Healthcare has never had more workforce data.
Most health systems can quickly tell you:
- Their turnover rate
- Their vacancy rate
- Their agency labor spend
- Their overtime utilization
- Their time-to-fill
Every month, leaders review dashboards filled with workforce metrics. Yet despite all this data, healthcare continues to struggle with:
- Burnout
- Turnover
- Vacancy rates
- Retention
- Workforce shortages
Which raises an uncomfortable question:
What if we're measuring the consequences more effectively than the conditions that create them?
Outcome Data vs Experience Data
Most workforce metrics fall into one of two categories:
Outcome Data
Data that tells us what has already happened. Examples include:
- Turnover
- Vacancies
- Overtime
- Agency spend
- Time-to-fill
- Exit interviews
These metrics matter but they're largely backward-looking. They tell us the result, but don’t explain the causes.
Experience Data
Data that helps us understand what clinicians are experiencing before workforce outcomes occur. Examples include:
- Satisfaction
- Burnout
- Clinician alignment
- Intent to stay
- Trust in leadership
- Internal mobility interest
- Sense of belonging
These metrics don't tell us what happened, They may help us predict what is likely to happen next.
What the Research Suggests
Researchers have spent decades trying to understand what predicts turnover before someone actually leaves. The findings are surprisingly consistent. Factors such as:
- Job satisfaction
- Employee engagement
- Misalignment
- Organizational commitment
- Manager support
- Burnout
- Intent to stay
often predict turnover long before turnover appears on a dashboard. In other words: The experiences that drive workforce outcomes can often be measured before the outcomes themselves occur.
We Already Collect Engagement Surveys!
At this point, many leaders might be thinking: We already collect experience data and they're right. Most health systems already conduct:
- Employee engagement surveys
- Annual culture surveys
- Residency feedback surveys
- Pulse surveys
- Exit interviews
The challenge isn't collection, the challenge is that surveys can create blind spots.
A 2025 healthcare workforce study by Rhodes and colleagues, titled Who's Not Talking? Nonresponse Bias in Healthcare Employee Surveys, found that employees at higher risk of turnover were less likely to complete workforce surveys. The researchers concluded that organizations relying solely on survey results may be missing the perspectives of the very employees most likely to leave
In other words:
The people leaders most need to hear from may be the least likely to respond.
Why Surveys Often Fall Short
Surveys have become the default tool for understanding workforce experience. But workforce experience doesn't operate on a survey schedule.
By the time survey results are collected, aggregated, analyzed, and reported, the data may already be outdated. Teams change, conditions evolve, and clinicians may have already transferred or resigned. Surveys provide valuable insights, but they are ultimately snapshots captured at a single point in time.
Workforce experience is a moving picture.
The Workforce Data We Ignore
For all the workforce data we collect, there are surprisingly important questions that often go unanswered.
Questions like:
Do clinicians feel they are in the right specialty?
How closely does the role match what they expected?
Would they choose the same position again?
Are they energized or drained by their daily work?
Are they considering an internal transfer?
Do they see a future within the organization?
Are clinicians considering leaving healthcare altogether?
What aspects of the role create the most dissatisfaction?
What would make them stay?
These aren't traditional workforce metrics. But they may be leading indicators of future workforce outcomes.
From Workforce Analytics to Workforce Intelligence
Healthcare organizations have become exceptionally good at reporting workforce events.
The next challenge may be understanding workforce experiences before those events occur.
Not just:
What happened?
But:
What is happening?
And perhaps more importantly:
What is likely to happen next?
Because the most valuable workforce data may not be the data that explains why someone left.
It may be the data that helps us understand why they're thinking about leaving in the first place.