According to new research released in MIT Sloan Management Review, the nursing shortage in the U.S. is not only about compensation and workload, but rather is being driven by toxic workplace culture and a disconnect between leadership and the front lines.
By 2025, the U.S. health care system could suffer a shortfall of up to 450,000 nurses, or 20% fewer than the nursing workforce required for patient care.[i]
“Among nurses who quit, toxic culture is more than twice as predictive of their overall satisfaction than compensation or workload,” said coauthor Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of CultureX, a startup that leverages proprietary AI to measure and improve corporate culture.
For the article, “The Real Issues Driving the Nursing Crisis,” Sull and coauthor, Charles Sull, mined the open-ended, free-text comments from 150,000 Glassdoor reviews of current and former nursing employees since the onset of COVID-19. The results revealed the four factors that most shape nurses’ job satisfaction — compensation, workload, toxic culture, and organizational support.
Read More About Hrtech: Tackling the IT Skills Gap with Upskilling and Reskilling Efforts
Additional findings include:
- There is a wide variation in how nurses rated different employers. One might think that all nurses are uniformly miserable across all employers since all health care systems have been impacted by COVID, a shift to older patient populations, and regulations. However, some employers do much better than others in providing a healthy workplace for nurses. When comparing which factors best predict how nurses rated their employer before and after the pandemic, toxic culture experienced the largest gain in relative importance post-COVID-19.
- Nurses who work for staffing agencies are, on average, much more satisfied than other nurses. Compensation is only part of the story. Staffing agencies excel at addressing nurses’ concerns and transparent communication that builds trust. Nurses in full-time staff positions rate hospitals and health care systems higher than staffing agencies on learning and development (including promotion opportunities and reimbursement for training), benefits, and colleagues.
The authors have created the “Nursing Satisfaction Index,” an online interactive tool that compares how 200 large health care employers rank in the eyes of nurses. Users can see which large employers are the most/least toxic, have the highest-rated/lowest-rated top leadership, etc. The index is sortable by nurses’ overall ratings, their assessments of the top leadership, and the four most powerful predictors of nurses’ satisfaction: compensation, workload, organizational support, and toxic culture.
To improve the work lives of nurses, and all health care workers, leaders must collect and act on their feedback. The single most important step is to listen to nurses in the first place: Leaders must better understand what’s happening at the bedside.
Browse The Complete article About Hrtech : A Guide on Building Resilient Organizations using People Analytics
[To share your insights with us, please write to pghosh@itechseries.com ]