Retention Initiatives: Interdisciplinary Strategies to Decrease Turnover

Purpose:
A retention taskforce was formed to develop an innovative employee retention plan to assist with reducing first-year-of-service turnover of unlicensed assistive personnel. This strategic approach will assist leaders to identify new strategies which yield positive financial and patient outcomes.

Significance:
To meet the goal of reducing employee first-year-of-service turnover, a retention taskforce of key stakeholders was developed. Employee turnover is costly to every organization, therefore processes and metrics are essential to positively impact retention outcomes.

Strategy and Implementation:
By establishing organizational goals and implementing strategic tactics, other healthcare facilities can improve employee first-year-of service-turnover.The taskforce utilized a retention model to apply effective employee retention techniques. The model focused on addressing employee retention by evaluating processes, building on principles, implementing strategies, and achieving outcomes. By utilizing this innovative approach to retention, human resources, nursing leadership and nursing education have built infrastructures and provided resources to maintain and support the initiative, thereby impacting the care delivery by the entire nursing team. These initiatives have been proven to sustain stability of the nursing care environment.Significant reduction of the first-year-of-service turnover can be achieved by implementing these processes.

Evaluation:
Nursing leaders have the ability to influence and create organizational change when setting strategic priorities and focus on outcomes. The success was measured by the leadership goals and turnover metrics. A retention scorecard was developed and reviewed to assess the progress of the initiative.

Implications for Practice:
The outcomes have indicated a financial savings for the organization as well as improved staff satisfaction. Staff feedback was obtained and has strengthened outcomes, by creating an environment where staff feedback is valued and therefore improving the team environment and ultimately patient care.