Elevate the health care workforce with analytics

Authored by Deloitte’s Eric Lesser, Chandrika Divi, and Shannon Poynton; Visier.

Health care workforce trends today

Since losing nearly half a million workers in the first 20 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health care industry has been facing an unprecedented talent emergency.¹ The clinicians who remain in the workforce feel increasingly burned out, overworked, and unsatisfied—the staffing shortage in health care has had profound impacts across the industry. According to recent Deloitte research, nearly half of the clinicians surveyed reported high levels of burnout, and almost all worry that health care worker disconnection can result in decreased quality of care in their communities.² High attrition among frontline clinicians not only contributes to the talent crisis, but also puts increased financial pressure on health care systems. According to a 2022 study conducted by Nursing Solutions, Inc., the turnover of one bedside registered nurse (RN) can lead to a potential loss of $5.2 million to $9 million in an average hospital.³

Many organizations feel pressure from the staffing shortage and will need to continue navigating an extremely competitive health care labor market. How can they attract the talent they need and retain employees they can’t afford to lose?

Navigating the health care staffing shortage with analytics

There are many factors that can influence and drive retention, including leader and manager effectiveness, work intensity, work-life sustainability, career development and mobility, culture, total rewards, and job design. It is critical to assess the root causes of attrition in your organization to better understand the most effective solutions and maximize your investments.

Root cause analysis starts with gathering existing workforce data and capturing employee feedback. People analytics in the health care workforce can connect the dots between quantitative and qualitative data about employees’ experiences, behavior patterns, and emotions at work to help leaders identify underlying causes of attrition, predict who is most at risk for leaving, and prioritize what levers can be pulled to increase retention.

As an example, we worked with a client who invested in various benefits to boost well-being and drive retention. After examining benefits usage, uptake, and employee feedback, we realized that the most unanticipated benefit perceived by the client’s employees was pet Insurance. It’s a small example, but it highlights the importance of using data to shape decisions, choosing the right investments, and putting employee experience at the center of recruiting and retention strategies and decisions.

People analytics allow leaders to harness the power of data, understand the sentiment and needs of the workforce, and translate those insights into actionable next steps—how teams should be structured, how work can be redesigned, what skills and experience are needed, etc. It also empowers leaders to break out of a “one-size-fits-all” framework that doesn’t serve employees, patients, or organizations.

What you need: The data, the platform, and the strategy

People analytics give health care organizations a comprehensive view of their workforce, along with the insights needed to act. But taking full advantage of these capabilities requires combining the right strategy with the right data and the right platform.

Health care organizations have a lot of workforce data they need to consider, from turnover and PTO utilization to overtime and manager span of control. The data may come from different functions and live across multiple systems. One set of data can be helpful, but the challenge is intentionally bringing together all aspects of your workforce data in a common environment where it can be analyzed.

Putting the pieces together requires the technology infrastructure capable of harmonizing the data and presenting it with easy-to-digest visualizations. This is where an effective people analytics strategy and platform can help. With the right platform, you can start where you are today and build your analytics muscle as you go.

The people analytics operating model is equally as important as the data and technology. Clearly defined processes allow you to streamline and track the intake on data requests and interactions with your internal customers. A robust governance establishes standards in how to, and who can, access and use the data. It also creates consistent definitions of key metrics. Additionally, it’s important to involve the right talent in this process. Those with strong analytical skills can form the right questions and hypotheses, engineer the data from different sources, and tell a story out of the trends and patterns.

Start small, start now

Developing your people analytics capability is a journey. While it may seem intimidating at first, organizations can start small and continue to evolve. As you start building your health care organization’s people analytics capability for your workforce, we’d like to point out a few considerations:

1. Start small and harness the momentum. You don’t have to start big and do it all at once. Identify early opportunities to build success and engender trust within the organization. This can help you tackle bigger and more complex business challenges in the long run.
2. Don’t wait for perfect data. No organization has perfectly clean data. Prioritize the variables that you think will have the greatest impact on attrition when cleaning your data.
3. Identify “hot spots.” Analyze workforce data to identify those with a higher risk of attrition, and what’s driving that risk, to prioritize your investments and address the most immediate needs.
4. Put employees’ experiences at the center of the analytics. Start with understanding your workforce’s wants and needs, gradually building greater maturity on other data elements.
5. Build the “coalition.” Pull in your HR business partners and operational leaders to leverage their firsthand knowledge about the workforce. Partner with your IT department to understand system integrations and how data flows through various functions. Collaborate with Finance to learn how turnover can affect your bottom line and create and validate business cases for retention tactics and other HR initiatives. Lastly, make sure that there is oversight from Legal and Risk on data privacy.

We have seen that disruptive changes can happen abruptly, particularly in the health care industry. With an effective people analytics strategy and infrastructure, organizations can develop the capability to anticipate and proactively respond to business challenges and adapt to a constantly changing “new normal.”

Interested in learning more? Deloitte’s Shannon Poynton, Chandrika Divi, and Eric Lesser and Visier’s Yustina Saleh discussed how people analytics fits into the health care industry in an on-demand webinar, Maximize Your Greatest Investment—Your People: Navigating People Analytics in Today’s Health Care Industry. Access the full recorded session here.

Authors:

• Eric Lesser
• Chandrika Divi
• Shannon Poynton
• Visier

Endnotes:

¹ The employment situation—January 2023, Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor, February 3, 2023.
² Addressing health care’s talent emergency, Deloitte LLP, November 2022.
³ 2022 NSI national healthcare retention & RN staffing report, Nursing Solutions, Inc., March 2022.