Getting and Keeping Great Employees

We all know the importance of getting and keeping great employees. In most businesses, great employees is the secret sauce of the business success. Without them you can only grow so large. A recent article in Huffington Post highlighted a number of ways you can attract and keep great employees:

  • Onsite Spas
  • Fitness Benefits
  • Free or Reduced Childcare
  • Partially or Fully Funded Healthcare
  • Counseling/Therapy Resources

I don’t think that anyone would argue that these are some pretty compelling and fun things to have for your employees. I know I’d enjoy quite a few of these benefits. However, these benefits aren’t likely practical for most healthcare organizations. In fact, I’d argue that healthcare organizations should avoid the competition with other organizations in offering these types of over the top services and benefits to employees. I say that because they’ll never win against their better funded competitors for employee mind share.

Instead of offering these type of WOW benefits to your employees, healthcare has something that most of these businesses can’t offer: a clear mission and purpose.

That’s right. Many of these organizations that offer the list of benefits above are awful jobs. While it’s profitable to be good at driving sign ups for Netflix, it’s not very satisfying. The same isn’t true for healthcare. I’ve often said that if you can’t find purpose in what you’re doing in healthcare, then you’re doing something dramatically wrong.

I’m not saying that healthcare organizations should treat their employees poorly or that they shouldn’t offer some great benefits to their employees. They can and should, but they shouldn’t try to compete with other companies that are flush in cash. They’ll never win that game. Instead, healthcare organizations should offer a quality benefits program along with a clear mission and vision of the work your employee will accomplish with your organization. That’s a powerful combination that attracts the right employees for your organization.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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