Treat nurses as clients to increase retention

For a health care organization, the bottom line is a decrease in the ability to handle increased patient loads. Retaining quality nurses

is the key to surviving during this tight job market.

Five techniques that increase prospective patients’ desires to use a facility will help improve the retention rate of nurses.

1. Ask newly hired nurses about personal and professional goals. Ascertain their expectations of the organization. It is critical for supervisors to individually tailor their management styles to meet the unique needs of each nurse in a way that seems fair to every nurse.

In the same manner that hospitals develop individual treatment plans for each patient, managers must create customized supervisory and retention programs for each nurse. A one-size-fits-all philosophy will not work. Nurses have special needs, as do patients.

2. Develop an internal strategic sales plan. Sell the benefits of working in your hospital, not the features. Features are facts. Benefits tell nurses what’s in it for them in a personal manner. Benefits sell. Features do not.

For example, features would be that the organization is large and that there are myriad promotional opportunities available. Promotions lead to a higher income and personal and professional growth, which also are features. Increased income leads to other features, such as a better standard of living, larger home, nicer car, more exotic vacation and the ability to send children to college.

The benefits of all these features are higher self-esteem, being treated with more respect by others, and an increased level of comfort, relaxation, refreshment and peace of mind. Promote the benefits.

3. Create a nurse satisfaction survey similar to a patient survey. Collecting information from patient satisfaction surveys is routine in order for health care organizations to understand what to improve upon and what they are doing right.

Find out the attitude of nurses concerning pay, insurance benefits, available training, supervisor competency, opportunities for career advancement and the ability of the health care facility to hire good people. Analyze the trends and take immediate action upon detecting problems.

4. Use the positive feedback from the survey as copy for internal marketing pieces. Examples of marketing pieces are e-mails, newsletters and flyers. Regularly promote the information to nurses, because they are likely to forget each and every benefit available to them. In addition, the nurses will probably not even be aware of all the benefits provided to them as employees of the facility.

Devise marketing campaigns that include updates on new benefits so the nurses continually see the value of remaining at the health care facility. Remember to conduct competition checks and promote the unique advantages of the organization without communicating negativity toward competitors.

5. Drop everything immediately to help nurses when there are problems. This step is geared toward supervisors and should be taken as much as possible. Such an action would be natural in the case of problems or issues for a patient.

Problems being experienced by nurses must never be viewed as nuisances or interruptions. The manager needs to make sure that nurses realize they are important, and that time is definitely available for them.

Provide undivided attention, and ask numerous questions until the situation is completely understood.

Conduct a thorough investigation while continually updating the nurse on progress.

If the supervisor is unable to properly help, the situation should be referred to appropriate parties. Finally, the manager should follow up to be sure that the issue was effectively resolved.

By applying the same methods used to retain patients, a health care organization can become proactive in this tight job market.

Armed with a strategic retention program to treat nurses like patients, hospitals will experience lower rates of nurse turnover.

Lynne Haggerman, M.S., is president/owner of Haggerman & Associates, a firm specializing in management training, retained search, outplacement and human resource consulting. She can be reached at lynne@haggermanandassociates.com.