As hospitals and health systems face increased competition for talented workers, they continue to eye retention strategies beyond wages. This includes Chapel Hill, N.C.-based UNC Health, which partnered with Deloitte on a workforce strategy to embed leader best practices across the organization and increase engagement between leaders and their teams.
The strategy, rolled out in May 2022, is called UNC Health for Me and is designed to support and strengthen teams from "recruitment to retirement," according to UNC's website. At the center of UNC Health for Me are pillars such as Engage Me, Welcome Me, Develop Me, Value Me and Care for Me.
Include Me, which focuses on equity and inclusion, is designed to be woven throughout the pillars, Tanya Content, system vice president of talent at UNC Health, told Becker's. The organization's values are embedded throughout the pillar descriptions.
"What we've done is partnered closely with our internal communications team, and we've embedded [the pillars] into all of our activities and efforts and how [leaders] engage with teammates," Ms. Content said.
She said the 15-hospital health system, which has about 30,000 employees, began with leaders through a program called Retention Starts With Me, which provided development resources and opportunities to practice and participate in UNC Health for Me. The health system then implemented Laudio, a technology platform for healthcare managers, to integrate its pillar strategy with how leaders are engaging with their teams to improve retention efforts. For example, nurse leaders can track professional development goals of workers.
"That has really been the starting point," Ms. Content said. "And then we've continued to embody it."
Now, the health system has one week annually that's focused on each one of the pillars with different activities related to that particular pillar. "We do road shows and go out and have infused it across the different work that is being done [at the organization]. Not just HR work. Even in the hospitals. Programs that they're doing internally, they're utilizing those pillars and platforms to continue that message," Ms. Content said.
To assess success with UNC Health for Me, the organization has interactive human resources dashboards for leaders, including general recruitment dashboards.
Ms. Content said the health system also created a retention dashboard, which features reasons for teammates leaving the organization and data on the types of roles people are leaving.
"We do a lot of analytics with the positions, but we have started to put those visualizations in front of [leaders through the dashboards]," she added.
The goal is to see if the system's leaders are engaging with processes through the UNC Health for Me initiative and how recruitment is being affected by the strategy.
Ms. Content acknowledged, though, that evaluating the success of the strategy will take more time.
"It's going to take us a little bit, but we're down the road and identifying things like how many one-on-ones you have with your leader and how those things have affected retention rates," she said. "We're still piecing those things together. I still feel like we're learning."