Resilience belongs in every healthcare retention strategy
By Megan L. Dieringer, PhD, MBA
Healthcare leaders have spent years responding to burnout. But what if we’ve been intervening too late?
After analyzing more than 400,000 healthcare professional responses collected nationally between 2019 and 2023, research shows resilience isn’t just about helping employees feel better but acts as a measurable organizational predictor of healthcare professionals’ retention rate.
Resilience has rightfully earned recognition as an essential component of employee well-being. The opportunity now is recognizing that it also plays an important role in workforce retention and organizational success.
Beyond burnout, it’s time to elevate resilience
Burnout has become one of healthcare’s most discussed workforce challenges. Yet burnout represents the end of a process, not the beginning.
Long before a clinician or staff member reaches burnout, changes occur in how they experience their work, recover from stress, and how they perceive organizational support. These early psychological shifts influence resilience, which in turn influences turnover intention.
Organizations cannot afford to wait until employees are exhausted. The warning signs often emerge long before an employee decides to leave.
The workplace shapes resilience
One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding resilience is that it is simply an individual characteristic. While individual coping skills certainly matter, research suggests resilience also develops through the interaction between individuals and the environments in which they work.
Healthcare professionals encounter emotionally demanding events every day. Whether those experiences strengthen resilience or slowly erode it greatly depends on organizational conditions, and not just subjective, emotional resilience.
This distinction matters because organizational conditions are not fixed; they are shaped every day through leadership, work design, and culture. Leaders may not control every challenge healthcare professionals face, but they do influence the environment in which those challenges are experienced. Recognizing resilience as both an individual and organizational phenomenon expands how we think about our support for the healthcare workforce. It encourages leaders to look beyond individual coping strategies and consider the workplace experiences continuously shaping resilience.
The largest longitudinal examination of healthcare resilience
Our research examined national workforce survey data from Press Ganey spanning five consecutive years: before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study included:
- Over 400,000 healthcare professionals
- Clinical and non-clinical employees
- Multiple healthcare professions—not only physicians and nurses
- Longitudinal data from 2019 through 2023
- Statistical validation of resilience as a predictor of turnover intention
This broad perspective is important because healthcare organizations function as interconnected systems. Environmental services, patient care technicians, therapists, laboratory professionals, physicians, nurses, finance professionals, information technology teams, and countless others collectively determine the successes (or failures) of organizational outcomes.
Retention cannot be solved by focusing on only one profession or specialty.
The warning signs we can’t ignore
Even during one of the most disruptive periods in modern healthcare, our research showed that the organizational experiences associated with resilience remained remarkably stable. The main factors are:
- Enjoyment of work
- Having enough time to provide the best care or service
- Organizational support for work-life balance
These components remained steadfast even during the COVID era, one of the most disruptive events in modern healthcare history.
Beyond these workplace experiences, leadership and collaboration also emerged as important factors. Employees’ perceptions of their immediate leader and the quality of collaboration across the organization were consistently associated with turnover intention.
This reinforces an important reality: Healthcare retention is not driven solely by one factor.
Resilience is a strategic investment
Healthcare organizations continue to invest in initiatives that strengthen employee well-being, engagement, and retention. Increasingly, resilience is becoming part of that conversation.
Our research suggests that resilience deserves an even more prominent place in organizational strategy. It influences workforce retention, organizational stability, leadership effectiveness, and the continuity of patient care. Organizations that understand and strengthen the workplace conditions associated with resilience are investing in one of their most valuable assets: a workforce capable of adapting, remaining engaged, and choosing to stay.
Financial performance follows the pattern: Lower turnover reduces recruitment and onboarding costs, preserves institutional knowledge, and minimizes disruptions to patient care. But the greatest return may be organizational resilience itself, creating workplaces where healthcare professionals can sustain high performance through both everyday challenges and extraordinary events.
Leadership is the intervention
Leadership is built in the moments that often go unnoticed. Moments like:
- A conversation after a difficult shift
- A manager making time to listen
- Adequate staffing that allows employees to provide the care they know their patients deserve
- A team that collaborates instead of operating in silos
Individually, these moments may seem insignificant. Collectively, they shape how healthcare professionals experience their work, and whether they continue to see a future within the organization.
The future of workforce resilience
The conversation around workforce well-being is evolving. Burnout remains an essential organizational metric, but resilience deserves greater prominence as healthcare leaders seek to strengthen retention, workforce stability, and the continuity of patient care.
Healthcare organizations already collect enormous amounts of workforce data. The opportunity now is to use that data more strategically. Not only to understand when employees are struggling, but also to identify the workplace conditions that help them remain resilient.
When resilience becomes both a wellness priority and an organizational performance metric, healthcare leaders gain another powerful tool for strengthening retention before turnover intention becomes turnover.
This shift has the potential to strengthen not only healthcare organizations, but also the experiences of our healthcare professionals who care for patients every day.
Ready to make resilience part of your retention strategy? Speak to an expert today.