5 Labor Strategy Tips for Lowering Labor Costs to Grow Your Businesses

Many healthcare organizations today strive to meet the needs of their workforce by paying attention to the very human and natural elements of why people work. While it is a given that employees want to be happy at work, so do employers: motivation and satisfaction are directly affecting both sides as they seek to fill open positions. A great way to achieve high employee retention rates and top-quality service is by implementing a sound labor strategy.

Healthcare employers are under more pressure than ever to improve the quality of healthcare. The industry is facing significant changes, including the shortage of primary care physicians, increasing costs, failing national healthcare legislation, and increasing healthcare fraud. The stakes are high, and healthcare organizations need to act urgently if they don't want to find themselves caught in a cycle of rising costs without their patients getting the care they need. While some strategies have been identified for addressing these challenges in other industries, there haven't been any conclusive studies demonstrating how to address labor cost challenges in healthcare organizations effectively.

Ways to Optimize Resources and Reduce Overall Labor Costs:

1: Understand What Healthcare Professionals Want

Create a purpose-driven culture: A meaningful work environment is one of the most important factors in retaining staff members. If you want your employees to stay at your company, you need to create an environment where they feel like they belong and make an impact. To do this, focus on creating opportunities for your employees to grow and develop their skill sets through regular development programs and coaching from managers. This will help them feel like they're being challenged and supported by the organization two things that will keep them coming back for more!

Offer Continuing Education: Nurse residency programs and support of continuing education both help improve retention. Continuing education is a requirement for nurses. Employers who invest in the professional development of their nurses by offering the time, resources, and funds for CE courses often see increased job satisfaction among their staff and lower turnover rates, said Rosalind Sloan, MAEd, BSN, RN-BC, program manager/nurse planner for The Center for Continuing Education and Professional Development at the American Nurses Association (ANA) for RN.com.

Invest in Staff Support: Nurses have high levels of turnover because they often feel unsupported by managers and supervisors at work, according to a recent survey by LinkedIn Learning. To help reduce this trend and retain nurses who are already working at your organization, consider creating a culture that supports nurses needs. Designate one or more people to be your nurse advocate so that you can refer questions to him or her when they arise. Create an environment where nurses feel comfortable asking questions and seeking answers from management or other team members.

2: Assess and Adjust Skill Mix

When you need to hire nurses, CNAs, or techs, DirectShifts can help you get the right people in the right place at the right time. Your staff planning should be efficient and effective. It's not enough to just have enough people on staff; you need them in the right places with the right skills. That's where DirectShifts comes in. We can connect you with professionals that are ready to start working for your practice as soon as possible so they can get up to speed quickly and save on travel costs.

3: Reducing Labor Costs

As a healthcare company, you know that keeping your labor costs low is an important part of growing your business. However, it can be difficult to keep track of all the different labor costs in your organization. Here are some tips for reducing labor costs to grow your business:

1. Match staff to patient needs. When you're dealing with a patient's health and recovery, it's hard to match them with the right level of care. That's where technology comes in. Use technology to help you match staffing levels across departments and facilities so that every patient gets the right amount of care at all times.

2. Keep an eye on demand across departments and facilities. While matching staff to patient needs, keep an eye on the market across departments and facilities float professionals from overstaffed, low-demand facilities to understaffed, high-demand sites.  If there's a lot of demand at one facility but not enough workers there to meet it, consider hiring more staff or moving them between sites until the market stabilizes at other locations or drops back down again when the need for extra workers subsidies (which will happen as soon as your staffing levels return to normal).

3. Use technology for scheduling shifts per facility instead of per department.

4: Include On-demand Labor

Healthcare organizations are faced with two core challenges as they ramp up to meet the increased demand for care:

1.Find ways to reduce labor costs so they are sustainable and do not drive down performance.

2.Get staff aligned around patient outcomes, making sure they are providing the right care at the right time.

The Cost-Effective Healthcare Staffing Model

DirectShifts has designed an on-demand staffing model that completely removes agency overtime and cuts reliance on travelers by using a local pool of candidates. It is an AI-based model that helps healthcare organizations cut their costs by 40% immediately, so you don't have to get locked up in long-term contracts and can maintain the flexibility to meet the ebbs and flows of patient demands at the same time.

We connect healthcare employers directly with clinicians. Thus, helping healthcare facilities lean on technology-enabled platforms like DirectShifts, which helps them hire healthcare staff 10 times faster.

Save at least $600,000 per month, or $7.2 million per year, and improve annual ROI.

With a financially sustainable model, DirectShifts creates an "Uber-like" experience for healthcare employers who can easily find pre-verified and pre-credentialed candidates from a pool of 850,000+ clinicians at nearby locations. When you need support, you've got DirectShifts team to help streamline your administrative tasks of setting standard rates, credentialing, training, onboarding, timesheets, billing, etc at your fingertips 24*7.

Our flexible staffing model that leverages on-demand talent and technology is one of the most effective ways to staff your healthcare facility while supporting healthcare professionals. Combine this with other cost-effective healthcare staffing models to train your healthcare staff. This will improve employee retention, and your healthcare facility will have a winning model for your business and your people.

This model has also been featured asDirectShifts' On-demand Staffing Model helps Healthcare Facilities cut their labor costs up to 35%

Visit here to understand more about our Staffing Model: Employer (directshifts.com)