In the era of COVID-19 and extensive staff shortages, healthcare facilities all over the U.S. are scrambling to meet their talent needs. The situation is unpredictable, making it difficult to plan and implement a winning workforce planning strategy.
Reactive healthcare staffing can be extremely costly, resulting in decreased profitability for healthcare institutions. Not to mention that ineffective talent planning can lead to negative, and even deadly, patient outcomes. So, if you’re in management at a healthcare facility, it’s crucial to plan proactively vs. reactively - and we’re here to help. In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about developing a successful talent planning strategy.
Step 1: Assess Current Talent Needs and Initiate Planning
In such a turbulent healthcare landscape, chances are that your facility already has some talent needs that have yet to be rectified. These issues should be addressed immediately so that facility operations do not go under.
After speaking with departmental managers and supervisors, upper-level management will be able to gauge how many hires are needed. If you need to hire 5 ER nurses STAT, note that and draft a plan to get them hired and onboarded.
List out every step of the process and begin working towards resolving current talent gaps. You’ll need to consider the following as you plan (not an exhaustive list):
- Estimated budget
- Necessary recruiting staff
- Anticipated start dates
Consider a Healthcare Staffing Agency for Urgent Needs
Often, the quickest way to secure and hire last-minute talent is to use a quality nurse staffing agency. They have professionals on standby with the credentials and availability that you need. Do some research and consider several staffing agencies in your area to determine which firm can best meet your talent needs. Once you’ve developed a trusting relationship with an agency, you can use their services for any acute staffing issues.
Step 2: Plan Out Future Talent Needs
With your current talent needs at the forefront and in the process of being rectified, look to the future. The better your organization's forecasting capabilities, the more likely your facility will be able to succeed as future issues arise.
How to Plan Out Future Talent Needs
A big part of planning for future talent needs is predicting what may happen in the future. This can be extremely difficult to do, so here are some tips to help the process along:
- Do a bit of research on the current state of healthcare and the pandemic's trajectory.
- Brainstorm to come up with ideas about what could go wrong. Consider both internal and external factors and make a list of threats that could jeopardize the facility's ability to attract and retain talent.
- Prioritize the most probable high-risk threats.
Step 3: Come Up with Goals Based on the Worst-Case Scenarios
Your work in the previous step may have exposed some potential employment gaps to come. Now is the time to take action by drafting your plan. Vague statements or topics won’t do for this step. For the plan to be effective, it must be specific.
Take a look at your current staff and then assess the type and quantity of talent you’ll need in the future to be able to counter the threats identified in the previous step. To do this, your facility’s staff will need to consider any areas of lack within the current staff lineup. You may find that new people would be required to keep things going. It’s also worthwhile to assess whether additional training can be done to expand your team’s current capabilities.
Draft a detailed list of goals for the future - plan out potential talent needs for at least the coming year. You’ll need to know the types of talent you’ll need (nurses, physicians, CNAs, etc.), how many you may require, and the types of skills each hire would need.
Once the plan is in place, share it with relevant parties, like managers and supervisors. HR staff should also be aware of the plan should they need to take action on it in the future. Moreover, depending on the facility, a meeting may be beneficial. In that setting, the plan may be reviewed in detail.
Step 4: Be Watchful and Gauge Success
Now that your plan is ready, you can breathe a quick sigh of relief, but the work is not finished. The next step is to watch out for those threats that were identified in step 2. If management notices something fishy on the horizon, they can take action in anticipation of it using the plan document.
In addition to being watchful, there should be some monitoring to ensure that your plan is being followed closely and that it’s effective. To monitor success, management should come up with some benchmarks that reflect success and those that reflect failure.
Best Practices to Make the Plan a Success
We’ve outlined the main steps to follow to form a workforce planning strategy, and if these steps are followed, you’ve got everything you need to draft an amazing plan. Still, some may have issues formulating the plan. Here are some bonus tips to assist you:
- Incorporate talent management software. There’s a lot of technology out there that can help to make the recruiting, hiring, and onboarding processes easier. Some of these software solutions are pretty impressive, offering assistance with processes like reporting, tracking tools for onboarding, goal-setting tools, and more.
- Set measurable metrics for success. Vague benchmarks are unhelpful. Incorporate numerical figures so that they can be easily measured.
- Ensure that your goals are achievable. There’s no point in setting a goal that cannot be achieved. Keep your goals relatively modest and with the means of the organization.
- Use timelines. A goal without a timeline is useless. Create a reasonable sense of urgency by coming up with a precise start date and end date for each goal.
With the information in this article, you now know how to plan your organization’s talent needs effectively. With proactive staff planning, you’ll be one step ahead of reactive competitors and positioned to provide stellar care to your patients.
