

12. Burkett, Holly. “Reinvent your onboarding process.” HRCI Learning Center. https://www.hrci.org/community/blogs-and-announcements/hr-leads-business-blog/hr-leads-business/2022/02/14/reinvent-your-onboarding-process. Accessed October 20, 2022.

13. Crabtree, Steve. “Worldwide, 13% of employees are engaged at work.” Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx. Accessed March 3, 2022.

14. SHRM. “Developing and sustaining employee engagement.” https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/sustainingemployeeengagement.aspx. Accessed March 3, 2022.

15. SHRM. “SHRM/Globoforce using recognition and other workplace efforts to engage employees.” January 24, 2018. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/Pages/employee-recognition-2018.aspx. Accessed April 10, 2022.

16. Zavyiboroda, Maryna. “Rightsizing an organization: A definitive guide.” June 7, 2022. https://hrforecast.com/rightsizing-and-downsizing/. Accessed October 20, 2022.

17. Forbes Councils Members. “13 creative ways to retain ambitious employees when promotions are scarce.” January 14, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2022/01/14/13-creative-ways-to-retain-ambitious-employees-when-promotions-are-scarce/. Accessed October 20, 2022.

Darin Challacombe is ScanSTAT Technologies’ director of learning and employee development. He is a member of the human resources team and oversees all educational opportunities for the company. He has worked in educational space since 2002, and he has focused on health information management (him) and release of information (ROI) for the past four years.

Susie Hanna is a master’s-level educated and SHRM-SCP certified human resources professional (SPHR) with over 20 years of human resources leadership experience. At ScanSTAT, she uses her a broad set of effective HR skills across as vice president for human relations