Healthcare Talent Management Blog

David Szary and I sat down with Miranda Maynard, Employment Supervisor at EMH Healthcare, to discuss our list of the Top 5 Recruiting trends for 2012 and how they'll impact healthcare HR. We recorded our conversation with Miranda for Just in Time Education - a podcast/webcast brought to you by LEAN Human Capital and HealthcareSource. In each podcast or webisode, we'll cover a recruiting topic and give you 5 minutes of education to inspire you and hopefully spark some new ideas. 

I had a great time filming the first "webisode" of Just in Time Education with David Szary, founder of LEAN Human Capital and The Recruiter Academy. We promise better picture clarity and audio next time (thank you for baring with us while we work out the kinks). Despite the technical glitches, David shares 5 great tips for avoiding Recruiter Rut! Let us know what you think by commenting on this blog post and feel free to suggest new topics for us to cover. Up next, an audio blog with Miranda Maynard, Employment Supervisor at EMH, Healthcare where the three of us discuss 5 top HR trends for 2012.

As we enter into the New Year, one of the things many healthcare HR departments will review, or just recently reviewed, are their annual employee satisfaction survey results. I interviewed Adrienne Cozart, VP of Human Resources at UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, to see how her healthcare organization encourages survey participation and organizes the process of surveying their healthcare employees.

After speaking with some of our partners and clients, I came up with the a list of our picks for the top healthcare HR trends in 2012 (look for a podcast coming out soon where we'll get LEAN Human Capital's take on these trends).

“94% of problems can be traced to the process, but only 6% to the person. But often it is the person that is measured, not the process. Start with the assumption that the it is the process that is broken and most times you will be right," said W. Edwards Deming, in reference to his 94/6 rule. To improve employee accountablity at Trinity Health, healthcare leaders decided to review the performance management process. In late 2010, they implemented performance management software. Improving the performance management process helped their organization increase employee accountablity. A few weeks ago, we recorded a webinar on creating a culture of employee accountablity. Our presenters included Lisa Brock, the VP of HR at Overlake Hospital Medical Center and Kathie Pasquarella, the Director of Education & Training at Trinity Health. Here's the section of our webinar where Kathie discusses how Trinity Health uses performance management software to hold employees and managers accountable.

I've been reading through our blog articles from 2011 and reflecting on some of my favorite moments from the past year. Here's a list of the top 3 highlights.

With 2012 fast approaching, I started thinking about resolutions for the new year. We all have our personal resolutions (usually involving fitness and eating healthier) and our work resolutions (achieving goals, being more organized and improving processes). But something I heard David Szary from LEAN Human Capital say at our 2011 user conference really made me think of a resolution a lot of recruiters probably have for this year - tracking their efforts more accurately and consistently. He said, "You can't manage what you don't measure." This holds true for every department within an organization but especially HR. Traditionally, the "post and hope" ideology has been acceptable in many organizations. But with today's HR technology, the movement to measure how your advertisements are truly performing is growing.

Last week, we had an educational Webinar on achieving a culture of employee accountability in healthcare. Our panelists included Lisa Brock, VP of HR at Overlake Hospital Medical Center, and Dr. Frederick Morgeson, Ph.D., Michigan State University. Lisa spoke about the journey Overlake took, starting in 2002, to achieve greater accountability. In 2002, they ranked below average for patient safety and satisfaction and employee engagement. Lisa knew things had to change and that the process of positive change had to start with hiring the right people for Overlake. Naturally, when you think about accountability you think about what you can do for your existing employees to increase the sense of personal responsibility and ensure you're achieving your organizational goals. But at Overlake, the process of achieving accountability now begins before a candidate is even hired.

HealthcareSource recently published an article in ASHHRA's HR Pulse magazine on the current state of healthcare HR. We also reviewed the responses from the ASHHRA and HealthcareSource HR Initiatives Survey conducted last summer. What caught my attention was an article cited in the article - the AHA research paper Using Workforce Practices to Drive Patient Safety. The article suggests that "practices that ensure all employees’ awareness, understanding, and personal stake in the organization’s vision, including its current level of success in pursuing that vision" will obtain a higher rate of patient safety. Employee accountability and patient safety go hand in hand.

Earlier this month, I attended our user conference, Talent Outcomes, in Las Vegas. In addition to meeting our wonderful clients, I got to meet some of the vendors who attended the event, like Universal Background Screening (recently named the #1 background screening vendor in an employee satisfaction survey from HRO Today), AHA Careers, Beyond.com, NAHCR and LEAN Human Capital. David Szary, founder of LEAN Human Capital and the Recruiter Academy, presented at the event and spoke about LEAN's recruitment metrics benchmarking.