Editorial

Attracting and keeping talent: Nursing recruitment and selection

Alastair Rylatt
Director, Alastair Rylatt Consulting, Marrickville NSW

PP: 113

Article Text

Attracting and keeping talent is one of the biggest challenges confronting the nursing and health-care profession. Few hospital or community facilities are satisfied with their numbers of motivated and skilled workers. This concern will be the focus of healthcare recruitment and retention for years to come.

Of course, nursing is not the only profession to suffer from chronic skill shortage, low morale and burnout trends. However, in contemporary nursing, the problems of talent management have important consequences in their profound affect on life, death and human suffering.

The problems of obtaining talent, upgrading skills and motivating employees cannot be solved overnight. Extensive long-term strategies need to be addressed before any real change can occur. The good news is that there are increasingly industry-wide and international efforts to reverse some of these trends, including incentive programs to attract talent, looking at new ways to encourage people to join, or to re-join the nursing profession through subsidised training support.

Of course it is not only the nature of the work and lack of funding that causes difficulties. Social trends, such as an aging workforce, are also impacting the future of nursing. For example, in Australia the average age of a nurse is 45 years of age. It is expected that in the next ten years, one-third will leave the workforce. This shortage is also being experienced in many other countries such as Japan, the USA and the UK.

So given these challenges and uncertainties, what can be done? Naturally, the answer lies in using better people management practices. This includes ensuring career opportunities exist and ensuring that what makes your workplace special is both known and embraced by employees. It also includes providing the maximum opportunity to discuss with employees, how work can be improved and organised. This means regularly addressing job stimulation, greater balance and different levels of responsibility. This now leads to the million-dollar question! Given the current pressures on the nursing profession, what can be done better in recruitment and retention?

In my opinion, three people management skill areas must be addressed if you wish to improve the capacity to attract and keep talent in these challenging times: improving leadership; stimulating knowledge exchange; and overcoming burnout. Addressing these three factors can lead to notable changes in staff motivation, performance and enthusiasm.

Improving leadership
There is a saying that people do not leave bad organisations, they leave bad bosses. This holds very true in nursing. Certainly, the system may be difficult at times, but there is still ample space for leadership that encourages exchange, flexibility and hope. It is easy to understand, while under pressure, how supervisors opt for compliance and an autocratic style rather than dialogue and teamwork. However the fact is, in the long run good leadership requires compassion and flexibility in order to stimulate the exchange of ideas required to manage smarter. This does not mean going soft on the hard issues but leading with the heart as well as the head.

Here simple rituals with staff can help the morale and fun in the workplace. Places of work can be entertaining and can give great comical relief as well as achieving visible results and outcomes. Work can supply a real sense of friendship, family and community, if we get the dynamics right. From experience, the teams that show greater creativity in how they say thank you do generate the highest levels of commitment. So say yes, to fun rewards and mutual support.

This means we need to loosen up, be less serious and grab every opportunity to build a positive attitude while doing a professional job. In saying this, you do not have to be a comedian and tell jokes every day, but it does help if you can find something to smile at on a regular basis. So whether it is having birthday cakes, bringing in baby photos, or having a game of softball, look to fun for yourself and your business.

Of course, these ideas have a non-monetary reward attached to them. They make people feel included, valued and important. Varying the ways we have fun and say thank you is also vitally important. Even a creative idea can become boring if it is overused. For example, some people are hooked on after work drinks. Certainly these social functions can be a lot of fun but they can become boring if they are poorly organised or over used. So spark your imagination and come up with some new ideas on a regular basis.

Additionally, practical steps must be taken to provide critical emotional support when staff take on extra or new levels of responsibility. This is particularly the case when shift work is involved or when numbers are low or there is a high turnover. Left unattended, people can quickly experience a great fear of responsibility. So extra care must be taken to ensure that confusion, fears and dilemmas are addressed and that people feel connected and supported. Most of all, we need to help remove feelings of isolation and that the burden of responsibility which comes with high workloads.

