PROVIDENCE – As Rhode Island’s largest private employer, Lifespan Corp. hires about 100 new employees each month.
While that’s an improvement on earlier COVID-19-induced hiring difficulties – last year, the health system hired around 500 nurses and lost 600 – it’s still not enough to meet the organization’s staffing needs, said Bill Schmiedeknecht, interim senior vice president of human resources and chief human resources officer at Lifespan.
“We’re holding our own,” Schmiedeknecht said. “So we’re losing about as many as we’re hiring.”
This employee shortage emerged as a common dilemma for employers in recent years, and it holds particularly true in two of the state’s most significant economic sectors, health care and manufacturing.
On Thursday morning at the Providence Mariott Downtown, industry leaders gathered at Providence Business News’ 2023 Workforce Development Summit to discuss hiring and other challenges impacting today’s workplaces, how employers can overcome these obstacles and what to expect as many brace for a potential recession.
Throughout the two-hour discussion, panelists came back to a common theme: attracting and retaining employees.
“Human capital is your single greatest investment,” said Nina Pande, executive director of Skills for Rhode Island’s Future, a nonprofit providing employment and professional advancement assistance to unemployed and underemployed Ocean State residents.
For the West Greenwich plant of Amgen Inc., a California-based biopharmaceutical company, connecting with and retaining employees has meant an increased emphasis on treating employees as individuals and making an effort to accommodate personal needs.
This shift helped the company start to reverse high turnover rates, said Julie Matthew, manufacturing director at Amgen, and increase morale among employees.
“When your people see and feel heard … people feel a sense of purpose,” Matthew said.
In improving workplace values, employers must also think critically about their efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, Pande said.
That means not just basing success on overall organizational statistics, she added, but on how those numbers are distributed across the company’s levels. While a workplace may seem diverse when looking at broad figures, Pande said, companies need to make an effort to ensure that this representation extends to the C-suite, as well as hiring managers.
While some of the panelists’ advice was related to workforce shifts prompted by COVID-19, Matthew Weldon, director of the R.I. Department of Labor and Training, said that if employers think that the workplace will eventually revert to pre-pandemic norms, he advises them to think again.
“It’s not going to happen in most industries,” Weldon said. “I don’t think where it’s at today is where it will be next year, and I don’t know that it’s going to go further in terms of employees’ feeling they need all these things, but it’s certainly not going to go all the way back.”
Those current employee values, such as flexible workplace and remote or hybrid arrangements, remain necessary for many employers who want to remain competitive, panelists said. But when offering these opportunities, employers also need to make an extra effort to keep employees connected to the company.
These efforts can be as straightforward as catered social events for employees, Pande said, with emphasis on the social aspect.
“You’ve got to get that sense of belonging,” she said. “You can’t just sit in your office and build culture behind a Zoom wall.”
Building morale also involves trusting that employees can work effectively when they’re not in the office full time, Matthew said.
“We find the time for connection if we build that flexibility and trust people to deliver what they need to for their roles,” she added.
Remote and hybrid work also bring about new hiring challenges and opportunities for employers, panelists noted.
While remote hiring gives Lifespan access to a larger hiring pool, it’s a two-way street: Rhode Island residents now have more opportunities to take a new, remote job without uprooting geographically, Schmiedeknecht said – sometimes, with significant salary boosts if their new company is based in a large metropolitan area such as Boston or New York City.
Employers also need to be mindful of the multigenerational nature and differing values of today’s applicant pool, panelists said, including those in the rapidly emerging Gen Z workforce.
Gen Z workers, in particular, place strong value on flexibility and work-life balance, said Doug Sherman, senior vice president and provost at the New England Institute of Technology, in addition to benefits that can help them offset high levels of student debt.
“Of course, they look for competitive salaries, but one of the things we see employers offering are sign-on bonuses, and also loan forgiveness plans,” Sherman said.
Jacquelyn Voghel is a PBN staff writer. You may reach her at Voghel@PBN.com.
