There’s no question that the healthcare workforce has seen a great deal of burnout and turnover in recent years. Long, taxing hours and poor pay have conspired to reduce the attractiveness of a role in the healthcare industry.
Mental and physical health are both critical to an organization’s long-term success. For this reason, it’s no surprise that remote working has a significant role to play in the future of the healthcare workforce.
Studies have shown that remote work can offer numerous benefits, like better work-life balance, less stress and more productivity. In addition, it’s important to have a dynamic set of tools in place to support these workers and help them avoid feelings of isolation and loneliness.
Moving toward global hybrid working models
Once considered culturally disruptive in healthcare, the idea of a remote workforce is quickly becoming a part of modern work environments in many hospitals and health systems, and could potentially solve a host of issues in terms of engagement and retention. The transformation toward global hybrid work environments is expected to open access to greater recruitment pools and tackle the ever-pressing talent and skills shortage impacting healthcare workers.
That said, the question is how to provide remote work opportunities with healthcare-specific recruitment challenges. Recruiting for these roles requires an extensive hiring profile for talent acquisition, which are far more unique than other types of customer care. There must be rigorous background and financial screenings, and candidates must be empathetic and well-trained in consumer-facing roles.
Nevertheless, the idea of remote and work-from-home structures in healthcare is a possibility, but this shift requires the right tools and human resource experts.
In addition to recruitment challenges, there’s the need to protect data. As well as having robust cybersecurity measures in place, organizations should work with partners that have technology tools that will better enable their business and access to excellent agent training about security. When millions of employees shifted to a remote setting in 2020, data breaches increased by 273%, which specifically impacted organizations that rushed to move operations off-site before establishing thorough cybersecurity protections.21
45% of remote workers believe they're more productive while working at home,19 and 83% of employers say the shift to remote work has been successful for their companies.20
Next steps to retain healthcare agents
Lean on HR experts
Use human resource experts to find the right talent for your organization. As the healthcare industry continues to face an exodus of employees, it’s critical that healthcare leaders focus on their business and allow experts to help fill gaps in their workforce. Leaning on outsourcing companies can reduce costs and improve the management of time and resources by allowing a third party to take on the complexities of hiring for healthcare customer service roles.
Prioritize training
Support engaged, hands-on training with both interactive learnings, microlearnings and one-on-one guidance to tackle the specific technologies and formalities within the contact center. Additionally, it’s critical that remote workers are trained on cybersecurity threats, as 90-95% of all breaches are due to human error.22
Use tech & automation tools
With CX experts as your guide, incorporate technologies that streamline remote work. Automation and technology tools can support efficient, streamlined work processes — according to an Everest study, agent productivity among organizations increased 41-60% when leveraging digital CXM solutions.23 However, it takes the help of experts to understand how to gradually implement tools that align with a strategic budget and training plan.
19 - Buffer, “State of remote work 2021,” buffer.com. 20 - PWC, “It’s time to reimagine where and how work will get done,” pwc.com. 21 - Atlas VPN, “Number of breached records surged by 273% in 2020 Q1,” atlasvpn.com. 22 - Hutsix, “Preventing human error in information security,” hutsix.io. 23 - Everest Group, “Navigating the digital CXM transformation journey,” everestgrp.com.