When 57% of employees leave their jobs—and their companies—because of their managers, you can’t afford not to invest in developing your frontline leaders. The paradox is this: healthcare executives recognize the value of their team members and the high costs of turnover, yet don’t invest in leadership development because they’re not confident in reaping the ROI.
Every healthcare executive I talk to knows they need to invest in leadership development. It’s on strategic plans. It’s in budget discussions. It’s mentioned in board meetings.
But then budget pressures hit, and what’s one of the first things to go? Leadership development.
Here’s the problem: While you’re postponing that investment in your frontline supervisors and managers, you’re hemorrhaging money through the revolving door of employee turnover. The costs of that turnover can be staggering.
The Real Cost of Doing Nothing
Consider this: DDI research indicates that 57% of employees quit because of their bosses. Think about that. More than half of the people walking out your door believe you could have kept them—if only someone had paid attention.
The average cost of turnover for a bedside RN is $61,110, and the average hospital loses between $3.9 million and $5.7 million each year due to nursing turnover alone. Each percentage point change in RN turnover will cost or save the average hospital an additional $289,000 a year.
A single percentage point.
Not all of that turnover is preventable, of course. People relocate. They retire. Life happens. But much of that voluntary turnover could have been prevented by better frontline leadership.
When nurses and other healthcare staff aren’t having regular conversations with their supervisors, when problems go unnoticed until it’s too late, when supervisors aren’t walking the floors and keeping a finger on the pulse of their departments—that’s when people start looking at job postings.
Your frontline supervisors are either preventing turnover or contributing to it. There’s not much middle ground.
Training and development can certainly help. But only if delivered appropriately and with a tangible and measurable goal in mind.
The Gap Between Learning and Doing
Many healthcare organizations invest in leadership training and then wonder why nothing changes.
The problem isn’t the training. It’s the failure to tie that training back to organizational impact.
Dr. Donald Kirkpatrick developed his Four Levels of Training Evaluation model back in the 1950s, and it remains the most widely used framework for evaluating training effectiveness. Yet most organizations still evaluate their leadership development programs at the lowest level: reaction: Did participants like the instructor? Did they enjoy the training? Those are the questions on the typical post-training evaluation form. And while it’s nice to know people enjoyed themselves, enjoyment has nothing to do with whether they’re actually becoming better leaders.
The four levels of the Kirkpatrick Model are:
- Level 1: Reaction—what employees thought about the training.
- Level 2: Learning—employees have gained knowledge.
- Level 3: Behavior—employees apply what they learned back on the job.
- Level 4: Results—the impact of training efforts on organizational outcomes.
Few organizations reap the rewards delivered when training impact reaches Levels 3 and 4 in part because there is no plan in place to coach and encourage people to continue to apply what they learned and measure the results.
Measurement in Action
So how can you apply this type of meaningful measurement to your training efforts? Let’s consider turnover as an example.
- You establish a specific goal for your efforts. Let’s say you want to reduce turnover by 10% over the next year.
- You provide training to frontline supervisors. They learn about the importance of regular 1-on-1 meetings, how to spot early warning signs of disengagement, and how to address concerns before employees start job hunting.
- You meet with your supervisors as a group and individually to help them improve their coaching skills. You are coaching the coaches. In doing so, you are supporting your supervisors while holding them accountable to specific behaviors and monitoring whether they’re doing things like:
- Conducting weekly 1-on-1s with their direct reports?
- Walking and talking to staff to keep a finger on the pulse of their departments and the culture?
- Spotting problems early enough to address them?
- Documenting and addressing employee concerns before they escalate?
- Then, you measure whether those behaviors are impacting your organizational goal. Consider both leading and lagging indicators. While a decrease in turnover is the goal, that is often a lagging indicator. A leading indicator is the number of 1:1s completed. Other leading indicators may be anecdotal, such as staff behaviors that suggest they feel heard and respected.
The point is this: You can’t just send supervisors to leadership training and hope for the best. You need systems to ensure they’re applying what they learned, and you need metrics to determine whether those applications are moving the needle on your organizational goals. That’s what will make the difference in terms of training investments that fail to yield results and training investments that demonstrate a strong ROI.
That’s why we’ve built extra support for organizations enrolling their leaders in our Be the Leader Nobody Wants to Leave, course. We provide tools and talking points to help reinforce the learning, change behaviors and deliver ROI. Let’s talk.
Tags: employee development, healthcare leadership, leadership development, return on investment, ROI, training, training metrics, training ROI
