Any healthcare organization requires a resilient and stable healthcare team, one made up of members both adept at their individual roles and able to work together effectively. This type of resilience is essential for both the immediate and long-term success of any healthcare institution. If team membership becomes a revolving door, then there will nearly always be a weak link somewhere. This is simply because it takes time for any group of people working together to gel.
General Challenges
For recruiters hoping to achieve this, there is the competitive talent market to contend with. The trick is not only to attract the most qualified people for the job, but also to guarantee some type of long-term job security and career growth for each member within your institution. In other words, you need to make it clear that your organization is worth sticking with and that promotion and growth are always possible. Health Jobs, a healthcare jobs recruitment service, advises that job postings should make it clear that there is the potential for career growth in your institution. This information should be clearly displayed. Then you can attract the right people for the job, meaning the ones willing to stick with the team long term.
The competitive talent market, however, poses continual challenges to be overcome. If your institution is geographically remote or suffers from a hiring problem for some other reason, there is a risk of under-assessing potential candidates rather than applying the strictest standards. Again, the way to ameliorate this is to advertise that you are committed to career growth. This is attractive, and you can be selective.
Strategies
Such are the general problems to be overcome where hiring is concerned, but there is a lot more to building a resilient healthcare team than just that. Here follows some strategies you can follow:
Hire Workers with a Track Record
As mentioned, hiring workers before some other organization snaps them up is always tempting, but it’s best to avoid this. A resilient team means a committed team, and you can only do that with a proper vetting process. The best way to guarantee this – and to ensure they are experienced professionals – is to go with slightly older applicants who have stayed at another organization for a long time. If they have proven themselves resilient in their last role, then they will do so again at your organization.
Provide Compensation and Wellness Programs
A solid way to make new employees feel like your organization is worth sticking with is to provide comprehensive health and wellness programs to meet the health needs which all health workers have. Working in health – as we all know – is a stressful and taxing task. If your new employee feels like they are well provided for in this department, they will also feel like long term membership of your team is something they can stick out.
Be Responsive to Worker Needs (Communicate)
A proper organizational culture for any health organization should be open and understanding and responsive to health worker needs, whatever these may be. In order to arrange this effectively, you should directly communicate with your potential team members and find out what their individual needs are. This should not only be done at the interview stage, but it should also continue throughout.
Last Word
Ultimately, creating a resilient team means creating a team that will last. To achieve this, there should be a solid infrastructure and work culture in place, but it should not be so rigid that it cannot bend to support the team members you want to keep for the long haul.
