Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Health

6 Strategies to Boost Productivity of Employees in the Healthcare Industry

Workplace productivity is a must requirement for businesses today. With ever-growing demand, however, matching up to customer expectations along with keeping productivity levels high is indeed difficult for an employer.

  • How can a poor performer be turned into a power pact performer?
  • What must be done to boost employee productivity?

These are some of the questions that keep coming every now and then in the mind of employers. Especially in the healthcare space, where labor shortage is already putting a lot of pressure and burden on existing employees who are on the verge of exhaustion, productivity sounds like a distant dream. Making efficient use of available labor to turn around things in favor of business is what healthcare organizations keep struggling for.

However, here are six effective strategies that can help healthcare employers improve the productivity of their medical workers and professionals. Following these strategies will help healthcare systems and facilities provide better quality care to patients.

1. Provide the Right Tools to Streamline Workflow

To extract the best performance of your healthcare workers, hospitals, or any healthcare organization must ensure that they provide employees with useful tools. Selecting the right software or tool that makes working efficient and easier is what can boost the productivity of your workforce.

Here are some of the tools, healthcare brands need to give to their employees to help them work better:

Collaboration Apps 

Teamwork is an essential part of the success of any team. It is only possible when the team is on the same page and are aware of what everyone in the group is up to, keeping track of every activity. This is when the collaboration tools like project management software or apps come into use. There are readily available project management tools in the market that can help your healthcare workers manage workflow with real-time data on their day-to-day operations.

Giving useful project management tools equips your team with the ability to track, manage, and share documents of a particular project among the team members.

Time Tracking Apps

Healthcare companies can make use of time tracking software to easily keep an eye on the team’s working hours and productivity rate so that valuable insights can be used to improve the efficiency of your workplace.

Communication Apps

It is a must that you provide your team with communication apps to keep their conversations organized and easy to track and manage. It helps to streamline work as most of the communication apps have file sharing and accessibility features as well.

2. Focus on Cultural Fit While Recruiting

There are companies who while recruiting make sure to check whether the future employee will be able to fit into their work culture and core values. This saves a lot of time and resource as only culturally fit candidates gets selected who are unlikely to quit later due to failing to match company values.

While for many cultural fits may not be that important, arguably, it is a crucial factor in the selection process. If the employee you hire fits into your company culture, then he/she is likely to motivate and energize others, increasing the productivity of all. Healthcare companies can follow the same strategy while hiring nursing or technicians or any other professional as indirectly it will help them improve the performance of existing workers as well.

3. Enhance Employee Skills with Training

Often, employers stop taking an interest in nurturing the talent they have. Once done with the recruitment, employees are left on their own to learn and grow. While few can do it themselves, most of them need external support and training to nurture their skills so that they can perform better.

Healthcare organizations also must pay attention to training their medical professionals and workers going ahead. If your workers are not up-to-date with the recent market developments in their field of work, then they will remain behind and would not be able to meet your expectations. Their productivity will slow down, and only proper training can give them the required boost. Companies in the healthcare sector must note down that providing skill training to both new and existing healthcare workers is crucial to ensure productivity.

4. Stop Micromanaging and Encourage Autonomy

In an interview conducted quite some time back, productivity expert Robby Slaughter surprised everyone with his advice to keep managers away. He said that the best way to increase productivity and encourage employees to manage their time and resources better is by asking the managers to back off. It is the most effective productivity booster.

Considering his advice, healthcare organizations like others should grant their employees freedom. It should be a self-correcting process where manager interference is less. Then only achieving better results is possible. It is the common nature of managers to hover and make employees even more nervous which leads to poor performance. But, if you seriously want the best out of your employees, healthcare managers must learn to let go and allow employees to take charge of their responsibilities and be independent of the choices they make.

5. Communicate with Employees

No matter whether you are in the healthcare field of any other, communication is undoubtedly the key to successful employee management. Without proper communication between the employer and the employee, relationships fail, and so do business as its impact. Healthcare brands need to ensure uninterrupted and two-way communication with their employees. If you talk, then only you can clear their misunderstandings, know their expectations, and explain responsibilities to your employees and in return, get a productive workforce.

Brands need to create a culture and encourage an environment of positive communication. Managers can hold meetings to discuss future possibilities rather than sticking to past mistakes and what could have been better the last time. Doing so builds a negative situation which is not at all encouraging. Instead, you can talk about the positive outcomes of what you have learned from your mistakes and how you can use them to benefit in the future. Be open to communication with your team members as this will help improve team involvement and productivity.

6. Offer Great Perks and Rewards

Who doesn’t like to get rewards for their hard work? We all do.

The Healthcare industry is no different, and here employees work 24×7 in emergencies, and when the patient inflow increases. From physicians to lab technicians, nurses, pharmacists, and others work hard in a challenging and intense atmosphere on a daily basis. Hence, if hospitals do not pay them incentives or perks for their overtime or exceptional service, then they are obviously going to be disappointed and demotivated. Even the same thing applies to a healthcare IT company as well. If the employees are not recognized and rewarded, then they will lose motivation to work better, and their productivity will certainly go down.

So, don’t let that happen with your healthcare business and start rewarding your employees with attractive perks and gifts.

Final Thoughts

In any workplace, the key ingredient that drives success is productivity. A company can do well even with fewer employees if they are highly productive in their area of work. But an essential aspect that most of companies forget is the productivity of employees depends on engagement. If the worker is disengaged with the company and its work ethics, principles, and process, then he is least likely to give his best efforts.

Disengaged employees can be harmful to your healthcare business. The reason for such occurrences can be many. Either it can be because of your micromanagement and confined treatment of employees or because they are underpaid or overlooked. Ignoring employees and unhealthy company work culture can result in reduced productivity among employees according to a recent study. If employees are disinterested and disengaged, then the percentage of absenteeism will also increase, which will drag down your profits.

So, stop being unnecessarily strict and give your employees the freedom and chance to prove themselves. And if they successfully perform their responsibilities, then don’t forget to appreciate and value their efforts.

Written By

My name is Lauren Williams, currently working as a senior marketing manager at MedicoReach. I have been working in the B2B industry for a decade now. Through my marketing blogs, I keep the industry updated on latest trends, development, and advances across the various segments of digital marketing.

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

You May Also Like

Fitness

If you’ve put in a good workout, you know how great you feel afterwards; sort of like you can do just about anything. You...

Small Business

There is usually someone already who has found a faster more efficient way to run a business. Asking for help if usually the best...

Tech

Workplace productivity is crucial for business success. Fortunately, business efficiency increased by 1.2% across the United States in 2019 — total output increased by...

Business

The very notion of delegating tasks and responsibilities to others is something that many business owners and managers can often feel ambivalent, and even...