During his six-year tenure as CEO of Osceola Regional Health Center in Sibley, Iowa, Ben Davis and his team achieved a 91 percent staff retention rate — well above the industry average.
Mr. Davis has since moved on to helm Glencoe (Minn.) Regional Health, assuming the new role May 15. He noted that retention success in Iowa took years to achieve and was a collaborative effort among staff and leadership. While every facility is unique, he touched base with Becker's to share retention strategies that might be replicable across organizations.
"Every healthcare organization is different, and so you don't want to force anything," Mr. Davis said. "We can implement something similar — I don't know that it'll be the same, but something similar — [to the retention strategy at Osceola Regional] here at Glencoe Regional Health."
Mr. Davis has already traveled across the hospital's departments to learn how their processes work, and will embark on a "listening tour" over the next 60 days to meet with front-line staff and better understand what is important to them.
Soliciting staff feedback like this is vital to a strong retention strategy, according to Mr. Davis. When he began zeroing in on retention with his team in Iowa, employee engagement surveys and patient satisfaction surveys were important measures of success; the two are closely intertwined.
"There are really two goals: we want to be the provider of choice and the employer of choice. And we can't be the provider of choice if we're not the employer of choice," Mr. Davis said. "So, data will show you that for every 1 percent increase in employee satisfaction, we get a 2 percent increase in patient satisfaction."
One way Osceola Regional incorporated both patient and employee feedback was by creating service excellence workshops taught by front-line staff, not official hospital leadership.
"One recent workshop that we did was called Embracing Collaborative Culture. And that peer-to-peer education is powerful," Mr. Davis said.
He noted that fostering unity and creating space for affirmation is especially crucial for new employees who are more difficult to retain. But it is also important to express appreciation for existing staff, said Mr. Davis, who was writing "years of service" letters to congratulate Glencoe Regional's tenured employees before joining this interview with Becker's.
"If we invest in our staff and we invest in the people, and if we invest in our family here at Glencoe Regional Health, then we'll see better patient outcomes and we'll see better patient experience," Mr. Davis said. "And that's what we want to provide to our community, to our family and our friends."