Springfield, Ill.-based Hospital Sisters Health System has brought back roughly 400 former colleagues over the past year — a figure now representing more than 10% of annual new hires.
Thomas Ahr, senior vice president and chief human resources officer of the system, said the number was not something his team had been tracking closely until recently. When the team started examining where new hires were coming from, the scale of the return caught their attention.
Two main factors drove the rate of return, Mr. Ahr told Becker’s, the first being culture. HSHS has invested steadily in strengthening workplace culture and colleague safety over the last couple of years, and internal survey data began reflecting it. HSHS had been watching its recommend-to-work scores climb for some time. Engagement scores, which had been holding steady, also finally jumped — as Mr. Ahr and his team had expected. That prompted a question: what comes downstream of a workforce that increasingly recommends their workplace to others? The answer, it turned out, was “boomerang” hires.
The second factor was direct, intentional outreach. HSHS built intentional re-recruitment programs targeting people who had previously left.
“A big portion [of the talent pool] — not unique to us — is folks who used to work for you, and so we got very intentional around at least having outreach to them, saying, ‘We don’t know what your experience was here. Hopefully, it was good, but you’ve left. Would you consider coming back?'” Mr. Ahr said. “And that’s paid off for us.”
The boomerang numbers sit alongside a broader retention story. HSHS cut voluntary turnover by 50% over its past two fiscal years, meeting or exceeding stretch goals on both overall voluntary turnover and first-year voluntary turnover each year.
Mr. Ahr attributes part of that progress to daily discipline. Each day, he writes on his wall how many colleagues left the day before and how many were hired, creating an emphasis on daily review, he said.
The biggest turnover misconception
When asked what he would tell other health systems still struggling with turnover, Mr. Ahr’s answer challenges a foundational assumption of workforce strategy.
“The biggest misconception is that [turnover] is an individual leader’s problem. It is a system challenge, and we need to look at it that way,” he said.
He draws directly from high-reliability organization thinking, arguing that retention works the same way safety does in high-reliability environments — it is an emergent property of systems, not individual performance.
“HRO principle says that the outcomes are products of systems, and individuals are part of the systems,” Mr. Ahr said. “Retention is the emergent property of culture and leadership systems, and turnover is an error, just like a safety event is an error.”
The practical implication cuts both ways.
“Great leaders can’t overcome bad cultures,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how good you are, if the decisions the organization is making, or the things that the enterprise culture values, leaders can’t overcome that. By the same token, great cultures with poor leaders don’t work out well.”
He points to workplace violence as a current example. Violence has become so pervasive in acute care settings, Mr. Ahr said, that individual leaders alone cannot address it. Organizations that respond at the system level are the ones that can create environments where staff feel safe enough to stay.
Looking to the second half of 2026 and into 2027, Mr. Ahr pointed to three workforce priorities. The first is leader standard work: building systems that remove administrative burden from frontline leaders so they can focus on the relational work that shapes retention.
“We believe the job of a frontline leader is too complex, too difficult, and too often they’re involved in performing managerial tasks versus leadership duties,” Mr. Ahr said. “We’d rather them engaging the team, listening, assisting with care, problem solving, than spending time at a keyboard.”
The second is colleague voice. All of HSHS’ hospital ministries are pursuing Magnet designation, and Mr. Ahr sees the program’s underlying principles — shared governance, structured listening and involving staff in decisions that affect their work — as essential to sustaining the gains the system has built.
The third is workplace safety and violence prevention. For Mr. Ahr, it is a precondition for everything else.
“If you don’t feel safe at work, there’s no way you can provide care,” he said. “You’re going to look for somewhere else to go, and the organization can do things around it.”
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