Employee Retention Requires

Communication, continued from page 3 establishment of a nurse empowerment and engagement council. “We are pulling nurses from all across the health system for this council, and they will be the voice of the nursing community. Any scheduling changes, bonus contractsanything that will impact nursing - that team will evaluate it and make a decision based on the parameters they’ve been given,” Shelton said. “We have nurses with 40 years of experience and we have some with 20 months with us. They are excited about being part of a team that will impact their work environment.”

“Communications between shifts can also be important,” Harbin said. “During staff meetings, employees have complained that other shifts didn’t work as hard as they did. There was a lot of that back and forth. So management made it a priority to hold everyone to the same level of accountability. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from that. People can’t leave things for the next shift. Spending the time to make sure everyone is held to the same accountability has really helped.

“During the pandemic the thought process was often, ‘If I can get a body here to work, I’m happy.’ Now that things are starting to settle down a little bit, just having a body here may not be the best thing. You have to have everyone on the same page and work with each other equally.”

Shelton agrees that a culture of teamwork is critically important. “Healthcare is all about the group you are working with,” she said. “Patients coming into the hospital are sicker than they’ve ever been. The nurse has so much a responsibility now that to have a good patient care tech or unit secretary or transporter, those support services that are there and committed to the patient is extremely important. It impacts patient care. It impacts retention in a department. The culture and the patient experience comes from the entire team.”