Talent Recruitment
Broken Clinicians or Broken Culture?
Insights on how smart organizations are adapting their hiring and retention strategies to prioritize culture and engagement.
March 23, 2026
Physician burnout and turnover. It’s the Achilles' heel of the field, once causing just a limp and now a repeated stumble—so much so that executives list retention and workforce wellbeing as top priorities, according to a 2026 Korn Ferry survey of seventy-eight physician executives. Yet some organizations are triumphing, with turnover rates slipping into the single digits. What, exactly, is their secret formula?
It comes down to providing the conditions that clinicians relish. “Physicians enjoy work when they feel like they can show up and practice medicine,” says pediatric surgeon-turned-consultant Li Ern Chen M.D., market leader in the Physicians Solutions practice at Korn Ferry. This is not the norm. Most doctors arrive at work to find a forcefield of friction, whether it’s piles of administrative work, new staff, or a lack of resources and unintegrated technology.
“They’re exasperated. They’re tired. It’s a battle,” says Mitul Modi, senior client partner in the global healthcare practice at Korn Ferry. “I can’t help but imagine that the fun and joy of delivering care has disappeared.” Unlike, other fields, healthcare organizations face constant job competition from unrelated industries, where physicians can take non-clinical positions to combat burnout. “They can go work for tech or AI and never see a patient again, and say goodbye to all the headaches that come with it,” says Modi.
For once, the solution is not money. (Phew!) Tossing compensation at an unhappy workforce does not address the underlying issue; fifty years of organizational psychology research suggests that the presence of thick paychecks doesn’t actually create satisfaction; when presented with new income, clinicians simply adjust to bigger bank balances and continue dreading their jobs, now with the added resentment that comes with golden handcuffs.
What makes people look forward to showing up every day? “Culture is really the answer,” says Kae Robertson, senior client partner in the healthcare practice at Korn Ferry, who spent two decades as a registered nurse. “And it’s the one thing you can control.”
You know good culture when you see it. At base level, it’s about people wanting to be there. And relative to other internal initiatives, it is remarkably inexpensive to craft, because much of culture hinges on policy. For example, physicians like to feel that their voices are heard, and that they are part of decision-making. This focus on executive-physician communication takes a bit of time but is essentially free, and makes an enormous difference throughout the enterprise. “When you get it right, you’re creating an environment where patients feel it, and patient satisfaction improves,” says Robertson.
Compare this to the alternative. When clinicians are eyeing the exits, likely dangers include financial losses, declining quality and presenteeism. “The risk is multipronged, and teams aren’t firing on all cylinders,” says Chen. The fiscal troubles quickly snowball: lower clinician-driven revenues, sky-high rehiring costs, longer patient wait times. Patients begin to post bad reviews; quality ratings drop; lower reimbursement rates follow.
The irony here is that culture — which feels soft, and is difficult to explain to a board—is the most durable and compounding competitive advantage in healthcare. The organizations that know this are quietly building something their competitors cannot buy: a workforce that actually wants to be there. In an industry held together by the efforts of exhausted people, that turns out to be everything.
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