How To Improve Existing Employee Performance During A Recruitment Crisis

This is truly a challenging time for care and healthcare providers To understand opinion on the biggest difficulties the sector is currently facing, we recently carried out research with over 200 care and healthcare employers

We found that nearly 9 in 10 organisations are now struggling with staff shortages and alarmingly over a third of these also admitted that shortages are compromising the quality of service they can deliver

77 per cent of those we spoke to believe it is a recruitment challenge that is driving the sector’s staff shortage crisis Addressing a recruitment crisis is not a quick issue to resolve Whilst improvements to a company’s offering to attract more team members can be made this takes time Companies are also subject to a huge number of external factors that impact on the ability to recruit such as keeping up with rising wages in a competitive labour market Therefore retaining existing employees and allowing them to be able to still perform their roles well must always remain a focus Improving employee wellbeing and engagement will help you to weather a staffing storm

If you don t and especially in the current climate, employees are ultimately at risk of burnout, stress, poor mental health and poor performance When these occur you face further resignations and a worsening crisis

Intrinsically linked over half (58 per cent) of the industry leaders we spoke with said they are experiencing

By Toyah Marshall, Principal Employment Law Adviser and Solicitor at WorkNest (www worknest com)

issues with staff performance Whilst there are many reasons for underperformance – some of which are of course unrelated to staffing levels – being stretched will impact a person s ability to carry out their duties at the highest possible level of quality It makes their role extremely difficult with little opportunity to perform at even the required level let alone over perform or personally develop in their skills and roles

Addressing performance management issues is crucial but one quarter of care organisations aren t tackling the concerns they are seeing This is because they are either understaffed or don t know how to – or a combination of both

Employers can address this with short term action that will bring long term benefit: upskilling the existing workforce offering learning and development opportunities and supporting employees with their physical and mental wellbeing

Train employees on the importance of compliance and embed it into their daily operations Reduce manual processes to ensure they can fulfil their duties with the best care quality and minimise the likelihood of processes affecting their performance

Care and healthcare leaders can ensure their teams are present and performing by creating a culture of putting quality and patient care first Leaders must also regularly connect with staff members to address their concerns with tasks and support them through performance or wellbeing related issues

In the same research project, when exploring what the general consensus is on the recent changes to the Care Quality Commission s (CQC) new framework it was unsurprising that providers would rather not have to deal with adapting regulation Unfortunately, it is only exacerbating the number of challenges the sector faces

For more guidance and free HR employment law and health & safety resources for care organisations visit https://worknest com/sectors/care/