Originally published by Becker’s Healthcare, this article is reposted here with full credit to the original source.
Executive collaboration as key to workforce engagement:
How nursing and HR at two health systems partnered to support frontline leaders
Being a high-performing health system requires an engaged front-line workforce. But stretched-thin front-line leaders often lack the tools, training and bandwidth to achieve high levels of employee engagement and retention.
During an April Becker’s Hospital Review webinar sponsored by Laudio, four HR and nursing executives discussed how cross-functional executive collaboration can positively impact employee engagement and retention. The session was moderated by CJ Floros, chief operating officer at Laudio — a platform that streamlines work and prioritizes high-impact tasks for front-line healthcare leaders. Panelists were:
- Katie Beach, vice president, people operations, Nebraska Medicine (Omaha)
- Kelly Vaughn, chief nursing officer, Nebraska Medicine
- Sondra Davis, chief HR officer, North Mississippi Health Services (Tupelo)
- Kristen Long, vice president, chief nursing executive, North Mississippi Health Services
Five key insights were:
- Staff recruitment, retention and engagement are no longer just HR metrics; these metrics apply to the entire organization. Because the workforce is so critically important, workforce priorities and initiatives are increasingly shared among the entire C-suite and throughout the organization. For example, retention initiatives, such as 60/90-day new hire check-ins, are shared among HR leaders, chief nursing officers and nurse managers, while team member and patient engagement initiatives are shared between HR and chief experience officers.
- Listening to front-line teams is essential to identify those workforce priorities that truly matter. At Nebraska Medicine, HR and nursing executives incorporated active listening to create a work environment that ensures front-line clinicians can thrive and have meaningful relationships with one another, their patients and their leaders. “Identifying priorities based on listening to our front-line leaders and teams, establishing shared goals and creating cross-functional accountability to deliver those results was critical to our success,” Ms. Beach said.
- At Nebraska Medicine, a top priority is patient experience – and nurse leaders play a critical role. Nurse leader rounds is a recognized practice for understanding patient experience and identifying proactive opportunities to improve it. To make the most of nurse leader rounds, Nebraska partnered with Laudio, whose frontline leader platform enables hospitals to document the approaches, patient feedback, and actions taken by front-line teams to improve patient experience. Based on the data entered, the platform yields aggregated insights into performance trends, including high-performance areas and areas for improvement, which helps leaders have more meaningful conversations with team members and executives drive best practices more broadly.
“Those insights are helpful in identifying best practices and the transportability of high-performing practices to other areas where we may need improvement,” Ms. Vaughn said. Emphasizing the importance of performance-related insights and conversations, Ms. Beach added: “Having a really strong performance development and management approach can make or break the success of a team in an organization.”
- Modeling cross-functional executive alignment is key to embedding a culture of collaboration. At North Mississippi Health Services (NMHS), this approach was exemplified by the HR and nursing departments — led by Ms. Davis and Ms. Long, respectively — during the implementation of the Laudio platform. The implementation was a strategic initiative that was contingent on cross-functional teamwork.
“When we are aligned in leadership and model that behavior, we’re driving the same expectation through our own verticals,” Ms. Davis said. She noted the need for leaders below the executive level, including directors and managers, to have similar collaborative relationships for key initiatives to be successful.
- After implementing Laudio, NMHS changed the way it did employee rounds. Leaders heard from front-line nurses that they wanted rounds to be more intentional, so the process was modified from “drive-by” rounds of casual check-ins to more structured unit-by-unit rounding. With support from Laudio, structured rounds included collecting and documenting nurses’ suggestions for improving the patient and employee experience. But the key to turning those ideas into actual improvements was what the organizations did with them.
“It’s really about the follow-up that we do once a quarter in town hall meetings,” Ms. Long said. “‘Here’s the things you told me, here’s what we did about those things and here are the improvements we made.’ We have seen great improvements in employee engagement, recruitment and retention as a result of implementing ideas from our staff [because] they feel valued.”
As a result of those efforts, in the last year alone NMHS reduced turnover for registered nurses by 21% and increased overall retention by 23%. “Metrics aren’t everything, but they are a way to measure whether we are getting results from the work we’re doing as we collaborate across our verticals,” Ms. Davis concluded.