Call offs/Staff turnover

kidzcare · Mar 4, 2015

What are some ideas that nursing facilities have done to curb call offs and staff turnover?

Treating their employees well and offering good pay/benefits are good incentives to stay. Not tolerating poor performance or disrespectful behaviors (weed out those employees and the good ones stay). Have appropriate staff to patient ratio.

Basically, do all the things that you would do if the BoN was always looking.

The saying is "Morals are what you do when no one is looking" and any health facility should be judged on how they run day to day and NOT when they are being judged. I there is high turnover, then the place is receiving a failing grade from their employees.

caliotter3 · Mar 4, 2015

Lived in one city where the facility that had the highest rate of pay also had the best retention rate. There were never any openings there unless someone moved away or retired.

MedChica · Mar 4, 2015

Fire the unhappy people!

(laugh)

Just playing.

I don't really know. (if management isn't the problem), Why not get out of the office and WORK the floor for a day? Pay attention to what's going on, for once. It can be done. One of our RNs did the same when she was trying to get to the bottom of the sudden tension on the floor. It worked.

CNAs jump ship all the time but when a facility can't hold on to it's nurses? You know there's a problem.

Either way, facilities with high turnover rates are like 'gold mines' to this little PRN nurse. I work in such a facility, right now. PRN, of course, because the money is 'right' -- and, yes, I can be bought. (laugh) I'd never work there FT.

I noticed the weird "floor dynamic" on my first day of orientation. Within 30 minutes. Pretty sure, if it's obvious to me (and the great horde of nurse that stopped working there) management's aware, too. They've gotta be.

I mean - it's one thing if management is the issue. The staff tend to get on well in that case. They're actually friends and friendLY towards each other -- because there's a common foe. (laugh) When those nurses leave, there's a hole and others will bemoan the fact that they've 'lost another good nurse. WHY?'.

... but that particular facility can't hold onto it's nurses because the nurses on the floor tend to scare new hires away. Nurses eating nurses. They're a bunch of a-holes, honestly. Not all of them, no. Just enough. Too many difficult personalities in the building. I'm pretty good at keeping interactions with them to a minimum.

I'm one of two from my orientation group of 8 (1 RN, 6 LPNs and 1 CNA) who is still working at that place. We are both PRN...now. The other nurse was FT during orientation but I see that she's changed her mind.

Meanwhile, the facility is having it's 3rd 'career fair' in 2 months .... (laugh)

They aren't vested in fixing the problem; it's probably less work to keep throwing new hires into the meat grinder.

Esme12, ASN, BSN, RN · Mar 4, 2015

As a manager?

Usually it is a systemic problem. Bad staffing. Not being held accountable. Is this everyone in general or a particular group.

SubSippi · Mar 4, 2015

I'll tell you what NOT to do...

My facility was having a problem with employees calling in, so their solution was to cut in half the number of unscheduled absences we were allowed to have in a year. I'm assuming their thought process was that it would cause employees to be more selective about using their sick days.

Nope. All this did was cause people to use their FMLA when they had a cold. This means that instead of being out one day, they would have to be out a full three days to qualify for FMLA time.

It was the same people who called in all the time that started doing this, and those of us who would go a year between sick days also stayed the same.

If you want people to stay, offer incentives...and I don't mean beach towels or keychains. People need yearly raises for there to be any incentive to stay. And people who call in excessively should be dealt with on a case by case basis.