Since April 2021, a social phenomenon linked to employment has taken root in the United States. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.4 million Americans left their jobs in September 2021 alone. This figure supplants consecutive records set for six months, a significant increase not seen in the United States since the Bureau began tracking these data in 2000. Economists soon called this period of turbulence the Great Resignation.
According to the magazine Time, the 7.7 million Americans who are unemployed are not scrambling to fill the 10.4 million vacant jobs. The wages of many of these jobs have not kept up with rising consumer prices. Jobs often do not offer worthy benefits or advancement opportunities. And when an employer is unable or simply unwilling to make the job more attractive, tired employees will quit.
For Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, many people simply don’t want to go back to jobs that are too demanding, boring and low paying. They want something else and are ready to look for something better.
Go or stay?
As in Quebec, employment in the health sector in the United States is not in good shape. Nearly one in five American workers have quit their healthcare jobs since the start of the pandemic, according to a Morning Consult poll. And of those who chose to stay, 31% have considered quitting their jobs.
It should be understood that each resignation increases the workload of the employees who remain. Those who hold the fort become tired, there is a loss of expertise and for more than one, the game is no longer worth the candle and they in turn resign.
According to the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, since the start of the pandemic, 66% of their members have considered leaving the nursing profession.
The pandemic is putting enormous pressure on healthcare teams who have to support the functioning of the healthcare system day after day. The nursing shortage is putting health at risk in several hospitals.
“In Quebec, we no longer count the refusals to work of employees who denounce compulsory overtime”, the working conditions and the lack of resources. Network employees are exhausted both physically and emotionally by the workload imposed on them, which leads many to resign, to take an early retirement or to make a career change.
With the consequence that the vicious circle continues, schools are training more and more health professionals, they are overused for lack of resources, they are given the worst hours, then they leave.
Team spirit
It would be easy to accuse management of incompetence and say that no private company would survive this kind of operation. However, healthcare establishments are not automobile assembly lines, there is the human factor to consider. Squeezing the lemon without regard for the work being done is bad for the organization.
The management of health establishments also have to juggle budgetary constraints and costs for new treatments which are still growing. And to balance budgets, management will sometimes have to make cuts in administrative services, human resources, nursing staff and maintenance. Work organization then becomes difficult with the loss of expertise, the staff shortage and the difficulty of retaining the remaining employees.
Of course, an organization that wants to excel must focus on points that are characteristic of more efficient health establishments. She must equip herself with a positive organizational culture where respect and trust between colleagues are sustained.
Human resources need to constantly reinvent themselves in order to find the right employees, support them and help them grow. The organization must also focus on the development of leadership at all levels and encourage autonomy. Finally, it is important to have an activity monitoring system with explicit goals to be achieved in order to properly assess the quality of health services.
And what about the contribution of middle managers, coordinators, team leaders who have a key role in the implementation of organizational strategies. It is important that these are in sufficient quantity to manage the teams and establish lateral links between them. Small teams where each individual knows the others in the group in order to build a work environment where there is an understanding of what needs to be done, where employees have been able to bond with all the other members of the team and where they learned to work together and to trust each other.
It’s an art of getting people to work and building a team spirit to keep them interested and happy. Managers need to do some soul-searching on how to better organize and integrate teams. And to do this, the managers in the field need free rein to set up their teams and improve working conditions.
The solution to retention problems inevitably involves decentralization, financial stability, local management and the support of teams in the field.