Article
The end of a default
In comments reported by Becker’s on May 28, Jeremy Stephens, chief human resources officer at Tidelands Health in South Carolina, argued that the traditional full-time position is no longer the right starting point. Many new entrants want reduced schedules, such as 0.7 FTE or three and a half days a week, while longtime staff often expect a standard five-day pattern. A workforce that flexes with patient volume needs policies that welcome both.
Tidelands faces several pressures at once: a new partnership with MUSC, a planned hospital and a market that spans a rural southern corridor and a fast-growing northern one. Its response goes beyond scheduling. With five generations in the workforce, benefit tiers and FTE thresholds that shut out part-time workers are being rethought. The system is also moving from reactive hiring to modeling turnover, retirements and promotion pipelines years ahead.
Growth as a retention tool
Sutter Health offers a related example. Its enterprise learning program, which serves more than 60,000 employees, grew participation 120% year over year, and total learning experiences rose 216%. Pathways are organized by role, career stage and capability, development plans are built into leaders’ performance expectations, and program graduates return to teach later cohorts.
Both approaches treat retention as a design problem. Flexible schedules widen the pool of people willing to work, and visible growth paths give them reasons to stay.
Steps for leaders
- Audit eligibility rules: Find benefit and pay policies that cut off at a fixed FTE level, and estimate what it would cost to soften them.
- Offer more schedule types: Build shift options for part-time and returning workers, and track fill rates and turnover by option.
- Forecast, don’t react: Project retirements and turnover by unit three to five years out so recruiting starts before vacancies open.
- Tie development to managers: Make development plans part of leader evaluations, not an optional HR program.
- Decide and move: Gather frontline input, then act. Stephens suggests a plan that is about 90% right is usually enough to start.
Archive entry for May 28, 2026, added Nov. 11, 2026.