John Cass - Talent and Assessment Strategy Specialist shares how to help boost employee resilience and lead to improved workforce retention.
Aon’s Global HR Pulse survey found that 92 percent of companies say they have made attraction and retention of staff a top priority. For the health and social care sector it’s no surprise that these two objectives should be in sharp focus. The cost of high staff turnover is damaging financially, but also can be difficult to recruit new permanent staff in the current workforce market, often resorting to agency staff. From an insurance and liability perspective, an over reliance on agency staff significantly increases cost and risk due to agency workers being less familiar with patients care plans, medication and the way the organisation operates. In a more complex care setting where patients or service users display challenging behaviours, the risk is significantly heightened.
HR assessment tools is not a new concept and with the advancement of technology there are several tools emerging which aim to support the recruitment process. Recruiting the right people is one challenge but what solutions can be most effective to measure staff wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability to make sure those employees stay? And what support is most valued during their employment journey.
Employ the Right Staff
The journey towards workforce resilience can and should ideally begin as early as the pre-hire assessment stage. There are a range of simple tools to help businesses get the right people by answering the questions: Will they do the job? Will they want to do the job? And can they do the job? There are a series of ‘tests’ which can help assess if you are attracting the right people. At Aon, these are: A Situational Judgement Test (SJT) answers the ‘will they?’. While a Behavioural Test – the ‘will they want to do it?’ – is about understanding whether their answers reflect their true response. Finally, an Ability Test can help decide the ‘can they?’.
For an extra layer of pre-screening, a realistic job preview positions candidates into real life scenarios to ensure they know what the role they are applying for involves on a day-to-day basis. These scenarios will be different depending upon the patients or service users that the employee could be supporting.
Working through these stages, gives an organisation a great chance of getting someone in for the right reasons. But getting the right employees through the door is only the beginning of the challenge; a business also needs to be in with a good chance of keeping its best employees for the long term, reducing recruitment and on-boarding costs.
How Resilient Am I?
At Aon, we utilise our Human Sustainability Index (HSI) which is especially useful in retaining staff at managerial level where employees such as supervisors, team leaders and ward managers have that valuable embedded knowledge and experience that organisations need. As a tool that can be rolled out quickly across a group, HSI answers the question as to how resilient people, teams and organisations are by finding out how well staff are doing in eight different areas of their work, financial, physical and home life, and then signposting them to available solutions to help address any issues. One client’s senior manager, for example, had a weak community score which was one of the areas identified that they needed to develop in terms of their own mental wellbeing and resilience. Tackling that deficiency presented no cost to the business and there are many other actions in response to the HSI findings that a business can take to help individuals that don’t necessarily revolve around cash expenditure.
Driven by Data
There have been many solutions around employee wellbeing based on what businesses think their people need which has in the past resulted in budget being wasted on inefficient products. A data driven solution should be able to signpost employees to wellbeing products that they actually want and need. It should aggregate data up to a team and organisational level, providing reporting so that businesses can quickly see where teams are weak or strong, and are able to identify areas that need to be addressed.
How can we break the cycle?
A well-defined process to pre-hire assessments and realistic job previews and continual monitoring of mental health and wellbeing can make an important contribution to getting the right people in and then making sure that a business loses as few of those employees as possible. It feels that there is no one solution and every care provider will be different. However, those providers that are taking steps to ensure that all colleagues are supported throughout their employment journey, right from career development, a safe and supportive working environment, flexible working and importantly creating a no blame culture where people can feel valued and be heard, are crucial elements to securing a more resilient workforce.
Find out more about Aon’s Human Sustainability Index or contact John Cass ([email protected])
About Aon
Aon plc (NYSE: AON) exists to shape decisions for the better — to protect and enrich the lives of people around the world. Our colleagues provide our clients in over 120 countries and sovereignties with advice and solutions that give them the clarity and confidence to make better decisions to protect and grow their business.
This article has been compiled using information available to us up to 11/07/2023.
Whilst care has been taken in the production of this article and the information contained within it has been obtained from sources that Aon UK Limited believes to be reliable, Aon UK Limited does not warrant, represent or guarantee the accuracy, adequacy, completeness or fitness for any purpose of the article or any part of it and can accept no liability for any loss incurred in any way whatsoever by any person who may rely on it. In any case any recipient shall be entirely responsible for the use to which it puts this article.
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