Untangle the Complex Issue of Healthcare Compensation Management

April 1, 2021
April 1, 2021

This blog post is the fourth of four excerpting our article, It Pays to Overhaul Compensation: Boost Retention and Operational Efficiency.

To address the issue of better managing healthcare staff compensation, HealthStream began to study compensation’s many pain points from an administrative perspective. We wanted not only to explore issues from the employee’s perspective, but also to handle them in a way that made sense for operations.

The resulting innovation, the HealthStream Compensation Planner (HCP), is a cloud-based solution that reaches across the compensation continuum to leverage multiple positive results. It takes a problem that has been ranked fourth in reasons for healthcare-worker turnover, according to NSI Nursing Solutions Inc., and wrestles all its parts into a strategy for outcomes that improves budget adherence, provides individualized recognition, boosts transparency and compliance, empowers managers, and most importantly, creates happy employees.

Untangle the Complex Issue of Compensation

A major goal for the HCP was to address the many factors that play into compensation plans. Guidelines, market data, business results, salary cap limits, and more are among those elements. Plans also are built around different merit bonus and equity elements, as well as rules and budgets, so no two are alike.

The HCP works in a predictive way, working through these variables so that users can manage many different merit, bonus, and equity plans alongside their specific rules and budgets. It can pull in and integrate data from other sources, including HRIS, payroll, and financial software. This simplifies a complex process significantly by:

  • Reducing the cost and manual effort of planning by more than 40 percent.
  • Decreasing compensation-related turnover cost by 20 percent.
  • Eliminating the chances of errors, omissions, and policy conflicts saving up to 33 percent of budget spend.

Compensation Is Key for Achieving Some Healthcare Outcomes

Compensation is key to achieving three critical business outcomes: engagement, retention, and improved performance. More frequent conversations around compensation, coupled with a compensation strategy that occurs outside the annual-review process, can be a major driver to reduce turnover in RNs and other positions where onboarding and training are very costly. HCP is designed not just to make that process easier, but to integrate it into everyday business operations.

“Our compensation manager takes the pain out of that work,” says Holbert. “With the ability to simplify and streamline data, it allows HR professionals to save time and increase overall accuracy, even in complicated organizations. It systematically guides, controls, and simplifies the development and allocation of merit, bonus, and equity awards to drive employee engagement, performance, and retention. I would have loved to have had this tool in my past life. The time savings, accuracy, and efficiency would have been a huge ROI.”

The full article also advises healthcare leaders to:

  • Begin Thinking About Compensation Strategically
  • Create Frequent Compensation Rewards
  • Use Technology to Untangle a Complex Issue

Download the article here.