Chief People Officer Stef Bloom explains how treating the employee experience as a core business strategy drives recruitment and curbs turnover.

By Gillian Manning

Turnover has long been treated as the cost of doing business in healthcare. Long shifts, emotional labor, and clinics scattered across dozens of locations make it easy for staff fatigue to go unnoticed until it shows up as an exit interview. According to the 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention Report, national hospital turnover sits at 18.5%, with voluntary resignations accounting for nearly 95% of all departures.

For Stef Bloom, the inaugural chief people officer at Spear Physical & Occupational Therapy, addressing retention challenges in healthcare requires shifting employee experience from a passive HR initiative into a core business strategy. Spear—which operates across more than 80 locations—is scaling its footprint in a tight labor market where competitors frequently attempt to win talent through sign-on bonuses.

Bringing expertise from scaling consumer brands such as Warby Parker and Casper, Bloom quickly recognized the critical distinction when transitioning into healthcare operations.

“In healthcare, there is no product,” she says. “They are the brand. They are the service that our patients are experiencing, and so making sure that we are finding and retaining top talent is just critically important for our patients and for our business.”

Her strategy at Spear targets three areas: empathetic culture, dedicated leadership training for clinicians, and tailored support for site managers out in the field.

Turning Clinical Experts Into People Leaders 

A primary challenge in outpatient healthcare stems from how leaders are prepared for their roles. Physical therapists complete rigorous clinical doctorates, but their formal schooling rarely covers staff management. When clinic directors are promoted without managerial training, staff morale and clinic performance can suffer.

“Physical therapists have doctorates. These are highly qualified, passionate people who chose a career that is challenging,” Bloom says. “But in PT school, it’s highly clinical. You’re not often learning how to be a good people manager…That’s why we spend so much time on manager training and manager effectiveness, because it’s not something that they’ll learn in their formal clinical training.”

Spear’s answer is a leadership pipeline built into the employee experience and that evolves with individual employees. Some of their programs include the following.

1. Spear’s Future Leaders Program (SFLP): a year-long track for rising clinical leaders covering manager effectiveness, business acumen, and coaching.

2. Cohort-based learning: participants travel to headquarters, role-play tough management scenarios, and complete capstone projects together.

3. Peer-to-peer guidance: middle managers lean on each other for feedback and validation, easing the isolation that comes with running a clinic solo. “Guidance from horizontal is usually really effective,” Bloom notes, “and I think that helps mitigate the loneliness of the middle.”

4. Mentorship at every level: new hires get a dedicated mentor in year one, and experienced staff get an advanced leadership track.

When site managers are taught to lead well and given affirmation along the way, they’re better equipped to catch the early signs of “silent burnout” before it costs the organization talent, or better yet, before it happens at all. Over the past five years, the average hospital turned over 106% of its workforce, according to NSI’s report—underscoring why structured management training serves as an essential buffer against turnover across the sector.

Scaling Culture Through Empathy 

Holding a culture together across more than 80 locations takes more than a mission statement on the wall. It takes leaders who show up—literally.

At Spear, that’s built into the org chart. Executives and regional directors aren’t removed from the clinical floor; they still treat patients, side by side with the people they manage.

“Our CEO, all the way down, are folks that treat patients, too,” Bloom says. “Understanding the emotional labor that comes with care, the hardships of the role…really helps us identify what is a risk of burnout.”

Burnout rarely traces back to one bad week, Bloom explains. It’s usually cumulative, worn down by friction that people higher up don’t see. Because Spear’s leadership is still in the clinic, they’re positioned to catch that friction before it hardens into attrition, and to route in operational support before fatigue becomes a two-weeks notice.

Spear then pairs that boots-on-the-ground experience with talent intelligence. Bloom spent much of her onboarding walking clinic floors, watching for friction points firsthand. That qualitative read gets layered against bi-annual engagement surveys, turnover rates, and offer conversion metrics—giving HR a clear map of exactly where to address the issues that quietly wear staff down.

Employee Experience as a Recruitment Strategy 

Outpatient and acute care providers are all fishing in the same shrinking pool of skilled clinicians, and in that market, a bigger bonus check isn’t enough to keep someone long-term.

So, Spear treats recruitment less like a hiring cycle and more like an ongoing relationship. Hundreds of clinical students pass through Spear’s network on internships and rotations each year, which means many future hires get a firsthand look at the culture long before they’re weighing job offers.

And the pitch isn’t one-size-fits-all. Spear tailors its messaging by audience: New graduates hear a different pitch than a seasoned clinician relocating across the country.

“There’s no longer ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to recruitment,” Bloom says. ” We have to really triangulate lots of different methodologies to make sure we’re finding great clinicians and that we are their employer of choice.”

Connecting culture to the bottom line comes down to tracking the right operational signals—like offer conversion rates and long-term retention trends. When HR equips frontline managers and strips out day-to-day clinic friction, employee experience stops being an abstract goal and becomes a clear competitive advantage.

“We spend a lot of time making sure we are a relationship-driven culture, and that team members feel they are viewed first as people versus employees,” Bloom says. “It’s how we recruit, and it’s how we retain.”