3.6 million people left their jobs in October 2023. It's probably very likely that your health center lost good employees in the last two years. Some of those departures were inevitable (and maybe even welcomed), but a lot of those could have been avoided with intentional retention strategies.
Last week I talked about the importance of developing your leaders as the #1 way to get good employees to stay. Now let's talk about your tools and technology.
As non-profits, community health centers are often hesitant to spend money on things that don't have an obvious tie to good patient care. The problem with that is, we often operate with slow, old and clunky technology that is out-of-date and a huge financial risk to our organizations. Not only is it incredibly frustrating for staff to be battling their technology all day; it is costing your health center productivity, efficiencies, and putting the organization and your patients at risk.
I had an IT assessment done on my health center in 2019. At the time, our health center was part of the county, and I felt frustrated with the speed and clunkiness of our IT equipment. I thought the assessment would affirm my frustrations, but I had no idea how much it would reveal why our care teams couldn't see more patients during the day, how frustrating each day was for our staff, and especially how easily it could have been to hack into our old computers and cause a very expensive (read: millions of dollars) cybersecurity incident.
If you are looking for ways to retain your good employees, look at ways to improve their daily experience at work. Are they waiting for slow wifi all day? Is their equipment old and slow? Does the hardware and software work well together seamlessly or are they having to do things manually all day?
Here are 3 things you can do to improve the technology at your health center:
1. Ask employees what is working well and not working well. Observe them throughout the day to see where the technology is slowing them down.
2. Do an IT assessment to see where there are gaps. I didn't realize how valuable it is to have an expert go through all of our equipment, software and connection points to see what is actually working well and not working well, and where our biggest risks were. The assessment gave me a plan to address the issues that I didn't know existed.
3. Have an IT replacement plan. It is shocking how quickly IT equipment becomes obsolete. Just like your cell phone slows down significantly after a couple of years, laptops and desktops do too. If you get frustrated when your phone isn't responding to you at lightning speeds, then imagine how frustrated your employees are all day dealing with slow technology.
If you want to retain high performing employees who like to be really productive during the day, then make an investment in your tools and technology.
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