Healthcare organizations around the world are increasingly turning to the Predictive Index® (PI®) to help them meet their key strategic goals of reducing costs, improving patient satisfaction, and improving patient safety. As we’ve been working closely with PI healthcare clients and speaking with prospects and industry colleagues on these matters, a number of key trends have emerged regarding talent management initiatives, including a renewed focus on:
- Improving employee satisfaction and increasing employee engagement
- Enhancing leadership capacity at all levels
- Improving employee retention rates, especially for top-performers in key roles
- Streamlining and simplifying talent management processes
- Creating a service-oriented corporate culture
- Aligning the workforce with the organization’s mission and core values
- Improving employee satisfaction and increasing employee engagement
To address these issues and others, here are three tips we offer to healthcare executives:
• Hire the Right People: Start with a thorough and realistic analysis of what the different roles in your organization truly require. A healthcare practitioner wouldn’t treat a patient before understanding all their symptoms. Similarly, you cannot determine a good hire without rigorously assessing your prospective employees to find out whether the job, team and corporate culture you are offering are likely to meet their needs and tap into their strengths.
• Focus on the Individual: Recent research indicates effective leaders provide their employees with “individualized consideration”, providing each employee with unique guidance. Despite the hectic nature of the healthcare field and the recent trends indicating a shift in focusing on creating “team players” above “individual superstars”, it is important for managers to find time to schedule frequent check-ins with each employee, keep the lines of communication open, give plenty of personal feedback, and make sure that their original positions are still energizing them.
• Work the Data: Mining your organization’s data may reveal that what you thought was driving turnover actually isn’t—and that you can quickly intervene in “high-leverage” areas, often without significant financial expenditures. Examine the characteristics of employees themselves, such as their personality, intelligence, educational background, experience, job performance and promotion history, as well as the conditions that reside outside of the person, such as the job market in a given city or the quality of one’s immediate manager.
The insights gained from data-based personality assessments like PI Worldwide’s Predictive Index can improve retention rates by teaching managers to understand the needs and behaviors of their key employees and developing long term retention strategies. This knowledge is critical to creating a work environment focused on open communication and delivering high levels of patient care. By strategically aligning all members of the organization — administrators, healthcare professionals, technicians and aides into positions that naturally reward those needs, both organizations and patients will benefit.
Case Studies: http://www.piworldwide.com/Client-Voice/American-Health-Network.aspx and http://www.piworldwide.com/Client-Voice/Bloomington-Hospital.aspx
MANAGING SMARTER 