Combatting Staffing Challenges With Text Messaging

Recruitment. Retention. Burnout. Costs. Challenges like these — and others related to building and sustaining an optimal workforce — continue to place significant strain on healthcare organizations. The impact of these challenges is substantial, affecting everything from care quality to revenue, patient volume, and overall organizational viability. As these challenges remain unaddressed, their negative impact grows, making it essential for organizations to leverage available resources to combat them.

And yet, in the face of these escalating concerns, many organizations are underutilizing one of the simplest and most effective tools: text messaging, and more specifically conversational two-way texting.

While often associated with patient communication, texting is a powerful and cost-effective solution for healthcare human resources (HR) leaders and teams as well as other staff members within an organization. When integrated into a broader staffing strategy, text messaging can enhance recruitment and retention efforts while reducing burnout and lowering expenses.

Let’s look at how texting delivers improvements in these four areas.

Bolstering Recruitment

Text messaging can help amplify an organization’s recruitment reach and accelerate the hiring process, all without requiring the allocation of a significant budget or additional internal resources. 

Texts can keep current staff informed about job openings and encourage employee referrals. The messages can include links to the job openings and descriptions, as well as details about potential referral bonuses to further drive engagement and promotion. With two-way text messaging, staff can text back the contact information of recommendations.

Past employees and job applicants may help you fill openings or find new team members. Texting former staff members who left your organization on good terms or past applicants who previously expressed interest can enable you to reconnect with potentially qualified candidates who are already familiar with your organization.

If you host or participate in job fairs or similar events that can aid in recruitment, a text message to current staff — and possibly past staff and job applicants — with details about the events can help drive interest and applications. 

Texting also supports the hiring process itself. Timely messages can guide applicants through the process, providing updates and reminders about interview times, directions to your organization, required documentation, and qualities that make your organization an appealing place to work. This can be an effective way to reduce the likelihood of interview no-shows while improving the candidate experience. Two-way texting enables organizations to engage in conversations with candidates to address questions and concerns that could cause problems in the hiring process.

Strengthening Retention 

While staff turnover is inevitable, minimizing it can significantly benefit healthcare organizations. Each time an employee exits voluntarily, the organization loses valuable institutional knowledge, familiarity, and comfort. Team continuity, and potentially workplace culture, is likely to take a hit, and the potentially time-consuming processes of recruiting and onboarding a replacement must begin.

Text messaging can help build staff loyalty to an organization from the earliest days of their employment. Use texting during the onboarding experience, sending new team members welcome messages, reminders about documentation requirements, links to training resources, key details about benefits and enrollment, and important onboarding dates like their orientation schedule. 

Text announcements about personal and professional milestones such as birthdays, work anniversaries, and certification achievements. Doing so is a simple way to show appreciation for team members. Texts sharing news about organization milestones (e.g., named a “best place to work,” successful accreditation, new facility or department) can also help strengthen the connection team members feel to their employer.

Use texting to promote culture-enhancing activities like staff appreciation events, team lunches, and volunteer days. Two-way text surveys can also ask staff members for suggestions of other team-building activities they would value.

Send texts reminding staff members about important matters like underused benefits (e.g., flexible spending accounts, retirement plans, employee assistance programs) as well as career development opportunities provided by your organization. These messages further demonstrate appreciation for your staff and a desire for team members to be successful at and outside of work.

Frequent and meaningful messages like these can help you remind staff about why your organization is a great place to work and build a culture where people want to stay — and want to tell others about their job experience. 

Easing Burnout 

Burnout can have serious consequences for an organization. It not only impacts an individual’s ability to perform their job — potentially jeopardizing patient care and financial outcomes — but also contributes to higher turnover, negative online reviews, greater difficulty in recruiting new staff, burnout in other team members, and increased costs to attract talent to a high-stress environment.

Texting can help mitigate burnout and its effects. For staff members who spend significant time using more manual communication methods, like making phone calls and sending emails, for patient and team member outreach, access to a text messaging solution can reduce the usage of these methods. This decreases administrative burden while improving productivity and helping team members feel like their time is valued. 

Two-way texting can also be automated and personalized, reducing workload while still maintaining a personal touch. Organizations using two-way text messaging for patient communication drastically decreases the frustration associated with ineffective communication channels (e.g., phone calls going unanswered), which further contributes to burnout. 

HR departments can leverage text messaging to remind and educate staff about wellness resources provided and covered by the organization, like mental health support, employee assistance programs, and gym memberships. Keeping wellness resources in the spotlight can encourage more staff to take advantage of them while normalizing and demonstrating organization appreciation for self-care.

Send uplifting messages to staff, like a “thank you” for extra effort during a stressful period, a motivational quote, or words of encouragement from leadership. Gestures like these can go a long way in reminding team members they are valued and give organizations a way to express gratitude.

Conducting “pulse surveys” — short questionnaires to gain fast feedback — via text message can provide an organization with timely insight into topics like team morale and areas of concern. With this information, HR departments and organization leadership can pursue improvement actions.

Decreasing Costs

The American Hospital Association’s “Costs of Caring” report notes that between 2021 and 2023, hospitals’ labor costs rose by over $42.5 billion and makes up nearly 60% of the average hospital’s expenses. 

Text messaging can contribute to an organization’s efforts to better keep staffing costs in check and potentially contribute to savings. For recruitment efforts, texting can build greater awareness of job openings. It can attract more appropriate candidates. And it can help ensure prospective candidates follow through on their interviews. Faster recruitment — and one that ends with a strong hire — can reduce the staff time and resources that must be allocated to the hiring process.

For retention, text messaging can support an organization’s efforts to build a strong culture and positive work environment. Staff who feel valued by their employer and satisfied with their work and job experience are less likely to seek out alternative employment.

For burnout, texting can enable an organization to combat its various contributors more effectively, helping avoid the potential financial, clinical, and operational risks associated with exhaustion. Text messaging can ease the workload of some team members while raising awareness of ways staff can better take care of their health and wellness. Texting can remind team members that their contributions do not go unnoticed, boosting morale, and it can be used to flag possible issues of concern before they grow in magnitude. 

Texting as an Essential Staffing Solution

If healthcare organizations hope to achieve greater success with their workforce, they should leverage every tactic available. Given this challenging environment, one such solution must be text messaging. 

Texting is simple, and it does not require significant staff time or resources. It’s cost-effective. Messages can be sent to large groups, such as all employees, or targeted to specific sub-groups, like staff working in individual departments. For organizations that are short staffed or looking to grow, two-way texting has been proven to reduce workloads and increase staff satisfaction thanks to its ability to decrease the significant number of phone calls administrative staff make and receive from patients, among other productivity benefits. 

Using two-way texting for patient engagement — especially when an organization is short-staffed — can improve employee satisfaction while leading to better patient engagement and outcomes.

Most importantly, text messaging is a highly efficient solution that integrates seamlessly into any organization’s recruitment, retention, and burnout-reduction efforts. Now is the time to begin or expand your use of texting to strengthen engagement with current and prospective staff.

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