OMNI looks at ways to alleviate staff shortages
Wednesday February 20, 2008 -- Deron Hamel
ORILLIA, Ont. — As part of the first annual OMNIway forum Feb. 12-14, OMNI Health Care unveiled its plan to address future human resource (HR) issues and find solutions to expectations of increased staff shortages throughout the long-term care sector.                 

For many years, the sector has experienced challenges when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff members. Statistics Canada is predicting there will no longer be enough workers to replace retirees within the next five to 10 years.

To help buck this trend, OMNI is focusing on improvement in three areas — retention, recruitment and succession planning — over the coming years.

In an effort to retain staff members, OMNI already provides people with flexible hours and hosts fun events, such as golf tournaments. Offering relocation bonuses for registered staff and managers, as well as enhancing the rewards system are other avenues the company is looking at to help foster retention.

OMNI has already established several practices to bring new staff members into the OMNI family, including offering staff finders’ fees for recruiting new employees, participating in job fairs and providing bursaries and educational opportunities to promote people to enhanced positions.

Ideas brought forth at the conference to promote recruitment include increasing the finders’ fee from $100 to $200, providing homes in each region with three displays to use for their own recruitment initiatives and launching home-specific bursaries for local schools that do placements in OMNI homes.

In terms of succession planning, OMNI is looking at starting a system where positions are filled internally by way of promotion. By engaging staff members and encouraging them to move up within the organization, OMNI’s chief operating officer Candace Chartier believes internal promotion will find a lot of hidden potential.

“Engagement is so important because what it’s doing is tapping into people to look at themselves and realize that they have a lot of potential, and that they can be more and do more,” she says. “If you don’t tap into that potential, you’re never going to know it was there.”

The company is also considering a new managers’ training program, as well as empowering each manager to help devise their own succession plans.

Chartier believes that by using these approaches and promoting OMNI’s culture the company can help alleviate stress on the sector caused by staffing shortages.

“I think if we start charging the hearts and minds of people and linking the heart and mind to health care, that that’s where we’re going to make a huge impact,” she says.