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Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Health Care

They are talking about this topic: General Skills

 

The quotes below are about this issue:
As health care moves toward a more team-oriented approach, employees need to be able to communicate effectively with other professionals, such as doctors, nurses, and social workers. Interpersonal communication and conflict resolution are frequently cited as crucial skills that are often lacking in new hires. Some employers attribute this to the younger generation having less experience with face-to-face communication.

Employer Quote Region
"Employer 1: Most of them don't know how to spell. I'm serious.

Employer 2: It's very true.

Employer 3: It's pretty sad.

Employer 2: But they can text it to you.

Employer 1: You know they spell 'you're' as 'ur.'

Employer 2: They can text it to you.

Employer 3: With their text language.

Employer 1: They are so used to the texting that they forgot how to spell the word 'you're'."
Central
"Dealing with other employees and things like that—that is part of being a nurse—but they don't see that. They see the technical and medical sides of being a nurse, but not the person connected to the leadership part of it." Central
"Sometimes I think they've done so much texting that they've forgotten how to talk." Central
"One thing that I've heard from our folks in HR in children's hospitals and clinics is the need for being able to transfer the interpersonal skills that nurses are taught with patients and families to team members. Because of the growing complexity of care and the interdisciplinary nature of that complexity, they need to have really strong and effective communication skills and teamwork skills. Those skills would be a great advantage." Metro
"What we're seeing is that care is becoming much more complex. We need people who can think critically and act on their feet. We need people who are good not only with family members, but also with physicians and other team members. They need to take that leadership role. We really think that the education level of the RN needs to go up." Metro
"In addition to communication skills, they need conflict resolution skills. They need to understand how to de-escalate a situation and manage conflict." Metro
"I think one thing I've noticed about the ones that I hired is that they—I don't think they've ever heard a word of criticism in their life, you know? But they've got ideas. They want to be involved." Metro
"They also need to understand their role in the health care team. They don't really get the big picture of what their role is. We're starting to get more and more involved in appropriate lab utilization and being part of the care team. And there's this fear that that's really not their goal. But that really is their goal. So we need to work on that." Metro
"I hire supervisors and managers, and my supervisors need to have a bachelor's degree, and my managers need to have a master's degree. And I want to comment on things I see as missing from the programs. Specifically, I work with RNs—and I see a need for basic leadership skills, a need for the ability to speak in front of people and to articulate your ideas, and a need to be able to facilitate change." Metro
"I think it might get worse just because you have these younger people that don't interact as much. They're too busy using their Smartphones and doing all that technology versus eye-to-eye contact and understanding." Northeast
"I'm a laboratorian, so I feel like I need to make a comment about the laboratory. First of all, I think people who went into the laboratory, at least in my day and age, we went in because we didn't feel that we had very good communication skills. We didn't want to work with patients or talk to too many patients. That's why we went into the laboratory. But, that's not true anymore. We have to serve our communities. We have to be able to interrelate effectively with our colleagues. But I see that it's something that a lot of students that come into my program need to work on.

I also expected to hear that the way we trained them before needs to change because the equipment is now so highly instrumented and automated. And those pieces of equipment are—there isn't much we can do to fix them anymore. We need to know when they're not working, and we may need to do a few things to fix them. Or we call service and they send service contractors that will either walk us through it or they will come down and fix it for us.

I was also thinking about how do we organize our work? How do we look at our work? How does that work flow? How can we address people and organize our work better, but yet not make mistakes? And, again, communication skills are important because we're doing more with care and we're doing more things outside the laboratory. So, communication seems like it's going to be a bigger deal for us. "
Northeast
"I think, too, working on the team approach. I hear that a lot from all the different education—from medical students all the way down—working out how they rotate on a team. You have a team for the physicians, social workers, practitioners, RNs, LPNs. I mean, it's a team that's working with that patient, especially on the disease management side.

Question: Can that be a part of the curriculum, or is that something they have to learn when they come to work?

Employer: We're expecting them to know that when they come in the door so that they're ready to work in those team models.

Question: So, more of that as we move into the future?

