The workforce is constantly evolving and companies across all industries are adapting to ever-changing employee desires. Smart employers are striving to create a positive employee experience. That requires constantly refining how they approach human resources to ensure that they can continue to recruit and retain top talent.

From flexibility and competitive compensation to professional development opportunities and a focus on wellness, workers are seeking out desirable benefits when deciding where they want to work. While every industry has its own challenges, the unique characteristics of the healthcare sector have caused it to lag behind other industries in some respects.

I came into my position as chief human resources officer for Banner Health, one of the largest nonprofit hospital systems in the U.S., without any healthcare background. But we have moved to adopt fundamental principles for growth to ensure that we are serving the needs of current and future employees.  

To help become an ideal “Employer of the Future,” we have implemented a three-pronged strategy:

This strategy is helping us to live our mission: just as Banner has worked hard to optimize all aspects of the healthcare experience for customers and patients, we are equally dedicated to meeting the needs of our diverse, demanding workforce.

For HR professionals working
toward similar goals, these five tips are essential for recruiting and
retaining top talent, regardless of your industry:

Flexibility

Flexibility is key to recruiting and retaining top talent. Employees today want to decide how, when, and where they work. It can be as simple as allowing employees personal options in how they dress, while still aligning with company policy. This may not be a new concept in every field, but it is not yet common in healthcare. Another option is flexible scheduling: allowing people to work less than full time or a modified work schedule. Banner, which is the largest employer in Arizona, offers telecommuting options which have led to more than 2,200 team members working from home.

Customized career paths

It’s increasingly important
to balance what employees want today with what they will want tomorrow. More
and more, employees want to create their own career ladder, instead of feeling confined
to a narrow path. They also want more transparency–knowing where they stand
and receiving more frequent feedback.

Particularly at large organizations, policies need to work for a diverse base of employees with very different jobs and life experiences, ranging from Gen Zers to Baby Boomers and beyond. Workforce diversity is growing across all industries, and we, as HR pros, must customize our approaches and our interactions with employees to make sure their needs are being heard and addressed.

For example, physician burnout is a very serious issue in healthcare nationwide. Physicians have far different wants and needs than other employees, so we created a Physician HR Team to ensure that we listen to them and tailor our approach to better support them. We also created a Physician Development and Experience Team to help us design a new mobile technology, the Clinician Experience Project.

This technology offers short suggestions for physicians on all facets of their work. Whether it’s how to help a patient more efficiently, how to have a courageous conversation with a colleague, or how to improve patient experience scores, this library of over 600 insights and bits of advice, provides a tailored value-add for our talented physician community.

Fresh perspectives

We all develop job descriptions with criteria we would like new hires to meet. However, don’t let these expectations hinder you from making unorthodox strategic hires. Sometimes a person without the expected background will bring a fresh perspective that will shake things up for the better. Banner has made a conscious choice to hire from outside healthcare. We currently have 26 executives from other fields, including banking, retail, hospitality, and customer service, and this shift in hiring is serving us very well.

Creativity and innovation

Fostering creativity
throughout the workforce is critical for employee satisfaction and for ensuring
your organization continues to innovate and evolve. Redesigned workspaces can
help boost creativity and collaboration. Giving team members the opportunity to
share work space and ideas is an inexpensive perk. Other strategies, such as
“Focused Fridays” which consist of no meetings and limited emails allowing
leaders to spend more time with their front-line team members and reimagined meeting
agendas that put rules in place for meetings, including when, who, and how long
they should be, can optimize productivity and balance collaboration with other
demands on employee time.

Technology that helps

Technology has changed workflow, productivity, and information access, but often with added burdens for workers who are already under pressure. We are implementing a new human capital management system to help streamline processes.

Our HR department utilizes 11 different systems, but unfortunately, most don’t talk to each other. An employee might complete their annual goals, but those goals don’t download into their performance evaluation, which in turn doesn’t load into their compensation or their development summary. So, we’re deploying new technology to collapse those 11 pieces into one.

During rounds, nursing staff regularly visit each patient on a unit or meet with physicians or other colleagues to discuss each patient’s progress, setbacks, etc., since the previous rounds.

Banner recently rolled out a rounding app for our nursing leaders that helps them better address the needs and wants of our patients, as well as better engage with their direct reports. The app notifies housekeeping to clean a room once a patient checks out, recognizes team members on the spot for outstanding service, follows up on patients and medication, and sends out other alerts. These features help nursing leaders focus on what’s most important – their patients and team members.

Employees are the heart and
soul of any organization and HR practices must embrace that truth. The more you
work to understand what your employees want and need and what really motivates
them, the more you’ll be able to recruit and retain the very best people.

The post Become an “Employer of the Future” — Five tips for recruiting and retaining top talent appeared first on HR Morning.

