Providing nothing but high-quality care should be the goal of any nursing home, and one aspect that plays a big role in this is the nursing staff. Nursing home staff are responsible for ensuring that the residents are satisfied and happy in the facility. They need to have a deep understanding of making the patients comfortable and relaxed while teaching them independence and self-care.

It shouldn’t also be ignored that most nursing homes house many older individuals that require a higher level of care due to their chronic conditions. For that reason, nursing staff productivity is of the utmost importance. Listed below are seven strategies to help you improve your staff’s productivity.

Offer development and training

If there’s a way to improve your nursing staff’s skills and productivity, it is to provide essential training and development to them. As a nursing home owner or manager, it’s your job to help your people provide care to the residents. Help them enroll in certified nursing assistant classes in a credible training facility to allow them to specialize and enrich their work experience.

CNA training can also allow your staff to be skilled and knowledgeable enough to work in different settings.  Are you running an assisted living facility or a residential care facility? You can conveniently transfer them there without worries. Other types of training programs that you can consider include pulmonary clinical nursing, critical care, clinical instructor training, pulmonary emergency nursing, and different refresher courses.

Incentivize your nursing staff

You cannot expect your nursing staff to happily and willingly get extra work done with good incentives. It’s important to have incentives set for your staff that also relate to the goal of your nursing home. Remember that money is not the only great motivator out there, especially for passionate healthcare providers.

Talk to your team to come up with the right list of incentives to offer, whether that’s fun team trips, career progression events, or extra vacation leaves. On top of that, you can also give simple treats to your hardworking staff. Remember birthdays and celebrate them, bring in snacks on a Friday, or go on a monthly team dinner. These might not be real, big incentives, but they can boost your staff’s productivity, job satisfaction, and morale.

Conduct regular meetings

One of the best ways for nursing home managers to connect with the team is to host regular meetings. This is a perfect opportunity to engage with your nursing staff and get feedback from one another. Give them feedback about their work performance, and at the same time, listen to their opinions and concerns too. This enables you to determine and resolve issues in the healthcare facility and assure that everyone is still happy and satisfied with their jobs.

Some of the common problems you can tackle in your meetings include access to support care resources, standardization for resident or exam rooms, and other care processing systems. You have the option to hold group meetings or one-on-one talks with staff – or do them both! Stay updated with the situations in the home with regular staff meetings.

Prevent work long hours

It’s an obvious fact that in the healthcare industry, working for long hours is quite normal. But this is one thing you shouldn’t tolerate in your nursing home as much as you can. Your staff can’t possibly provide a higher level of care to the residents if exhausted, stressed, or already burnt out. An overworked staff will find it difficult to maintain great standards of service. Revisit the tasks or work rotations and see where you can adjust.

If the workload is overwhelming, hire extra staff temporarily to help your permanent ones. If you are located in a state wherein there’s a staff crisis, try seeking the help of recruitment agencies to fill gaps in your staffing. At the same time, it also pays that you know how to identify the signs of overworked staff. These may include poor work performance, no work-life balance, high voluntary turnover, drowsiness at work, irritability, and visible signs of health issues such as chronic pain, high blood pressure, and depression.

These strategies are not solely useful for improving the productivity of your nursing home staff. They are also excellent ways to keep your people happy, content, and valued in their jobs. In this way, your nursing home can also retain its staff for longer and not worry about the nursing crisis worldwide.