NEW YORK CITY – If the economy picks up in 2012, hospitals may find themselves scrambling to hang onto key employees.
That’s one of the main findings noted in a recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Saratoga. The report, titled the “2011/2012 US Human Capital Effectiveness Report,” looks at human resources management trends across 12 industry sectors. For the hospital sector, benchmarking data was collected from over 50 hospital systems across the country.
“As everyone starts to feel that the economy is beginning to improve, organizations become concerned about flight risk,” said Shebani Patel, the report’s coordinator. “Employees get more interested in seeing what’s out there.”
Consequently, she said, organizations are focusing on career development for their employees, as well as thinking about what their workforce needs will be over the next 1-3 years.
As the report’s executive summary put it, “organizations are taking more time to evaluate and assess whether their current practices have long-term positive impact on engagement and retention.”
At Kansas City-based St. Luke’s Health System, retention levels have been “very steady through the last three years,” said Dawn Murphy, senior vice president of HR, but that doesn’t mean the organization isn’t expecting change.
Murphy noted that “when the economy was in dire straits, the RN vacancy rate plummeted” at the 10-hospital system that employs 9500. She pointed out that “nurses in a bad economy tend to become primary bread winners,” particularly if their spouses are laid off. As the economy improves, the vacancy rate inches up.
Murphy said that at St. Luke’s the rate is “still good, but we’re monitoring.”
But if hospital employees around the country do begin to think about leaving their jobs as the economy heats up, not all of them will necessarily be looking to work somewhere else.
According to Peter McMenamin, health economist and Senior Policy Fellow at the American Nurses Association, the recent recession lead many nurses to stay at their current jobs. But he suggested that in the near future the nursing workforce may be impacted by nurses who have put off retiring until the economic crunch eases.
On average, he noted, nurses tend to be older than the typical hospital employee, and more than 40 percent of the nation’s current nurses are 50 years old or older.
So while hospitals may be starting to worry about their turnover rate for employees with low tenure, given that older nurses tend to occupy positions of greater responsibility, hospitals may also have to worry about filling key nursing positions.
“Hospitals should recognize the need to pay particular attention to their pivotal roles and high performers, for whom turnover is slowly starting to increase and could lead to expensive consequences down the road,” stated the PwC report.
As if anticipating the report, Dawn Murphy said St. Luke’s will be implementing a “new HR operating model” in the coming year. That model will include a separate function for talent acquisition, and among other things, find ways to do “a better job with mining social media, and focus on top positions that are difficult to fill.”
The organization plans to have the program in place within the next eight months.