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Google’s head of human resources, Eileen Naughton, will step down later this year amid rising tensions between the company’s top executives and rank and file employees.

The executive departure follows many months of highly public people issues at the company, including claims of pregnancy discrimination and an allegation of sexual misconduct by a senior executive at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

After the executive was allowed to leave with a multi-million dollar severance package, 20,000 employees walked off the job to protest that decision and to highlight what they say is a lack of diversity at the company.

Google workers have also sent all-hands emails on issues ranging from sexual harassment and retaliation, to racial and gender-based discrimination, to Pentagon contracts. And a steady stream of those internal messages has leaked out onto social media and gone viral.

Massive HR challenge

HR pros are always trying to balance the needs of the organization with all of the myriad issues employees bring to work each day. It is one of the biggest challenges in any business, whether you have five employees or 500.

At Google, Naughton had to find that balance for more than 100,000 people worldwide.

In the time since the 2018 walkout, Naughton tried to address the growing tensions at the company, putting procedures in place intended to make it easier and safer for employees to report misconduct.

She also worked to improve wages and working conditions for the thousands of temp and contract employees at the company.

But current and former employees say that the changes have not been enough to address systemic problems at Google and continue to call for more action by the company’s leadership.

With the company facing continued and vocal dissatisfaction among its rank and file, Naughton has announced she is giving up her HR role and will move to a different, unspecified job at the search and advertising giant after helping to find her replacement.

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You’d love to have employees working for you who are the type that always want to learn new things and grow, right?

Right.

Engaged
employees spend more of their time working to improve their performance through
training and development.

They are the
type of workers every company wants, and they expect their employers to create
a positive experience for them by matching their ambition with effective
training.

For firms and HR professionals trying to create a positive employee experience, it’s essential that your team of in-house trainers is ready to lead the way.

But who will
train the trainers?

Great managers don’t necessarily make great trainers.

So, if you truly want learning to take place, it’s best to give your manager/trainers the help they need to take training to the next level, so you can create a more positive employee experience.

Here are 10
ways to do that.

1. Provide
the big picture

Make sure you let trainees know right from the start why they’re learning whatever you’re teaching. Giving the big picture reinforces to trainees what needs to be accomplished by the end of the session. Then a trainer should break it down into smaller pieces, all the while referring back to the big picture so people see how it all fits together.

2. Repeat
names

When
training a small group, try to start the session off with a smile and a
personal greeting. Then attempt to use the attendees’ names at least three
times during the training session. It helps them feel like part of the process,
and will motive them to do better and pay attention.

If you tend
to forget people’s names, try associating them with someone famous or someone
you know.

Another
technique for retaining someone’s name is to repeat the person’s name back to
him or her when you first meet or when the person enters the training session,
if you already know them. For example you could say, “Hi, Jeff, it’s nice to
meet you.” Or “Hi, Mark, so glad you could make it.”

3. What’s in it for me?

If you want
adults to retain training material, you must show what’s in it for them.
Reason: Adults best retain information they consider useful. It’s the way we’re
hard-wired. If you fail to show adults how they’re invested in the material,
the cerebellum won’t let the info travel to the cerebrum to be stored. It’s
vital trainers tie the material to their audience.

4. Apply
what was learned

After you
show trainees what’s in it for them, you need to give them an immediate opportunity
to practice what they just learned.

The adage –
use it or lose it – applies very much to adult learners.

Whether it’s
in the form of a training exercise or a game, or letting the trainees demonstrate
something, they will retain it better the sooner they get to use their new skill
or knowledge.

5. Tie it to
experience

Adults are
not a blank slate. Every trainee brings some prior learning to the table, and that’s
especially true of adults.

Adult
learners have a lot of experience and knowledge they bring to a training session.
Whether it’s right or wrong, it will have an impact because it’s in their
brains and influences how they perceive things.

A great way
to get adult learners to retain training material is to tie it to something
they already know. By doing that, the brain doesn’t have to learn something
new. It just applies what it already knows to a new situation, which strengthens
retention and the learning pathways in the brain.

6. Repeat
key concepts

If you want
your audience to remember the key concepts, repeat them. Put them on a slide, a
dry erase board, a handout, etc., and repeat them several times.

Then at the
end of every session, review the key concepts again. Just like children learn
through repetition, so do adults.

7. Be brief

Keep your
instruction/lecturing time brief. Teach in 10- to 20-minute time chunks, then change
to an activity or group discussion. And every time you break from the short lecture
chunks, do a new activity. Even a fun activity becomes repetitive when done in
the same way every time.

8. Be simple

Don’t
overwhelm your audience with everything you know about the topic being covered.
Just give them the absolute-need-to-know information.

One of the
harder things to do as a trainer is break the information down into the
need-to-know information and the nice-to-know-but-not essential information. If
you try to cover too much at one time, your audience won’t retain the
information.

