In healthcare, recruiting new colleagues is a daily, challenging goal. HR advisors Adrienne Schevers and Astrid Kröll from the elderly care organization Van Neynsel (with about 1100 employees in the Den Bosch region) know that reality like no one else. But no matter how hard you recruit new people, the real secret lies in retaining the people you already have in-house. To gain a better understanding of this, the organization has been participating in the nationwide outflow research by NetProve since 2023. This research is a collaboration with RegioPlus.
“We try to work hard on the front end to attract people, but we still have shortages. To understand why people are leaving and learn from that, we had to turn the faucet on the back end a little more.”
From handwork to organization
In the past, analyzing employee turnover at Van Neynsel was mostly a matter of a lot of manual work. The HR consultants themselves conducted all the exit interviews with departing colleagues. You can certainly hear and feel a lot in those conversations, but try to extract a clear, organization-wide trend from all those loose stories.
“Technically speaking, it was just very difficult to extract the main points from the conversations. We wanted to get away from that ‘gut feeling’ and looked for a way to use hard data for the organization.”
Let the system do the work
They found that solution by working together with NetProve. The exit process now runs smoothly and automatically in the background. As soon as a colleague leaves the company, a digital questionnaire is automatically sent out, followed by a reminder.
The turnaround was quick. “It was quite quickly put in place very well,” Astrid says. For the HR team, a lot of time-consuming administrative work was immediately eliminated, while they saw that the response from departing employees remained consistently high.
Making time in the rush of the day
But, as the HR advisors emphasize, you’re not alone in collecting data in a beautiful dashboard. The real trick is to actually do something with it on a structural level. Astrid is all too familiar with that pitfall: “In the rush of the day, we’re all busy; not only us as support staff, but also the care workers and the managers.”
That is precisely why this new approach helps them to occasionally brake very deliberately. Twice a year they review the results and go through a fixed cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act) together to see if the course they have set is still working.
What it brings in practice
And the collected data turns out to be valuable. The reports highlighted a clear top three of reasons for leaving. For the HR team, these were not huge shocks; however, now that these signals are factually and reliably substantiated, internal discussions are becoming much easier.
Even more importantly: From Neynsel, the insights are now directly linked to everyday practice in the workplace. Astrid explains:
“For example, we are linking these results directly to our efforts around flexible work schedules, so that we can better respond to the needs of our employees.”
They also saw from the data that the teams needed a different form of leadership. This led to the conscious choice to shift the role of the team coach to that of a team leader, so that employees are better supported.
Finally, the new system gives them the space to look beyond their own walls. They can directly compare their own discharge rates and response times (benchmark) with other healthcare organizations in the Netherlands. This not only provides peace of mind and reassurance, but also shows exactly which buttons the organization needs to press to keep their valuable healthcare professionals on board with joy.