When labor demands increase, a successful healthcare business responds by ensuring that it meets those demands. This means keeping the right number of qualified contingent healthcare workers on staff as needed. In administering healthcare, labor quality is paramount. To assess the quality of your labor force, be sure you are attuned to the performance and well-being of your employees.
Ask yourself: Do they feel overwhelmed? Do they frequently make mistakes due to exhaustion? What is their morale like? If you find your medical staff is caught in a cycle of exhaustion, cutting corners, and mental and emotional fatigue, they may be overworked. As a result, the labor quality is compromised. This is why contingent workers are so vital to the healthcare system.
So what can you do to ensure you are meeting labor demands?
- Keep a profile of all contingent job positions in your workplace ready in case labor demands increase.
By quickly integrating qualified temporary staff that meet all of the current credentials necessary, you can avoid lapses in labor quality. When there is a flux in labor demand, having contingent healthcare workers as backup streamlines the healthcare delivery process and allows for more highly skilled and seasoned staff to focus on their specialties, all while making their experiences as painless as possible.
- Be swift in changing out any contingent employees that do not meet job requirements or do not demonstrate satisfactory job performance.
ShiftWise is committed to finding workers that match what you’re looking for and that are the best fit for your staff. By utilizing ShiftWise’s VMS model, you can easily schedule temporary staff who match your profile and filter out those who don’t. This expedites the resolution of any changes in labor demand.
- Utilize contingent employees before hiring additional staff.
This allows you to determine whether your labor demand is based on a temporary flux or something more permanent. It also gives you the opportunity to see the contingent workers in action. If labor demand increases or if you find you need to add contingent workers more often, you can schedule them to work for longer periods of time until the labor demand normalizes.
When labor demand rises quickly again, you can choose to assign these same contingent workers to fill the gap, and, if needed, easily reintegrate them into the system instead of trying to integrate new employees whose job performances you have not yet assessed.
Labor demands change throughout the year and depend on various factors. Maintain a constant awareness of the shifting analytics in your field so that you can prepare for employment needs in advance. Keeping track of these fluctuations in labor demands and adjusting your staff accordingly will keep things even and make transitions easier.
ShiftWise’s software and services help healthcare workplaces manage a variety of contingent workers including in-house flexible workers and external staffing vendors, for both clinical and non-clinical areas.