Employer: Yes."
Northeast
"They need relational skills. We want folks at all levels to know how to deal with one another. And how to deal with conflict in a productive way. How to confront people in a productive way. I'm fearful that in ten or fifteen years it's going to be even worse than it is today because our younger people are communicating this way when they start." Northwest
"And when they start working side-by-side, they don't even have a chance to develop social skills. Because they communicate with their little palm pilot type things. And I think it's going to get even worse. What we need from an educational standpoint is to put in relational type skills—it needs to be a strong component. And customer service skills—not just the customer as patient in our case—but an understanding that we are customers to each other as co-workers." Northwest
"We have some applicants that we would love to be able to hire, but right now they're challenged by English as a second language." Northwest
"Employer 1: I'm just saying we can do a better job. Because a lot of our staff, from time to time, stumbles because they don't know how to deal with a situation, and we have to take time to teach them those skills.

Employer 2: I know exactly what you're saying.

Employer 1: When, in fact, they should have acquired those skills already through multiple sources, yet they have not."
Northwest
"You know, with 77 employees, there are going to be frustrations all the time. But, bottom line, absolutely every family will send me notes or will stop me in the halls or will make phone calls to say, 'Your staff is wonderful.' And it's like, 'Okay, all right.' So, I have to believe that the family is being honest and true. So, am I expecting too much of this staff? Not necessarily." Northwest
"And an emphasis on those people skills, too. And being respectful of each other. I mean, that's just got to be emphasized." Northwest
"I'd say verbal communication skills are important, because the newer grads are good at the written communication because of the tests." Southeast
"Question: Assisted living must have some younger employees that are working with people who are many generations removed from them. How is that communication piece and those soft skills?

Employer: I think there are some challenges there. Sometimes between the clients and the staff, and sometimes between the staff and other staff. One of the challenges with communication in senior services is the volume of people working in smaller teams in one setting—and often in clinical settings in the nursing schools. But when they get into, for instance, an assisted living facility or long-term care facility, one RN might need to oversee lots of work. It isn't just, 'I've got three or four people,' it's 'I've got maybe 30 people that I have to think about, and I have to oversee the care that everyone else does. I'm responsible for that.' So, that person needs to be able to figure all that out and prioritize and be able then to communicate what needs to be done. Prioritizing, communicating, and feeling comfortable with that. There is—especially for young people—understandably, a lot of angst about that. So, communication sometimes becomes, 'How comfortable do I feel not only communicating with people face-to-face, but also being able to prioritize, being able to say the right things, and making sure that right things are being done?' And that is challenging in that work setting for new people. We expect a lot out of our nurses. And, you know, if someone is experienced and you've developed personal confidence in them, it's a little easier. But for new people that are coming onboard—and often times we're hiring new people—it seems that's a challenge for them. And we really have to support them along the way, walk alongside them as they grow those skills."
Southeast
"We don't have any of the nursing nurses on staff at our place, but even with the techs—a lot of them are exercise science majors at [MnSCU college]—they have that clinical background but they struggle with the communication skills. And we work with the public, so every day you work face-to-face with multiple people. You have to have those skills when you interact with staff and patients." Southeast
"Communication is one issue that we have because, especially with the younger generation, there is more emailing, texting, and different things like that. A lot of times there isn't that face-to-face communication." Southeast
"Communication skills. I think that will always probably be on the list as something that's really important. And the team piece of it. That's the model that we have. That's working with physicians or other clinicians—there are nine clinicians on teams and everybody has a piece of how care is delivered. And I think the old way was that the doctor was the head of the pyramid, and we didn't challenge different things. That's not how it is today. So, that's a little bit of a transition. And some of our older staff might have trouble breaking habits because, before I couldn't talk to a doctor that way, but now I can actually challenge them. And we're really trying to build more of that culture where everybody is on the team and each voice is important. But you have to be able to communicate what you want, what you need, or ask questions. Things like that." Southeast
"The issue would be mostly with the verbal communication." Southeast
"I think one more skill deficit that we see both in new workers as well as incumbent workers is the ability to manage conflict in a respectful manner. I don't think in our programs they're doing that. Being able to successfully manage conflict will help in their day-to-day lives. That seems to be a thing that, as management, we're spending a fair amount of time trying to help them manage." Southeast
"It comes down to mutual respect. In talking to my colleagues, who have the pleasure of working with our employees who are having issues, quite often it comes down to respect. Somewhere along the line we need to explain to people that we all come to the table with our own values, and it's not about who's right or wrong, but about respecting that we have different values and beliefs but we can still work together as a team. Team-working exercises are needed to meet the mission at hand and still respect the differences that we have." Southeast