Here are five ways hospital executives can address challenges associated with frontline staff relations.
1. Problem: Employees don’t know where the hospital is headed.
Solution: Communicate organizational priorities. Hospital administrations must have their frontline staffs focused on small, actionable objectives through consistent outreach and education sessions.
2. Problem: Current evaluations don’t incorporate meaningful goals.
Solution: Formalize organizational goals. Incorporating staff responsibilities — such as patient wait times, test result accuracy and supply expenses — into performance evaluations can increase the scope of a staff member’s goals.
3. Problem: Employees don’t feel rewarded for going above and beyond.
Solution: Don’t overlook effective sources of incentives. Cash bonuses and salary increases are not the only types of effective incentives. The Advisory Board also found praise and attention from leaders is extremely effective for roughly 63 to 67 percent of frontline staff members.
4. Problem: Nurses are mostly silent about poor teamwork.
Solution: Encourage peer feedback. Calling out poor peer behavior as it occurs and having formal feedback time can increase accountability.
5. Problem: Employees struggle to see how they contribute to the hospital at large.
Solution: Illustrate the impact of individual staff performance. Frontline clinical staff like nurses can benefit from hearing personal testimony from patients, but frontline nonclinical staff can also benefit from hearing how they contribute to clinical employees’ roles.
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