To recruit and retain nurses, you need to find ways to be a supportive employer. You may be wondering how to help healthcare workers without hurting your budget and how to offer support that’s genuinely meaningful for your workers. At our Customer Advisory Board roundtable discussion on the nursing shortage, we talked about one important way you can support your nurses: give them flexible benefits.
Supporting Nurses for Better Staffing
Supporting your staff is vital to maintaining your staffing ratios. Nurses who feel supported are less likely to suffer from burnout, so they’ll be more likely to continue working at your organization longer. If you can help your employees feel satisfied with their jobs, you’re also investing in your recruiting. Happy employees will represent your organization as a great place to work, helping your organizational reputation. In turn, this will make it easier to hire new recruits.
These benefits might include wellness perks, more options for retirement or savings, education support, or more flexibility around picking shifts.
It can take time and resources to set up flexible benefits, and you’ll need fantastic communication between employees and HR. However, once you have flexible benefits in place you’ll make things easier on yourself in the long run by inviting workers into the selection process.
Who’s Using Flexible Benefits?
Flexible benefits are rising in popularity in many businesses. Healthcare is just one of the industries embracing unconventional or flexible fringe benefits. As of March 2021, 36% of hospital industry workers had some form of flexible benefit package. The fact that over a third of these workers are getting flexible benefits is remarkable, but these packages aren’t yet standard. In other words, this is a strategy that’s growing in popularity, but is still unique enough to set you apart as an employer.
What Kind of Benefits Do Workers Want?
The top benefit that workers want, according to one survey, is better health insurance. After that, respondents say they want shift flexibility, help with student loans, family leave, and daycare.
Many of these benefits have very low up-front costs for the employer. Options like flexible scheduling are especially popular among women. That’s worth thinking about, considering how woman-dominated nursing is as a profession.
Why Support Nurses With Flexible Benefits?
Flexible Benefits Get Rid of the Guesswork
The whole idea of fringe benefits is to help employees live balanced, healthy lives. There can be a lot of guesswork involved with selecting benefits, though. Even with the best intentions, sometimes HR managers select benefits that aren’t really useful. There is one way to guarantee your employees get the fringe benefits they need, and that’s to let them pick.
Flexible Benefits Increase Loyalty
In one MetLife survey, 72% of respondents said they would feel more loyal to their business if they were offered flexible benefits. This is big news for any healthcare employer trying to reduce turnover rates.
Flexible Benefits Can Reduce Burnout
Overall, 58% of workers say that nontraditional benefits would help them manage stress. That’s huge for healthcare, where burnout is one of the biggest reasons employees leave the industry. If you look at younger employees, the consensus is even stronger. Gen Z and Millennial applicants want to pick their own benefits—and these are the workers healthcare employers need to attract as Baby Boomers retire.
Better Healthcare Staffing With Apploi
Regardless of whether you can offer flexible benefits now, next year, or in the distant future, Apploi is here to simplify your healthcare staffing. We help employers source candidates, streamline hiring, and onboard new recruits. Hire painlessly to make a great impression on new applicants.
Interested in learning more about how you can recruit, hire, and onboard healthcare staff quickly? Contact us today for a free demo of our end-to-end talent management solution.