Stimulating knowledge exchange
Without the circulation of wisdom, talent does not grow. There is no use having staff at our disposal if effort is not taken to improve their know-how and capability. We need to create workplace where learning and innovation is the norm. Again, we must steer away from fear and compliance and look at setting up safe space for staff to share ideas, innovations and experiences.

There are numerous ways to circulate wisdom and stimulate knowledge exchange. What must be remembered is that knowledge is easily shared if it is written down, but when the wisdom is locked up in people's minds in the form of stories or experience it is much harder to use. So create opportunities for people to share insights that are locked away in their minds in the forms of stories, frameworks and know-how.

There are numerous ways to help the sharing of knowledge. Here are some examples:

• Have people tell stories, saying what they did and what they learnt.
• When you are coaching think out loud by sharing what you are exploring and why.
• Write a case study based on a real life situation. Then have a team of people explore their approaches to the situation.
• Do plenty of reviews of what is actually occurring during an experience.
• Encourage people to share their new understanding when they experience new knowledge.
• Set up informal chats and dig deeper into what is on people's minds. Free wheeling dialogue conversations provide wonderful anecdotes and ways of thinking.
• The greater the cross-fertilisation and collaboration the better! Organise meetings and knowledge sharing events to explore thinking, work in progress and test assumptions.

Closely associated with these comments is the imperative of having clear and transparent communication. Choosing to keep information to oneself, assuming everybody knows, or not asserting your rights to be involved are common failings in any business or service. The circulation of wisdom and know-how will not happen naturally, we need to assert our rights to be informed and to be consulted. We can hardly expect talent to evolve and grow if people are kept in the dark.

Overcoming burnout
For individuals and teams being burnt out is no fun. All too often workplaces just accept burnout as a fact of life and do nothing to address it. This is highly relevant to contemporary nursing when people are continuing to give their heart and soul without recharging and re-vitalising. The fact is that when you are struggling for energy, everything seems difficult or feels like a chore. We are all given signals of when 'enough is enough'. Sometimes we hear them and pick up the message, while on other occasions we are tuned right out. We are so busy being busy that we are leaving ourselves open to a downturn in our quality of life.

A local coffee shop displays advertising postcards and there, on a recent visit, one particular card caught my eye. It was about Mental Health Week and its motto was 'Achieve more, Attempt less'. When I reflected on this, I thought, "How true!" We need to be less demanding of ourselves and give ourselves the choice of reflecting more, digging deeper and resting more, before taking on greater volumes of work. For me, living life this way means a higher likelihood of being healthy and far more open to possibilities.

One of the most practical pieces of advice is to give ourselves a 30-minute 'gift' of self-nurturing each day. Self-nurturing can be any activity that promotes wellbeing and celebrates who you are, while stimulating a resurgence of energy. Self-nurturing activities are diverse and include exercise, diet, friendship and home-based experiences such as gardening or listening to music. These daily investments help you become more balanced and more able to achieve important goals - not just at work but in your whole life. A minimum of 30 minutes per day for unconditional, self-indulgence and different self-nurturing activities is what a person needs to maintain and sustain their energy, focus and mental alertness. Of course, more would be better. What is classified as self-nurturing is a deeply personal matter and the selection of appropriate activities must suit each person's unique needs. The key is to create a range of experiences that stimulate a variety of good feelings.

Remember: what makes an activity self-nurturing is that it makes you energetic and re-vitalised. Make sure you set clear and measurable goals and that you review your progress on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis.

Again, much can be done to spark greater wellbeing in the workplace. Here are seven strategies that can help teams address and over come the potential of burnout.

1. Hold a planning meeting to review priorities and deadlines
2. Let people talk out their frustrations and problems
3. Smash the perception that long hours mean success.
4. Encourage people to get a life.
5. People experiencing job burnout are often bored. Renegotiate their job and project work.
6. Being under-worked and undervalued can also lead to burnout. Most people want to feel they are doing something meaningful and worthwhile.
7. Coach people to be kinder to themselves and to each other.

View references

Navigate: Archives | Contents | Top of page

Search

Translate

Related Publications from eContent Management