Staffing in Organisations - a Major Issue

Staffing has been one of the major issues that most organizations face in this era. Recently there has been a higher demand in the healthcare industries technology department. This is happening due to many large hospitals, and smaller practices are joining together to become sizeable accountable care organizations to provide better care to there patients while keeping the insurance costs down. Accountable care organizations negotiate pricing with the group of doctors while increasing their payments in return for not performing any unnecessary testing or prescription of generic drugs when possible.

I have been working for a Clinical diagnostic lab for over ten years now in the field of technology and hold two critical positions at the company. I manage the crucial infrastructure for the office while maintaining the helpdesk and field support team since last five years. Our helpdesk manager had resigned which led me to take over the position. Helpdesk manager itself is a full-time position which is not filled to date. There has been a high demand in the market for IT professionals which has made difficult for smaller organizations to retain its employees. The more massive organizations have been providing more substantial compensation to there employees which is not possible for smaller organizations to contribute.

Every day we are always on the verge of losing good talent due to the current employment trend in the industry. There were days when we did not lose the excellent ability for many years. There is a lot of time invested in each person when they are initially hired. They undergo extensive training to help support issues faced in-house and externally at a client site. Recently we have appointed few people along with an extra full-time employee to be used as an active backup in case we lose any talent with very little to no notice.

We have used multiple strategies to avoid such staffing issues in future but haven’t indeed reached a point which has eliminated the issuing company-wide. We continuously have job postings posted on top job search sites like monster, indeed, career builder and use the professional linked in version to find good talent. We are continually interviewing in search of new talent. We have contacted local staffing agencies who specialize in healthcare staffing as another source to obtain skilled employees.

I believe that there is no real solution to solve staffing issues in any industry for an organization of any size due to its current demand. Many positions need to be filled, but nobody can fit in due to the lack of knowledge they have and the monetary compensation they require employers to pay. Employers do not want freshers as they would need more extended periods of training compared to the experienced ones, where experience ones are more demanding and are expensive for smaller organizations to hire and if hired retain them for an extended period as their demands keep increasing over the period. We currently have employees whom we have employed as our backup to fill in the positions when needed. We have provided higher monetary compensations to the current employees to retain them.