First published by Becker's Hospital Review.
Frontline leaders play a key role in shaping and adopting innovations that help the healthcare industry deal with the many challenges it faces, including workforce shortages, a shifting reimbursement landscape, increasing patient acuity, and the acceleration of automation and AI.
During a November webinar sponsored by Laudio, Jill Ragsdale, former Chief People Officer at Sutter Health (Sacramento, Calif.), moderated a discussion with Rosemary Sheehan, EVP and Chief People Officer at Hartford Healthcare (Hartford, Conn.), and Margie Zyble, Chief HR Officer at UC Health (Cincinnati), about the importance of converting strategic initiatives into sustainable programs, enabling leaders to do their best work, elevate culture, and foster healthy, stable workforces.
Three key takeaways were:
- Frontline leadership is where people strategy meets execution, but needs more thoughtful technology and enhanced support from HR. In recent years, innovation underpinned by technology has grown increasingly complex and hasn’t always been built with frontline leaders in mind. For this reason, ambitious strategic plans that count on technology and AI to help leaders improve clinical, operational, and employee-related metrics often face challenges at the execution stage.Many frontline leaders even feel that those technologies that are supposed to help them execute strategic plans — often increase their workload rather than alleviate it.
In the face of leaders’ many competing priorities and the complexity that arises from them, HR’s role is to “unfreeze the organization when it gets stuck, reduce complexity, provide clarity, and build simple workflows that help leaders execute the basics,” Ms. Ragsdale said.
- Health systems can differentiate themselves through a strong employee value proposition and consistent leadership culture. Ms. Zyble outlined UC Health’s key workforce priorities including operational excellence, employee retention, and developing people leaders. She noted that these priorities are propelled by efforts to establish consistent, transparent processes through technology and data-driven insights, amplifying the employee voice while improving support and training for leaders.
These priorities reflect UC Health’s view that in competitive markets, where compensation offers aren’t always significantly differentiated, organizations can set themselves apart through their employee value proposition and culture, which leader actions and relationships have a significant influence on. “This is the lever that can help [the most] with retention, engagement, and in some cases operational excellence, as we ask our people leaders to demonstrate consistency in their behaviors,” Ms. Zyble said.
Ms. Zyble cited research showing that employees who report to effective leaders contribute more to their organizations. To enable frontline leader effectiveness, however, UC Health recognizes that using technology to help drive leader best practice standardization and self-service is vital. “We want our leaders to be in a position where they can help themselves and we also don’t want them to feel like we’ve piled on work so that they are floundering with additional responsibilities,” Ms. Zyble said.
UC Health implemented Laudio to streamline leaders’ workflows and help prioritize high-impact actions within their teams. “We are very focused on enablement first and accountability second, because first we have to put people in a position where they can be successful and then they can lead others and we can have accountability standards,” Ms. Zyble said.
- Top health systems are focusing on driving leadership culture (and metrics) with technology. Hartford Healthcare has developed and implemented a four-pillar framework for embedding a positive leadership culture throughout the organization.The pillars are culture (developing leaders to know how to empower their teams), career (providing clear information about career paths and coaching support), well-being (minimizing obstacles in the workplace and fostering psychological safety), and total rewards (offering competitive pay, comprehensive benefits, and financial assistance for educational endeavors).
“The key message of our four-pillar framework is, ‘We care for you so that you can care for others,'” Ms. Sheehan explained. However, she acknowledged that nursing and other frontline leaders’ jobs are not getting easier, as their spans of control and responsibility tend to continually expand. “Technology is going to be the only thing that makes it easier.”
As a result of Hartford Healthcare’s efforts to support its leaders, the seven-hospital system achieved what Ms. Sheehan called an “outsized impact on our employee engagement scores and the discretionary effort they put forward.” Further, in the 10 months since its leader-focused strategy has been in place, the organization has reduced turnover by 7%, while 48% of new hires have come from employee referrals.
For healthcare organizations to overcome the many challenges they face, they need strong, empowered frontline leaders. As leading health systems like UC Health and Hartford Healthcare are showing, turning HR vision into frontline leader action requires a thoughtful, collaborative approach to leader enablement – one that accounts for the pressure today’s leaders face, drives system-wide consistency, and leverages technology in intentional, high-impact ways.
To learn more about turning HR vision into frontline leader action, visit Laudio.