Practice Management Alert

Follow these recruitment and retention tips to ensure smooth sailing

Attention, billing managers: If high staff turnover rates are plaguing your billing office, the weapon to fight them might be right under your nose.
 
The higher your turnover rates, the higher your recruitment and training costs. "Our nation's healthcare system is facing a major crisis," said Emily Stover DeRocco, assistant secretary of the Department of Labor's Education & Training Administration, at the Maryland Healthcare Workforce Summit in Annapolis on Aug. 18.
 
The DOL is targeting the healthcare workforce shortage with a new attack plan, the High Growth Job Training Initiative. Under the measure, DOL and its partners will gather information, conduct analysis and planning, and implement resulting strategies, DeRocco said in her prepared remarks for the conference attended by more than 650 employers, plus government reps.
 
While this initiative might help you in the long run, many billing offices need help with turnover rates today. To tackle recruitment and retention woes, you should tap one of your most valuable resources - existing employees - consultant Betty Gordon said in a recent teleconference. 
 
Follow these four steps to unleash your recruitment and retention power, said Gordon, with Simione Consultants in Hamden, Conn.:

1. Convene a task force.

Hold one "task force" meeting, asking representative employees to attend for an hour or so, Gordon said. Make  sure you have a good mix of employees, including workers who are single, have families, work other jobs, are younger, are older, and so on.
 
Elicit from these attendees their prime motivating principles. Often they include compensation, job flexibility, appreciation and respect, among others. Motivating principles often vary among disciplines and from region to region. Your job is to figure out which factors motivate your staff, "not what factors motivate the whole world," Gordon said.

2. Develop a survey.

Based on the feedback you receive from your task force, zero in on the important motivators. Turn these principles into statements with a numbered scale for a survey. For example, you could ask, "How do you feel about your pay rate?" with a "1" being excellent and a "4" being poor. And be sure to include space for staffers to write in extra comments. Distribute your finished survey to all your employees and include a deadline for return.

3. Analyze the data.

Take a look at the survey results for each of your principles - you'll want at least a 30 percent response rate. If your scale includes a rating system of excellent, good, fair and poor, questions with more "fairs" and "poors" than "goods" and "excellents" are your weaknesses, while the ones with higher scores are your strengths.

4. Formulate strategies for retention.

Sure, you won't be able to give everyone million-dollar salaries and every Friday off, but you can go a long way toward furnishing employees with motivations to work for you that are important to them. For example, if your employees say better health insurance benefits are important, you can offer options in which staff can choose higher benefits in exchange for a reduced pay rate. Or you can reward employees with added benefits after they reach certain employment time frames.
 
And don't forget to formulate plans for maintaining and improving those factors that you already do well. If you let those slip, you could lose billers right and left.

Keep an Eye Toward Recruitment

Using existing staff's motivators and taking steps to enhance those, apply your knowledge to recruiting, Gordon said. Stressing the good points about the billing office, as discovered through your survey, you can woo new billers into your fold. You can even use specific figures you gather.
 
For example, one of Gordon's clients included a job satisfaction question with a scale in its survey, and 97 percent of respondents scored it as excellent or good. Use a figure like that in recruiting and job ads, she said.
 
Using quotes from the comment portion of the survey  can also give your recruiting efforts a boost. "I love my job" and "I can schedule work around my family's needs" were two quotes her client gathered and used.