HA255 Unit 9 Retention Seminar Reflection Example

I Came to Seminar Saying the Raise Was Too Small: A Reflection on a Composite Night Charge Nurse Who Resigned After a Market Adjustment, the Fixed Rotation Nobody Asked Her About and What Stay Interviews Would Have Changed

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HA255: Human Resources for Health Care Organizations

Unit 9 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The seminar case, the nurse and every quotation from the exit interview are composite; the reflection shows the form of a seminar response and does not describe a real employee.

The Answer I Brought

The case was simple on paper. A night charge nurse with eleven years on a composite medical unit, rated highly every year, resigned three months after the hospital gave nurses a market adjustment of [four] percent. The unit's engagement scores were in the top quarter of the hospital. Before the seminar I wrote one sentence in my notes: the raise was too small. I expected the discussion to be about whether the hospital should have matched a competitor.

What Changed My Mind

A classmate who manages a dialysis clinic asked whether anyone had read the exit interview closely. In the case packet, the nurse mentioned the rotation four times. She had worked a fixed pattern of three nights including every other weekend for [four] years. "Nobody ever asked if I wanted to change it," she said, and later, "I would have stayed for a different weekend pattern." Pay came up once, and only to say the raise was "fine." I had read the same packet and seen what I expected to see. I had treated the resignation as a pay problem because pay was the problem I knew how to solve.

What the Course Sources Say

Turnover research suggests that people stay not only because they are satisfied but because they are embedded: linked to coworkers, a good fit with the job and their life outside it, and aware of what they would give up by leaving (Mitchell et al., 2001). A fixed weekend rotation for four years pulls directly against the fit with life outside work, the kind of strain that a raise does not touch. A broad review of turnover and retention research also notes that many departures follow a specific event or shock rather than gradual dissatisfaction (Holtom et al., 2008). In the case, the shock was her daughter starting weekend sports, which the packet mentions in passing.

A High Score, One Departure

Engagement scores are averages across a unit, and a high average can hide one person's growing frustration. The nurse could rate her coworkers and her manager highly and still leave over a schedule. Reviews of nurse turnover find that workload, scheduling and the relationship with the manager are among the main reasons nurses leave (Halter et al., 2017), and none of those is fully captured in an annual engagement survey.

Stay Interviews, Applied

The seminar's main idea was the stay interview: a short, scheduled conversation in which a manager asks a valued employee what keeps them, what might make them leave and what the manager could change. If the manager had held one each year, the question "What would make you think about leaving?" would likely have surfaced the weekend pattern long before the resignation. A schedule change for one charge nurse costs far less than recruiting and orienting a replacement with eleven years of experience.

What I Still Question

Stay interviews depend on trust. A nurse who fears being seen as disloyal may not answer honestly, and a manager who asks and then changes nothing may make matters worse. The tool is only as good as the follow-through.

What Goes on the Calendar

If I managed that unit, I would schedule a fifteen-minute stay interview with each charge nurse and each staff member over [five] years of service within the next quarter, ask the same three questions, write down one thing I could change for each person and report back to them within a month. I would also add schedule preferences to every annual review.

How I Would Know It Worked

A stay interview program can be judged by more than turnover. I would track how many interviews were held on schedule, how many changes were promised and how many were made, and whether resignations from staff with over five years of service fell over the following two years. I would also ask in the next engagement survey whether staff feel their manager asks about their schedule, which would show whether the practice reached the people it was meant for.

What I Take From the Seminar

The seminar taught me to read the evidence before choosing the explanation. My answer was money because money is easy to measure and easy to fix with a budget request. The packet pointed somewhere else, to a schedule and a question nobody had asked.

References

Halter, M., Boiko, O., Pelone, F., Beighton, C., Harris, R., Gale, J., Gourlay, S., & Drennan, V. (2017). The determinants and consequences of adult nursing staff turnover: A systematic review of systematic reviews. BMC Health Services Research, 17(1), Article 824. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-017-2707-0

Holtom, B. C., Mitchell, T. R., Lee, T. W., & Eberly, M. B. (2008). Turnover and retention research: A glance at the past, a closer review of the present, and a venture into the future. Academy of Management Annals, 2(1), 231-274. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520802211552

Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M. (2001). Why people stay: Using job embeddedness to predict voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44(6), 1102-1121. https://doi.org/10.2307/3069391