Trainers
need to ask themselves “What do my trainees need to know in order to do their
jobs efficiently and effectively, and keep their jobs?” The answer is what the
actual training session should be built around.

You can supplement the training with the nice-to-know stuff as handouts the trainees can take with them and read on their own time. Another way to think about it: If your training time was cut in half, which concepts would you include, and which would you make a handout?

9. Use honey

It’s not
only children that learn better with encouragement. Adults do, too. That’s why
the best trainers create a positive learning environment and celebrate small
successes, new learned skills and concepts, and deliver feedback in a positive
way.

10. Stay
relaxed

One factor
important to a fun training session is a relaxed, informal environment. If you
can avoid the classroom set-up, then do so. When a trainer stands up front and
everyone faces him or her lined up at desks or in chairs it creates a formal
lecture environment, which is rarely fun.

Get
creative. Set up small tables that you can walk between and interact with your
audience. Or if it’s a small group, having everyone sit around a big table is
better than the classroom set up. You just want trainees to face each other –
not just you – so they can interact easily with each other.

The goal is
to be close enough to engage the audience.

The post Great training is key to creating a positive employee experience appeared first on HR Morning.

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As technology leaders, we have the opportunity and responsibility to ensure that our teams – whether regional or globally based – conduct work with the efficiency and maximize performance, using software and hardware solutions to deliver the best products and services to our clients and customers.

Our mission as technology experts is to review existing systems, analyze new solutions and remove barriers to performance always with an eye on maximizing budget and minimizing disruption.

We are the technology gatekeepers of our businesses, but we also have the responsibility to understand that at the heart of all our technology solutions is the human touch.

We never lose sight of the fact that our most important assets are the people in our ecosystem. Our colleagues, customers and vendor partners are all integral to our success.

In an age where speed is paramount to maximize performance and we have new solutions to integrate on a regular basis, we must keep at the core of whatever we do the understanding that technology enhances our work. But it can never and should never replace our ability to genuinely connect to one another.

Here’s how great technology can foster and help our teams by building human connections and maximizing performance.

Creating a Collaborative Culture

We can always implement technology solutions to power our workforces, remove friction and improve performance, but if a culture is not built on collaboration, then the technology can often serve as a barrier to building bridges within an organization.

At the heart of every company, we want to instill a culture where collaboration is not only useful – it is needed. Whether our colleagues are global, spread across a country or down the hall, we need to share ideas and encourage voices from different perspectives to be heard.

Before implementing a new technology solution, truly take time to understand what your team needs and wants. Consider crowd-sourcing different solutions among teams to garner internal buy-in and ensure that the technology truly fits the need.

Seeing is Understanding

I am excited to work in a company that is dedicated to making people healthier and happier through nutrition and has a global work force reflecting our customer base.

I encourage everyone to put down their phones and whenever possible, walk down the hall to speak with a colleague. While conference calls are great – I encourage our teams to make video conferencing integral to all communication.

With video technology, we not only hear a person’s voice, we can discern so many non-verbal cues. Do the people I am speaking with understand what I am saying? Did I just experience someone’s discomfort with a presentation?

Is someone trying to contribute ideas but keeps getting interrupted? Seeing our colleagues provides so much more insight, a richer conversation and an opportunity to build deeper relationships.

Leading by Example

Having served in a global CIO role for many years, I find it important that executives truly understand what it’s like living in another country and culture, and how culture impacts technology decision and usage.

I have taken teams to China, for example, and given them their cell phones to get around a city, purchase groceries and rent a bike, while communicating via WeChat.

Through these experiences, these leaders begin to truly understand what it is like for colleagues and customers in their country to complete daily tasks. They learn firsthand the technology sophistication and norms of some countries, and the incredible challenges others face.

Nothing can take the place of having key
internal stakeholders experience for themselves what the challenges and
opportunities our global teams face without walking in their shoes.

Recharging People

We spend a lot of time thinking about powering our technology tools. From our servers to our laptops to our devices, energy is key to our efficiency. Just like our digital equipment, people need to take a moment to recharge as well. That means stepping away from your devices and desk, to sit with a colleague and have coffee.

Teams recharge in many ways and taking time out to think, walk, relax – not search and post – provides opportunities to refuel, recharging creative thinking.

As leaders, we have an enormous responsibility to enhance our existing technology tools with innovative solutions. Every day there seems to be an amazing new opportunity to introduce our organizations to technologies that enhance performance and streamline job functions.

While our role is focused on continuously evolving our companies, we also need to be careful not to follow every “shiny object” at the risk of losing the human touch of connecting to people.

So, put down your phones and tablets. Go across the hall and chat with a colleague, make all your calls (when possible video ones) and take time to recharge not only your devices – but yourself as well.

High-though high tech—with the
importance of the human touch– is limitless.

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