Finding the best healthcare executives can be a tremendous challenge, but it’s a great feeling when you finally find someone who can handle the responsibility. That feeling can come to an abrupt end when a rival steals them out from under your nose. One of the most terrible experiences in the professional world is having your star employee poached and losing them to a competitor forever.
While this unfortunate situation does happen more often than not, it can be avoided if you take the proper steps.
It all comes down to making sure that your star employee has no reason to leave.
Reward Their Effort
Having a skilled executive, especially in healthcare, is all well and good. However, just because they have continued to do a good job does not mean it should be taken for granted. When an executive performs admirably, rewarding those efforts can go a long way in keeping them loyal to you.
It is ideal for rewarding long-term exemplary service with financial compensation and offering pay increases or bonuses to reflect your appreciation of their efforts. You can also use frequent verbal praise of their efforts to reinforce your conveyed appreciation for their work and effectively remind them of the value they have to you and the company as a whole.
Financial and verbal rewards are not the only potential rewards you can offer to keep your executives happy and loyal to you. In addition, rewards are not even the sole measures you can take to do so.
Work/Life Balance
A common issue in virtually every workplace is that an employee’s, executive or otherwise, life does not revolve around their job. They can provide their absolute best effort to their employers, but they are still human beings with personal lives and limitations.
One of the most potent ways you can make an executive feel valued and retain their loyalty is to recognize this and make concessions for them when a personal emergency comes up. It would help if you also remained aware of the effect professional stress might be having on their mental health to ensure they do not suffer from burnout.
If your executive becomes overstressed due to constant professional pressure, they risk simply burning out on the position and, in the interest of their mental capacity, will seek to find a less strenuous option. However, if you allow for mental health days or even brief periods during the workday to allow them to compose themselves, your executive will have a much lower risk of burning out entirely.
However, even with a well-crafted work/life balance structure, you still might not net a loyal executive, if only because they may be a breed of employee renowned for abandoning employees: the job hopper.
Job Hoppers
An unfortunate hiring reality is that there will be employees, even executives, who are only interested in staying at a job for as long as it suits them. These job hoppers are not interested in loyalty and are simply looking to collect as much as possible for the minimum amount of work.
These employees, while rare, do slip through the cracks unless properly vetted, either by your HR department or by a 3rd party staffing company. These job hoppers can ultimately do more damage to your staff than any minimal amount of benefit they can offer, making a careful vetting process vital.
Many employers are plagued by turnover unrelated to job hoppers. Many executives leave their jobs to increase their pay, role, and responsibilities when there is no room for advancement within their current organization. Thus, allowing for promotion from within is a way to cut down on job-hopping from all but the most serial hoppers.
When in Doubt
While the tips we have provided can be excellent ways of keeping your current executives loyal, they will only be slightly effective at drawing new executives to you. While there are plenty of ways for you to attract new executive talent, sometimes a little extra help can be necessary to staff your office. Here at QLK, we specialize in finding the top executive talent in the healthcare field. Contact us today so we can help you!
