Fewer Nurses Choosing to Work Fewer Hours

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

“No one wants to work overtime anymore – I did not realize how reliant I was in the past on staff agreeing to work a few extra hours to cover gaps in staffing.” Nurse leaders are coming to grips with a change in the attitude of nurses related to their work. Many nurses today are prioritizing their mental health and wellbeing over making extra money. Several trends that leaders have discussed during retention workshops related to this topic include the following:

Most nurses who had a second job to supplement their income (15.7% of the workforce in 2020) are no longer working in those part-time positions.
Nurses are refusing overtime because they are burned out and exhausted.
Some new graduates are postponing taking their licensing exam choosing instead to work at employers like Starbucks and Nordstroms.
Many young nurses are asking to go part-time because they have stayed on their parent’s health insurance and don’t need the full-time benefits.
Mothers of children needing daycare are either cutting hours or leaving positions because of the inability to find childcare.
Nurses buy health insurance from the healthcare exchanges and move out of full-time roles to work part-time for agencies.
Some nurses tell their leaders that they plan to take the next six months off and hope things will be better in 2022.

These trends leave us where we have fewer nurses in the workforce, and those working are choosing to work less. This all adds up and helps fuel a fast-growing nursing shortage.

This COVID-19 pandemic has a butterfly effect across many aspects of workforce planning. Recent Gallup data clearly shows that an organization focused on their wellbeing will be a crucial recruitment determinant for Generation Z and Millennials. It is time to try something new.

Albert Einstein reminded us that you can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them. Our mindset in nursing for many years has been to design systems and processes using a one-size-fits-all model – whether you were looking at scheduling, expectations around full versus part-time work, or benefits packages. At the beginning of my career, all nurses worked 8 hours. Now the expectation is that all nurses work twelve hours. There is a mindset that if you have a vacancy in core staffing, it should be filled with one FTE versus splitting positions. There is a mindset that every nurse needs health insurance or wants to participate in the system retirement plan. We forget that staff can easily and sometimes more cheaply do both of these on their own. There is a mindset that only RNs should give all medications when Pharmacy Technicians are trained to do this but are rarely used in acute care settings.

When nurse leaders ask me which care delivery systems work best during shortages, my answer is that it depends. If you develop a mindset that you will be highly committed to integrating other staff into your nursing team and willing to be creative about it, team nursing or practice partnerships can work well. If you are ready to rethink your core staffing and retain all those nurses who want more flexible schedules, it will take more work and scheduling support, but you can do it.

If you genuinely want to focus on staff wellbeing, teach your leaders to coach staff to have higher wellbeing and resilience. Develop programs that address wellbeing. Be brutally honest about policies and practices that you have in place that don’t support staff well-being.

We have and will continue to have in the future fewer nurses than we need. Many of these nurses will work fewer hours than some leaders would like. But this is our new reality, and successful leaders will stop saying, “we can’t do this” and instead ask, “what does this make possible.”

Our Most Popular Right Now – Become the Boss No One Wants to Leave Nurse Retention in Turbulent Times

Give your leadership team the gift of a highly rated webinar – Nursing Leadership in 2021: Rebooting after a Life-Quake A Nursing Leadership Reboot Workshop.

Read the Nurse Leader Coach – Available at Amazon and Other Book Sellers.

Recommended Book by the Association of Critical Care Nurses – The Nuts and Bolts of Nursing Leadership: Your Toolkit for Success