by scott | Sep 21, 2022 | Blog, Client, Healthcare
Cold and Flu season is approaching and it is coming in HOT! While the 2021 flu season was milder than the previous year, partly thanks to the lingering COVID restrictions that kept us masked and sheltering in place. This year, the CDC recommends that, “adults 65 and older receive a high-dose influenza vaccine for better protection.” With masks off and COVID restrictions now lifted, it’s time to prepare your healthcare facility for an influx of patients, sick staff members, and of course, the stubborn viruses that are sure to visit us this fall. This blog will help you prepare for cold and flu season.
CDC Recommendations for 2022 Cold and Flu Season
The CDC published tips for preventing the spread of flu. Many of these will be familiar to you, but this year, in addition to reminding your patients of some of these best practices, you should also remind your staff:
- Encourage everyone, including your employees, to take the seasonal flu shot.
- Host a flu vaccine clinic at local companies. This will promote your facility in addition to protecting your community.
- Review your sick leave policies to ensure that your staff feels comfortable staying home when they need to. Set up a plan for per diem staff to step in to fill gaps as necessary. AG Globe Services can help in this area.
- Sick leave policies should support employees who come down with flu symptoms while on the job. Do not encourage them to “tough it out” to avoid spreading contagion. Create a culture where employees are comfortable confessing that they don’t feel well and back it up with plenty of paid sick time. This will help build an internal culture of wellness that will help your employees feel better about their health—and their jobs.
- Consider using telemedicine to your advantage in these cases. During COVID, quarantined clinicians who were asymptomatic conducted virtual patient visits. This is a great triage tool that keeps patients out of the ER and healthcare waiting rooms. But it also can make use of an exposed or slightly ill healthcare worker who can continue to work but do it safely at home where they’re not spreading germs around your facility.
- Continue to remind patients and staff of sanitary practices to stop the viral spread. Hand washing is the bare minimum, but also no-touch trash cans, hand sanitizer stations, and mask-wearing during peak flu season, are still important.
- Provide additional resources for employees and patients who are at risk for serious flu complications. Pregnant women and people with chronic diseases are particularly vulnerable at this time of the year.
Staying prepared for cold and flu season requires an extra effort. What can you do right now to prepare for staff illnesses that will leave you shorthanded this winter?
Mitigating Healthcare Staffing Shortages During Flu Season
Partnering with AG Globe Services now will help you prepare for flu season later on. We are a full-service healthcare outsourcing provider of top clinical and administrative talent. Healthcare organizations partner with our recruiting teams to help maintain appropriate staffing in their facilities during times of peak volume and labor shortages.
Are you still searching for a credible staffing partner? Contact our team today to get ready for the 2022 viral load. We can help.
by scott | Jul 27, 2022 | Blog, Client
Almost everyone has been struggling with employee retention, especially during the dreaded Great Resignation! We’ve learned that the secret to achieving your healthcare hiring goals in this market is to retain your top employees while adding new ones; it’s basic math that far too few employers fail to pull off.
Many nurses, who serve as the backbone of your entire clinical team have struggled with burnout during COVID. One-third now say they’ll leave their positions by the end of 2022. These numbers should make any hospital administrator shake in their shoes. But the reality is that these numbers can be turned around.
We can, and must, turn things around. In this blog, we’ll discuss how to improve your nurse retention rates and overall employee morale.
How to Retain Your Nursing Workforce
Did you know the average turnover cost of a single bedside RN is $44,400? Now couple that number with the nursing shortage and you come up with the perfect storm for healthcare hiring today.
Every industry facing a retention problem knows how costly it is. But nowhere more than in healthcare nursing, where the most experienced professionals are often the go-to resource for the “why” behind why things are done in a unit. Not only are training and onboarding costs going up when a nurse leaves your facility, you will lose some of the precious historical knowledge that makes you—you.
In the current hiring environment, we’re facing challenges that include the reality that the grass really is greener for experienced nursing staffers. Sign-on bonuses alone make leaving a job a lucrative proposition for a nurse these days. Your job is to find ways to counteract the attractiveness of these offers. How can you do it?
- Offer a more flexible work schedule. Nurses are not immune to noticing that the rest of the world has gone remote. While this may not be possible in most nursing roles, offering flexibility in scheduling may help offset the allure of an alternative schedule somewhere else. What if you shortened work shifts and offered floor nurses a telemedicine rotation? Maybe there’s an administrative rotation that allows them to step away from a unit setting and work from home?
