By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN
I am coming to grips with the reality that I am lucky if a new nurse stays with me for even two years. This is a whole new way of looking at nursing – it is less about joining a team and more about tours of duty on a career path. The goal is to keep gaining skills and advancing your career. I don’t know if we will have any core staff left on units who stay for most of their careers. I have not figured out how to lead or give quality care with this churn on my team. I feel like we are undergoing a big transition in nursing, especially hospital nursing, and things will never be the same.
Like many leaders, this blog reader is struggling with the changes she sees in how younger staff now view their careers. Young nurses come in and make it clear to nurse leaders that their first position is just a stop on the way to something bigger and better.
Some of the turmoil is undoubtedly due to COVID but ideas about work and career are rapidly changing. COVID merely accelerated a trend that was coming with the shifting demographics in the workforce. The term tours of duty to describe the phenomena we are seeing today was coined by Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. Military careers are built on the concept of tours of duty – no one stays in any one role for a long period of time. Moving on is an expectation and part of the employment contract.
Like many others working in the HR space, Hoffman warns leaders to wake up and realize that the employer/employee contract has changed permanently. He points out that “if you think all your people will give you lifetime loyalty, think again: Sooner or later, most employees will pivot into a new opportunity. Recognizing this fact, companies can strike incremental alliances.” A tour of duty also establishes a realistic zone of trust. Lifelong employment and loyalty are not part of today’s world; pretending they are decreases trust by forcing both sides to lie. The employee may not get lifetime employment, but she or he takes a significant step toward lifetime employability with the skills developed during a tour of duty. Consulting firms such as Deloitte now say that most “tours of duty” are like to be less than three years.
Most nurse leaders now tell me that “their well-oiled teams who could do anything” may be gone forever. Nursing leadership in acute care settings will be more like being an NCAA Basketball coach where team members can join the NBA in as little as one year and team roster management is their number one function. Nurse managers will need to stop thinking of teams as static groups of individuals who work together across time and lead with the idea that team composition may change at any time. Teaming will be a new skill. Care delivery may need to be done differently. Fighting this new reality is likely to be futile and nurse retention needs to move from the unit level to the health systems level. The best organizations will want to ensure that valued nurses do their “tours of duty” within their health systems.
© emergingrnleader.com 2021
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