Wayne Frangesch has served as senior vice president and chief human resources officer of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based HonorHealth since December 2019, providing him with pre-pandemic and post-pandemic perspectives on the healthcare workforce.
Mr. Frangesch told Becker's he understands that now, more than ever, it is crucial that health systems focus on enhancing leadership development and addressing employee disengagement to attract and retain workers.
He discussed how HonorHealth is focusing on those efforts. He also shared his thoughts on the use of AI to assist in resume creation and his organization's approach to job descriptions.
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What is the biggest challenge for healthcare HR leaders right now?
Wayne Frangesch: The focus on the ability to recruit and retain. We've been fortunate that we came out of the pandemic and were able to stabilize our staffing. In many ways, we're in a decent position in terms of our ability to recruit and retain in this market. We're known for our culture and nursing Magnet reputation in the community, and that's helped us. Then our staff has seen we have continued our focus on well-being. We have a caregiver well-being leadership role and have continued to be focused on each employee's success at and outside of work. That has helped us reduce turnover and retain a high-quality team.
Q: What strategies are you implementing to enhance leadership development within your hospital to prevent ineffective leadership from impacting staff morale and patient care?
WF: I've always been of the belief that healthcare is one of the most difficult industries to be a leader in. And I'm not sure we've always done a good enough job developing leaders who often were really good at a staff level who then got a promotion and we also left it at that. So I do think we've refocused on developing our leaders and even more focus on succession planning, thinking about at all levels leadership and senior leadership that were building our bench up even more than maybe we had done prior.
We're fortunate to have a pretty strong leadership team here. We've seen that in our engagement surveys that our staff rate them pretty highly. But we also understand that when turnover occurs, the leader relationship is often a key element to someone deciding to leave. So I don't think we can ever feel like we've completely satisfied the need to develop leaders, and we have a lot of early-career, brand-new supervisors often running many of the nursing hospital floors and clinics. That's a group that I'm probably most concerned that we keep developing, because they're still earlier in their career and they're still brand new as leaders.
Q: How do you assess and ensure the effectiveness of leadership within your health system? What metrics or feedback mechanisms do you use?
WF: We do an annual employee engagement survey. That gives you a pretty good sense of how staff or feeling about the person they directly report to. There's all the other metrics you can see whether it's patient experience, the physician feedback we get, the quality scores for the areas [physicians] lead. We also do a good job of getting exit data for those who do leave the organization. That also gives you another chance to hear about how leaders are doing. We do a decent job between setting goals in evaluating performance, and then as many of those insights you can get in terms of how someone's doing, we try to get. We continued to do engagement surveys, even during the pandemic, and are able to benchmark how we're doing. But I think the critical thing is getting that direct feedback from who they report to.
Q: How does HonorHealth ensure job descriptions accurately reflect the evolving needs and expectations of roles within the organization?
WF: We weren't unique in that a lot of health systems had a lot of probably overly prescriptive requirements on role descriptions. We learned that our industry is always training, and given the shortages in the labor force over the last handful of years, there were roles that may require multiple years of hospital experience where now we have more of an openness to potentially taking someone who has the desire to learn and training them up in the workplace. So I think how our job descriptions have probably changed has become more more preferences versus requirements. Obviously there are certain credentials that still are required if it's a licensure certification. But in some ways, if someone has a desire to be developed to kind of meet them there and develop them if they have a desire to commit and are committed to us and the community, then we try to support that development. Because the labor market's become so competitive, the idea of retaining and developing someone into not just the first job but multiple jobs and having job descriptions that support that is something we've focused more on in the last two years.
Q: What are your thoughts on the use of AI to assist in resume creation? Is it noticeable when candidates use AI or technology for this purpose, and does HonorHealth encourage this practice?
WF: Many of the application systems force applicants through fields that they have to answer to, so the resume, although it can be important, in many ways just depicts some of the experience. I'm not as close to reviewing resumes as I used to be, so I don't know if it's that noticeable at this point in time. I do think we're still an industry that the resume potential opens the door. But the ability to articulate in an interview your competencies and your skills still is what's driving a lot of hiring.
Q: What advice would you give to other leaders striving to enhance employee engagement and satisfaction in their organizations?
WF: Some organizations look at engagement, and they focus on an annual survey or biannual survey. The survey's an event. It's a moment in time. And it's often the feelings of that moment in time. HonorHealth has focused on engagement being a key leadership accountability that we're talking about every day. That's the key. It's not about an annual survey. It's about every day and you have an engaging culture. We're fortunate to have that. But I also know you can't take that for granted, and you can't just assume engagement is going to continue. You have to keep it front and center and keep working at it. Our leaders know that as important as quality, as important as patient experience, as important as finances, is our people and that engagement. It's held up at that same level on our scorecard of importance, so they know it's that critical to our success. It's a constant focus.