EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Hiring new case management staff might work best if managers think outside the box of maximum nursing experience.
- One manager looks more for passion for the work and patient population.
- A potential employee’s life and leisure experiences can play an important role in whether the person would be a good fit for a job.
- Life experience also can be important, particularly if it affects a case manager’s view of helping patients.
Case management for decades has been a profession for very experienced nurses. These highly skilled and experienced workers paid their dues in the healthcare trenches, and now want to do something that uses their well-honed skills in a different way.
But what if a manager looked at the recruitment process a little sideways? What if the priority would be to find people who have good problem-solving skills, who demonstrate creative potential in case management, and who have an obvious passion for the work and the patient population, but whose job experience doesn’t check all the boxes?
This is the approach one manager has taken, and it has proven successful.
“I’ve been in my role for almost three years, and I have had one person leave because I helped coach her to something more suited to her. But other than that one person, I’ve had no turnover in my department, and we have 36 employees,” says Honey Blankenship, MSN, RN, CCM, CPN, manager of case management for the Health Network at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati.
Blankenship has prioritized having a diverse workforce, including hiring men and people from different backgrounds. But mostly, she looks for passion in job applicants.
“When I put out a job posting, there are plenty of people who can do the work, but finding someone who is passionate is difficult — it can’t just be about the qualifications,” Blankenship says.
For example, Blankenship needed a pediatric case manager to work with children on Medicaid. The population included kids living in very low socioeconomic-type environments. “So in interviewing for a social worker position, I interviewed a gentleman and asked what inspired him,” she recalls. “He talked about his volunteer work with inner city youth and his passion for those kids.”
At that very moment, Blankenship knew she would offer him the job.
“He was experienced as a social worker, but had not done any case management,” she says. “But I think there are some things you can teach people, and there are some things inherently ingrained in people — like passion. So I find people who have those things ingrained.”
If she had found someone whose resume was better suited for the position, she might have had a case manager who could do the work, check all the boxes, but not go above and beyond.
“I wanted a person who would come in and really make a difference in people’s lives,” Blankenship says. “I always tell my team that I’d rather they made a difference in one person’s life than say they talked to five people today.”
Another person Blankenship hired was a nurse who had no experience as a case manager. But the nurse spent months at her child’s bedside after the child had a traumatic brain injury (TBI). For the nurse, the experience taught her how important it is to have someone with parents, helping them navigate the healthcare world during their crisis.
Blankenship hired the nurse to be a case manager, a job where she could put her passion to use being that stabilizing, helpful resource to other parents whose children were sick or injured.
Have these two case managers hired for their passion worked out? “Absolutely,” Blankenship says.
Some of the same unconventional approach has served Blankenship well when she works to motivate and retain staff.
“Retention should be a natural and fluid process, facilitated by understanding individual employees and what engages them,” Blankenship says. “You can’t have a blanket strategy for retention.”
Some employees are motivated by competitive salaries or bonuses. Others might desire a flexible schedule or a connection to a motivating vision. Still others simply want bureaucratic barriers removed so they can be more effective in their work.
Blankenship learns what each employee needs to stay passionate and motivated by meeting in person with them. For new employees, these meetings are weekly. For seasoned employees, it might be once a month. She also has an open-door policy, so no one feels as if they have to wait to ask a question or raise a concern.
“I see myself more as a coach than a manager,” she says. “I have these wonderful, passionate people, and I help them figure out what is their strength and how we can utilize them so they’re leveraging their strengths with their work.”
The one-on-one meetings might include questions about what the employee likes to do and how he or she prefers to be coached. Blankenship asks what their goals are and how they like to receive feedback.
“These are tailored toward people’s individual preferences,” Blankenship says. “I ask everyone what is going well and what they are struggling with. Sometimes they say they don’t have anything going on, and we’ll meet anyway and talk for half an hour.”
When a manager asks an employee what’s going well with their work, the manager can see the employee light up as he or she talks about some positive aspects to the job.
“Sometimes, we have more programmatic concerns that employees bring to my attention, and those help me as a manager to shape our program,” she says.
The most important part of the regular meetings is how it can build a relationship and trust with the employee. “The engagement piece is important,” Blankenship says.
She uses her nurse-honed intuition with staff.
“It’s very common for me to go to an employee and say, ‘Let’s go take a walk,’ after one of their peers told me that something was off with this person,” she says. “By having that relationship and engagement, we could walk and work through something.”
The whole idea of the meetings and walks is to catch small issues before they become big ones. Employees will continue to be productive and compassionate and passionate when managers take time to alleviate their concerns and misunderstandings, Blankenship notes.
For many people in today’s workforce, flexibility on the job is a major issue, so Blankenship provides that when needed. For employees who prefer a 10-hour day, four days a week, she helps them make that schedule work. When employees have special circumstances that require flexibility, Blankenship works with them.
For example, she had an employee whose wife had a baby. Both the husband and wife worked for the hospital and had to split their parental leave, and he gave most of his to her. One week after his child’s birth, he was back at the job, trying to handle both work and the late hours of an infant.
“I told him that if his daughter is up all night long and she finally falls asleep at 6 a.m., then he doesn’t need to be at his desk at 8 a.m. He could get that extra hour of sleep and come in at 9 a.m.,” Blankenship says. “It will make him more productive and just give him the reassurance that what’s important to me is not that he’s sitting at his desk at 8 a.m., but that he gets some rest.”
In another example, an employee walked to Blankenship’s desk and said she had “Fridayitis.” Blankenship told her to go home. “If your brain is completely spent, then go home and rejuvenate and come back refreshed on Monday,” she says. “This allows employees to know that the quality of their work is more important than the amount of minutes they sit at their chair.”
Focusing more on productivity than clock-punching works, she says.
“Honestly, my employees always make up their time,” Blankenship says. “I haven’t had anybody who I think is taking advantage of the flexibility, and the more I support them, the better the job they do in supporting patients.”
Hiring new case management staff might work best if managers think outside the box of maximum nursing experience.
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