- Bring in travel nurses or per diems to help reduce mandatory overtime. Or, since some nurses want the OT, perhaps sitting down with each nurse.
- Level up your salaries. Here’s a thought. If your healthcare facility pays a hefty hiring bonus to new nurses, what about offering a retention bonus for the nurses that stick around. When you eliminate the attractiveness of earning more money elsewhere, does it lessen the chances that a recruiter will steal your skilled talent away?
- Meet with your nurses and talk about care development. When was the last time you created a career roadmap for your clinical teams? Probably never, right? Work with your employees at every level to create a goal to improve and advance. You will give them a reason to stay on board.
If you’re still struggling to retain your nurses, maybe it’s time to partner with a quality healthcare staffing first like AG Globe Services today! We help healthcare organizations find the talent they need. Contact us to find out more.
by scott | Nov 10, 2021 | Blog, Client
Finding the right VMS (vendor management system) is challenging unless you know the right questions to ask. There are dozens of software vendors out there, and many of them work with recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) firms like AG Globe Services to increase the productivity of your business. We’ve compiled some of the best questions to ask a VMS vendor to help you make a more informed decision about outsourcing your hiring processes.
16 Questions to Ask a VMS
Not every VMS is created equally, & if you’re going to work with a VMS, you want to ensure its high quality and that it will help you meet your goals. Your requirements for the VMS platform are also important to your vendor selection. For example, perhaps you’re considering a managed service provider (MSP) or you are self-servicing your in-house contingent workforce. Whatever your business models, the VMS should support it. Good questions to ask include:
1.) What workforce models can the VMS support?
2.) How do user permissions and roles work?
3.) Are there systems that the VMS can’t integrate with?
You should also check in about the specific features that the software offers. Do their analytics support your goals of increasing efficiency or reducing expenses? Ask your potential vendors:
4.) What kind of reporting features does the tool offer and how do they work?
5.) What kind of workflow customization does the tool offer?
6.) What automation features can help your team work smarter?
A good VMS should also be able to handle sourcing, procurement, and the management of suppliers and/or contingent workers. It should allow for a statement of work (SOW) or request for proposal (RFP) document tracking, as well, which is helpful for working with a staffing agency or MSP. Good questions to ask include:
7.) Does the technology help manage different payment structures detailed within vendor-specific SOWs?
8.) How does the VMS enable the negotiation and evaluation process when looking at multiple vendors?
Of course, today, IT security is always an issue, so screening your vendor in this area is critical. Particularly because the VMS will field data from multiple locations into a central hub connected to your business. Consider asking the VMS vendor:
9.) What are the third-party tools used in the reporting/analytics platform?
10.) What type of cyber security measures are in place to field candidate data?
11.) What is the architecture for intrusion detection and backups?
12.) Do you have a disaster recovery plan in place?
Finally, consider the actual implementation of the platfoWe’vee’ve heard of many unsuccessful technology rollouts, simply because the vendor lacked the contingency planning necessary for a successful deployment. Stakeholder buy-ins are often an area that the vendor misses until you have an office full of unhappy employees! To avoid this, make sure you get the answers to these questions:
13.) What are the crucial elements for a successful VMS deployment?
14.) How do you ensure the VMS integrates successfully with existing software—and human workflows.
15.) What are your plans for continuous learning and support for the VMS software?
16.) How do you ensure every end-user has an optimal experience?
We know the right questions to ask your VMS because AG Globe Services is an offshoring company specializing in recruitment process outsourcing (RPO). Find out how we help our clients handle their contingency labor to benefit their businesses & get in touch with us today!
by scott | Oct 13, 2021 | Blog, Client
If you’re struggling right now to achieve your hiring goals—and who isn’t these days—it might make sense to work with a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) firm like AG Global Services. What are some of the common signs that it’s time to leave this work to the professionals? How can an RPO like AG Globe Services help your business?
Common Signs You Need to Outsource Recruiting
Hiring is always a moving target. If you’re not hitting the bullseye, it’s a good sign that you need help from a professional services firm like AG Globe Services. When your hiring needs increase, how is your recruiting team keeping up? Do they rely strictly on resume submissions? If that’s the case, you may have noticed that the one key performance indicator of your recruiting team is off-kilter. We’re talking about the time between a job requisition and onboarding. How’s your time to hire these days?
