Engaging and retaining employees is a significant challenge for provider organizations dealing with massive churn, especially among entry-level employees.
Supporting those employees through education and career development is a proven way to surmount that challenge.
During Becker's Hospital Review's 13th Annual Meeting, in a workshop sponsored by InStride, Molly Ellenberg Friedland, group vice president at InStride, moderated a discussion about how provider organizations are addressing talent challenges by deploying workforce education. Panelists were:
- Lauren King, senior director of talent strategy and career development, St. Louis-based Ascension
- Nathan Ziegler, PhD, system vice president for diversity, leadership and performance excellence, Chicago-based CommonSpirit
During the wide-ranging discussion, three key takeaways emerged:
- Addressing a lack of employee career growth opportunities is becoming a priority for health systems. Across organizations, human resources departments have long focused on employee recruitment and less on professional development and retention. Today, the widespread labor shortages impacting healthcare are causing health systems to reevaluate that approach and do more to develop and retain their workforce. Especially among roles with nation-wide talent supply shortages, systems have the ability to not only retain their employees through strategic education, but to build their own talent pipelines to fill high-need roles.
- Increasing access to educational and career advancement opportunities is essential to supporting employees' professional trajectories. Employees, especially entry-level ones, require professional development opportunities to build their knowledge and skills. Yet, tuition rates and full-time attendance requirements deter many employees from obtaining the education they need to advance.
"They can't work 40 hours and go to school for 40 hours. We're asking things that are unreasonable," Ms. King said, noting that health systems and hospitals also often fail to provide clarity on expected career progression. "In other industries, there's a clear ladder."
To address those barriers, Ascension has created the Vocare education program, in partnership with InStride, where entry-level associates can enroll in debt-free, online, and asynchronous courses to train to become medical assistants, pharmacy technicians or surgical technicians. That way the organization builds its own pipeline of critical talent while boosting employee engagement. "I've seen our operators' eyes light up," Ms. King said. - For minority employees, increasing access to education must be accompanied by increasing representation. At CommonSpirit, in addition to leveraging education benefits to elevate employees and build a pipeline, there is a push to ensure that associates from underrepresented or underserved groups see people like themselves throughout the ranks of the organization. Dr. Ziegler emphasized that doing so has a positive impact not only on those employees, but also on the patients and communities that CommonSpirit serves.
"Our workforce development is a collaborative effort across multiple functions and departments to bring [diverse] talent up through the organization, so that we have representation at all levels to mirror the demographics of our communities," he said. "Research shows that health outcomes improve when patients have clinicians that look like them."
Educational employee programs such as the ones that Ascension and CommonSpirit have implemented may have been born out of necessity — the necessity to invest in employees in order to motivate them to stay with the organization and to build critical talent pipelines. But they fulfill a broader health equity purpose too in that they also lift up the communities those organizations serve through the health and
economic benefits they create.
"[Equity] is a social justice imperative and education is a key to advancing equity," Dr. Ziegler said.