Why Modern Healthcare Organizations Need to Rethink the Holistic Employee Lifecycle

Revenue cycle leaders: It’s time for a wakeup call.

The workforce development and engagement models of yesterday are no longer effective with today’s external factors impacting healthcare organizations, including: workforce shortages, increased margin pressures and higher costs. Coupling this with the post-pandemic migration to remote and hybrid organizational structures, healthcare systems require a holistic re-evaluation of the entire employee lifecycle.

This requires a commitment and alignment to a top-down strategy with shared responsibilities. While this may feel like a massive undertaking, the risk of not doing so is even greater because your employees are faced with remote workforce challenges, such as:

• Not feeling connected to company culture
• Improper training and communication 
• Feeling confused by senior leadership messaging and strategy
• Poor engagement and retention
• Lack of internal and external communication standards

Let’s be clear: Employee turnover is not just an HR issue, but rather a corporate culture issue. How can you re-think your employee lifecycle to have it met with success? We’ve come up with a few questions to ask yourself to get started on creating a culture where revenue cycle employees thrive.

How has your company culture been challenged by remote workforce adoption?

Should your staff be remote, hybrid or onsite? One of our clients, a major health system, decided that each revenue cycle team could work in different locations based on their role or function. For example, here’s how it structures its functional roles:

• Patient Access: Onsite
• Financial Counseling and Patient Financial Services: Hybrid
• Health Information Management (HIM): Remote

With an estimated shortage of 4 million healthcare workers by 2026, consider how being flexible on this issue can help you recruit more easily and fill open roles. What new channels or approaches can be taken to increase engagement, productivity and accountability?

 The takeaway: Be flexible in your staffing approach and employee location requirements by job function.

How are you ensuring the effectiveness of your communications, workforce training and engagement strategies?

Not only are you responsible for setting up your revenue cycle teams’ success, you’re also responsible for showing someone how they will continue to grow and thrive as an individual within your organization. It requires implementing leadership essentials, service excellence standards and employee engagement. Let’s unpack those approaches a bit further.

 Leadership Essentials:  How are you connecting and motivating employees within your organization?

• • • Know how to execute the personal and procedural dimensions of leadership
    • Do things differently to establish trust and camaraderie while motivating leaders
    • Continuous learning: Achieve higher retention/lower turnover
      • Recognize how to facilitate meetings
      • Know how to never let a coaching moment go
      • Formally track why people quit and update policies and processes that support retention and engagement
    • Invest in and know how to have crucial conversations

 Service Excellence: How are you focusing on your people?

• • • Develop service standards to align your organization to achieve increased productivity and quality of output
    • Set an organizational goal to achieve Best in KLAS Personalized Internal and External Service Standards
    • Build a cohesive team with better self-esteem, morale and performance to become a regional employer of choice

Employee Engagement: How are you intentionally listening to your employees?

• • • Communicate a career path that shows what it takes for an employee to move into the next role
    • Develop a mentorship program that fosters friendship and career support between employees
    • Offer role-specific training or certifications that encourage employees to continuously grow
    • Conduct an employee engagement survey to find out what’s preventing your organization from becoming a regional employer of choice

 The takeaway: When you invest in your team and their well-being, they’ll invest in you.

Is leadership aligned across the business for employee engagement and service standards?

When you started your career, think about how you wanted to grow as a leader. Now, it’s your turn to think about how you can encourage your management team to grow with you.

• • • What are you doing to ensure that your team is aligned on service standards? Currance has found that leadership teams are often not aligned across service standards. To fix this disconnect, one of our major health system clients had their directors rotate across the revenue cycle team for a better understanding of each role and respective responsibilities to drive better overall performance.
    • How are you supporting people who want to bring their whole selves to work and drive engagement? You can do your part in recognizing the totality of that person or team to celebrate their ongoing achievements through service wins, birthdays, anniversaries or something as simple as ordering a team lunch during a chaotic week.

The takeaway: Instill your cultural values to foster a systemwide culture of not only quality, but accountability.

Adding more people to power antiquated processes can’t solve the business problems of today; however, workforce strategies focused on leadership, service excellence and employee engagement can. Consequently, healthcare delivery systems must adopt a system of engagement that manifests within corporate culture to maximize precious team resources, establish training and leadership opportunities for growth, and instill service excellence standards for repeatable success. 

Ready to discuss how Currance can help your organization overcome workforce challenges while boosting efficiency and cutting operational costs?

Let’s connect!  Contact us at sales@currance.com.