Another sign you should consider an RPO is when your diversity goals are not being met. Building bridges with underrepresented groups for your organization is not a fast or easy process. For obvious reasons, diversifying your organization is a key metric internally. But almost every candidate out there today considers your efforts to diversify as a selling point. Diversifying your teams is important for brand building and attracting high-quality talent. An RPO can help you achieve all of these goals.
What about your technology? Today, RPOs use a lot of it, from computer automation and chatbot to texting and the latest applicant tracking systems. If your organization is failing to keep up with the latest tech trends in recruiting, your candidate experience is likely a poor one. That means you’ll have a more difficult time attracting top talent.
If you have a full-time recruiting team, and many organizations do not, are turnovers in these positions a problem? That’s a red flag that something is terribly wrong within your recruiting workflow. Of course, this also could harm your time to hire.
Benefits of an RPO
Many companies split the HR function by adding in their recruiting responsibilities. This means that recruiting will, in fact, always be the afterthought before other HR-type functions. Today’s intensely competitive markets require constant effort to build networks, particularly in those hard-to-fill roles in engineering, healthcare, accounting, and others that require highly specialized skills. That’s problematic for human resource teams who rarely have the kind of time they need to build relationships within highly specialized industry niches. This leaves them only with a reactive approach to filling recruiting needs. That is something that simply will not net you the best talent in most markets today.
That’s exactly where an RPO can help your business. RPO partnerships allow you to outsource network building, sourcing, and hiring to industry experts that have years in the field. Firms like AG Globe Services bring the top tech along with deeply diverse networks we’ve spent years building. Reach out to our team today to learn more about your options.
by scott | Sep 8, 2021 | Blog, Client
MSPs: Your IT team may love them or hate them. But when it comes to outsourcing, there is no better partner to manage your technology infrastructures. (Especially if you don’t even have an IT team to begin with.) This article will help you understand the MSP model, the benefits, and the myths surrounding working with these companies.
What is an MSP?
MSP stands for managed service provider. Tech Target defines MSP as, “a third-party company that remotely manages a customer’s information technology (IT) infrastructure and end-user systems.” Thanks to the internet, and software-as-a-service models, MSP companies have proliferated as a service category. In fact, you can find MSPs in almost every type of IT from data storage to security. There are also MSPs that provide HR solutions, such as managing a contingent workforce, as well as benefits and payroll MSPs—to name a few categories.
There are more than 40,000 MSPs in North America by the latest count, and this service model continues across vertical markets in finance, legal, healthcare, and manufacturing—to name a few. Today you can find an MSP to handle your remote devices or your on-premise printers, your dev ops, or even your multi-cloud environments.
For small companies, MSPs allow the same level of IT support that big companies benefit from—without breaking the budget on hiring a resource in-house. That’s just one of the benefits of working with an MSP. But are there drawbacks? It turns out there are more myths about MSPs than you might imagine. Let’s break them down.
Myth #1: An MSP won’t care about your infrastructure as much as an in-house employee would so the quality of the IT service will degrade.
The opposite is true here. MSPs focus on one subset of IT and they become expert at managing it effectively. These technical experts are more likely to stay up to date on the latest changes to the technology so they can remain top of mind with potential clients. A Cisco study showed that the typical MSP increases the efficiency of their clients by 60%. Does that sound like they don’t care about your business?
Myth #2: Your data will be at risk with a third-party MSP vendor.
One cyber hack could put even the biggest MSP out of business. These companies have a vested interest in keeping your data safe. That’s why these vendors stay current on the latest security measures to ensure that a data breach never occurs on any network they manage. This includes the tricky area of access and device management, which has been so worrisome as many of our workers are now remote.
Myth #3: MSPs are more expensive than hiring talent in-house.
An MSP brings a team of experts to bear on managing your IT infrastructure or a subset of your technology tools. There is plenty of data out there to debunk this myth. One study listed the savings when using an MSP at 15% over hiring someone in-house; other studies list an even higher number. Help Net Security reports, “68% of SMB and mid-market business executives believe working with an MSP helps them stay ahead of their competition.” They also say the number one reason many companies choose to work with these third-party vendors is to cut costs.
AG Globe Services is a leading MSP that can handle your temporary staffing services. Our team can monitor and manage the host of staffing agencies your firm uses, carefully controlling costs and the quality of your contingent workforce. Get in touch with our team to find out learn more about the real benefits of our services.
