19 Feb Hospital Offers Employees $6300 To Quit

Earlier this week The Atlantic published an article entitled, “Why Amazon Pays Some Of Its Workers To Quit.”

This is a practice that actually started with the online retailer Zappos. There is an HBR article from May 19, 2008, entitled “Why Zappos Pays New Employees To Quit — And You Should Too.” (article here)

The rationale that began with the online retailer was simple: Because if you are willing to take the company up on “the offer,” you, as an employee, don’t have the sense of commitment the company wants from an employee.

Zappos places a great deal of importance on its emotional connection between its employees and their customers. It is this emotional connection that “seals the deal” for many of its customers. Zappos realizes that the culture they built is not for everyone. Zappos wants to know if there is a bad fit between new hires and the company so badly, that they are willing to pay for it….and pay for it sooner rather than later.

Which brings me to the title of this post.

What would happen if hospitals and healthcare organizations began offering their employees a $6500 bonus to quit their jobs tomorrow? (I picked $6500 based on the 2016 Bureau Of Labor Statistics study for healthcare practitioners having a median annual salary of $63,420)

Would we begin to have more smiling faces walking the halls? Would we have more front desk staff that greeted people as they walked into the office lobby? Would we have more people that would make the extra effort to guide a family member from the waiting room back to the exam room, or the physician’s office, or to the bedside of their loved one?

Would we have more clinical staff that would ignore the rings, dings, pings and other things from their personal social media feed to listen to the patient?

Would we have more physicians that felt empowered to ignore the time crunch of the RVU and to take however long they needed to care for the two eyes sitting in front of them at this very minute?

In a single swoop, would healthcare be able to eliminate the “8 and skate” employees and be left with a workforce that is rooted in why we all exist?

To listen, to understand, and to care for a person as a patient.

In a world where there is a premium placed on time and attention, could we find and retain the people that best fit our culture inside of healthcare if we decided to take a similar approach?

Each of us is motivated by something in specific. Some of us it is financial, others it is the public acknowledgment, another group may be the ability to make an independent decision, and others it is being able to build relationships. We all have our personal “why.”

In building my own teams I always hire for the intangibles…those talents that allow my team to humanize healthcare.

If we want to build a healthcare culture that truly places the patient at the center of health and care, perhaps it can be done in as little as $6300 a year?

Healthcare is delivered at the N of 1.

When you are the patient, that is priceless.

As always feel free to email me at cancergeek@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter and Instagram as CancerGeek

~Cancergeek