Staffing Challenges? Ask These Questions to Boost Retention & Recruitment

>>What’s causing the healthcare staffing crisis?

Now that we’re several years past the pandemic that transformed healthcare, it’s clear that the hospital staffing crisis isn’t going away. The bubble was always destined to pop — COVID-19 just rushed the process and intensified the consequences. 

Providers are leaving the workforce faster than they’re being replaced. A 2024 study by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing found that 40% of nurses (1.6 million workers) intend to leave nursing by 2029. Similarly, the Association of American Medical Colleges projects an estimated shortfall of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.

Nurses and physicians are feeling undervalued and overwhelmed, causing them to jump from organization to organization and, in some cases leaving healthcare altogether. As that happens, those who stay have a wider selection of employers — making it even harder to retain and recruit top talent. 

>>How to improve retention and recruitment 

Offering competitive compensation is a key part of this conversation. But there’s a ceiling to what you can offer, and your organization may have already reached it. Fortunately, salary isn’t the only consideration. Employee experience (EX) is another critical lever. 

Nurses and physicians talk, and your employee experience can work for or against you:

• If your organization is known for a positive culture, supportive leadership, and staff who stay, it’s easier to attract and retain strong employees. 
• If your organization has a reputation for burnout, not valuing the contributions of care teams, or is constantly understaffed, there’s only so much that a signing bonus or raise can help. 

A positive employee experience makes your healthcare organization an employer of choice. To understand and strengthen your healthcare EX, start by listening to your employees.

>>How to get honest employee feedback

Your employees know your EX better than anyone else. They’re keenly aware of the day-to-day bottlenecks and friction points, and they have a vested interest in providing feedback that makes their daily work easier. But they also want to protect themselves.

That’s why listening sessions and healthcare employee satisfaction surveys don’t always work. Employees may not be comfortable airing their grievances in a room with peers or leaders — and many won’t trust that surveys are actually anonymous. 

For transparent and insightful employee feedback, the best research format is in-depth, one-to-one interviews. They: 

• Encourage honesty: Third-party facilitators create a space where nurses and physicians can speak openly without fear of reprisal.
• Allow for probing: One-to-one interviews are less rigidly structured than group sessions. This allows time and flexibility for facilitators to read facial expressions, ask follow-up questions, and uncover something unexpected. (Learn how else they differ.) 
• Enable depth: Researchers can frame questions to push beyond the surface-level insights that come up in surveys and dig into root causes behind frustrations. 

>>Questions to ask nurses and physicians

The framing of the questions is just as important as the format of the research. You want to ask open-ended questions that get to the sources of frustration, why they’re happening, and how to solve them. 

These are the kinds of questions you want to ask nurses and physicians about the employee experience.

Do you feel valued? 

Many healthcare providers don’t — this is a root cause of low employee satisfaction and turnover. Pizza parties don’t repair feeling overworked and unappreciated. Talk to your nurses and physicians to understand what would truly make them feel valued. 

Does communication feel helpful and honest?

Communication is a common friction point in the healthcare employee experience. When leadership’s communication doesn’t feel transparent, it erodes trust. Clinicians also sometimes struggle to keep up with the volume of information shared, often telling us that “too many emails” gets in the way of bedside care. 

Do you feel aligned with the organization’s mission — and involved in shaping it?

Physician engagement improves when providers feel connected to their hospital’s mission and kept in the loop by leadership. When decisions feel top-down and physicians lose their voice at an organization, work feels transactional and loyalty suffers.

Do you have enough time and support to care for patients well? 

Many nurses and physicians feel that hospital systems work against them, not with them, citing inefficient processes and unnecessary red tape. These interviews and other human-centered design methods help uncover where time is being wasted and how to remove friction to improve healthcare employee satisfaction.

>>Why is listening important?

Finding time to listen to employees might feel inefficient or difficult for organizations that are already under-resourced. But it’s a critical prerequisite to solving nurse retention and physician engagement issues. 

Why? Failing to understand the true healthcare employee experience comes at the risk of: 

• Making the wrong decisions: Your team could implement changes that create new pain points and worsen the situation.
• Losing good employees: Designing the wrong solutions (or tackling the wrong issues) could further accelerate employee frustration and turnover. 
• Weakening the patient experience: EX and PX are intrinsically connected. Patient outcomes improve with proper staffing, and patients want to see that their clinicians are happy and supported. (Nurse burnout is directly linked to lower patient satisfaction.)
• Feeding a vicious cycle: Continued turnover worsens staff ratios, morale, and the patient experience, making it even harder to recruit and retain healthcare employees. 

Listening to nurses and physicians is the critical first step in ending the cycle and improving healthcare employee retention and recruitment.