Staffing hourly employees in the healthcare environment is the industry norm – but there’s nothing “normal” about it. Some days are an adventure, and other days seem like a soap opera. The reality is hiring and managing hourly staff can be an arduous task for any healthcare leader. Inherent in entry level positions or jobs with modest hourly compensation are myriad challenges such as high turnover, performance issues, attendance problems, etc. Even when you have great people, managing a staff of hourly employees is often burdensome because it’s time-consuming and introduces a host of potential considerations, challenges and compliance risks, especially when your hourly staff handles your PHI and other sensitive information.
Just what are the impacts on today’s healthcare professionals when leveraging hourly staff and how can managers create efficiencies, reduce the management burden and eliminate the compliance risks? Read on to learn more.
Time Commitment
Managing people takes time. A lot of it. Although technology is well-incorporated in the industry, healthcare staffing can never be fully automated and will always require management. While seemingly lower cost to your practice, hourly employees require more time-consuming tasks to manage such as time-tracking, resolving employee conflict, creating and maintaining engagement programs, etc. All of these efforts are valuable areas of focus but require time and attention and take the priority away from other key objectives, not least of which is providing great patient care.
In Their Absence
You love your employees, and giving them allotted vacation time for things like sick-leave, child emergencies and vacations all factor into your hourly employee’s benefits package. Unfortunately, most healthcare providers can’t afford to have tactical redundancies in place with staff, so when your hourly employees take time off, the rest of your in-house salaried and clinical staff will need to pick up the slack of the “off” employee’s duties. Even the practice admin leadership might get called in to help catch up. Pulling your already stretched staff away from their original tasks erodes employee satisfaction and distracts everyone from cultivating the right environment for your patients.
Onboarding Is Just the Start
Staffing changes seem to come in waves. Once one leaves, it’s not uncommon for two more to follow suit. Let’s say you’ve just experienced a recent strain of unexpected turnover, but you have several new employees starting, ready to relieve the burden on your remaining staff. Can’t you feel the pressure lift? Hold on. Before you can truly relax, your new staff needs to be trained. There’s at least a day or two of paperwork to review, several days of training to provide (in a perfect world), and a steady hand needed from you as your new employees get into the swing of things. While it’s tempting to breeze past these things in favor of “learning on the job,” you owe it to your new (and current) staff to dedicate this time to the initial experience and to your new team’s subsequent success. The better trained your employees are from the start, the better your team can operate.
Training Never Stops
While the healthcare industry continues to innovate to find the most effective and patient-centered methods of practice, you and your staff are left with the never-ending task of staying up to date on the latest features inside the EHR and keeping up with the growing volume of documentation coming in as well as needing to go out. Added to the daily administrative responsibility is the need to stay abreast of the broader trends and laws governing healthcare and PHI. Although often excellent multi-taskers, your hourly staff often needs continuous training and oversight on the tedious back-office tasks inside the EHR.
The Extras
Being in a healthcare career generally means you care about people, which applies to your patients and your staff. As a conscientious employer, you want to provide your hourly staff with good quality health insurance and retirement plans – but the costs of those perks add up. In addition, they become more difficult to manage in more transient and high turnover positions. Just as you want to give your patients the best experience, you want to make the workplace exceptional for your employees by investing in them – and they will sense quickly if you’ve cut corners.
Space Race
While not the first consideration but certainly on the list – where to put all the people. When it comes to staffing it’s important to ask yourself: do you have enough space for your team at your current staffing level? And is that still the case when you (hopefully) experience substantial growth? There’s also the considerations of real estate costs and/or whether your practice can afford the costs of updated workstations to save space.
Too Good to Ignore?
Managing people, especially hourly employees, can be a difficult task, even for those with considerable experience. While outsourcing may have historically been ignored as an option in healthcare, the realities of staffing hourly employees in the digital era of EHRs opens the door for a remote staff option. Working with a third party to augment HIM functions is becoming much more common – and cost effective – for healthcare organizations looking to simplify their operations, reduce compliance risk and focus their management time on patient care and growth.
We recently published a white paper on the challenges with hourly staffing and the options available to today’s healthcare systems and practices. Download a copy of the white paper today.