Engagement a Key Theme at ASHHRA Convention

If one word encapsulates the focus of last week's American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration annual convention, that word is "engagement."

Employee engagement; physician engagement; patient engagement; leadership engagement: The four-day ASHHRA convention in Phoenix, AZ saw more talk of engagement than the Viva Las Vegas Chapel on Valentine's Day.

"Engagement is critical because it helps you utilize your best resource," says Ann M. Torkelson, Human Resources Director at Mayo Clinic, and an ASHHRA seminar leader. "An engaged workforce is going to produce. You are going to have better patient satisfaction, better outcomes, even with less," she says.

For years, progressive healthcare organizations, like Mayo, have prided themselves on employee engagement and mission "buy-in" as the right thing to do.

Practically speaking, however, the bottom-line case for engagement clearly has been bolstered by two big-dollar issues: First, engaged employees are less likely to quit, and that greatly reduces budget-busting turnover costs associated with recruiting and training new workers.

Secondly, there is an understanding that patient satisfaction scores under the healthcare reform law will soon be linked to reimbursements. Engaged employees care about patient satisfaction, and that empathy will be reflected in higher reimbursements. 

"All those soft pieces of your customers' experiences come from that engagement. If your staff is willing to go above and beyond, whether it is an internal customer, a patient, a physician, whoever, you are going to get a lot more value," Torkelson says.

ASHHRA 2011 President Bob Walters says healthcare HR executives understand their critical role as financially challenged healthcare organizations grapple with issues such as engagement, recruiting and retention, and the linkage to bottom line issues like patient satisfaction.

"With disengaged leaders, you are going to have disengaged workers. So we have really focused on engagement," Walters says. "We have tried to look at productivity measures on engagement, and even with things like workers' comp, if you have engaged employees you aren't going to have bad workers comp experiences."

Tom Davenport, a talent management and organizational alignment consultant with Towers Watson, says many healthcare organizations have come to understand that engaged and energized staff really can make a difference.

"We have invested in technology. We have invested in facilities, structure, processes, any number of things. All of that can help. But ultimately – and I don't know why it took so long to figure it out – if you have energy and engagement then that stuff is a catalyst to outcomes you want," Davenport says. "And if you don't have energy and engagement all the other assets don't matter."

Davenport, who led an ASHHRA seminar on transforming the healthcare workforce, says senior leadership has often tried to downplay the HR factor.

"In some ways it is easier to conceptualize 'Well, what if I found a cool new way to treat or diagnose things? Then I'd be able to take the humans out of the equation,'" he says. "Humans are the hard-to-predict and hard-to-control part of the equation, whether its patients, executives, physicians, or employees. But we have finally come to the realization that you can't take them out of the equation."

As if things weren't complicated enough, the new thinking on employee engagement in healthcare is occurring in the midst of enormous change. Nobody knows for certain what healthcare will look like in five years. 

"I can't think of an industry that has more vectors of force hitting it simultaneously than healthcare," Davenport says. "You have legislative issues, financial issues, science issues, technical issues, cultural and morality issues. The things that are smashing into healthcare are if not unprecedented then at least unusual.

Healthcare has had to run so fast to catch up because for generations it was a pretty simple deal. It's not so simple anymore."

Walter says his son was writing a college paper recently on strategic HR management. "He said, 'Dad what is the difference between now and the days when it was 'personnel?'' I said 'the difference is now we are a major player at the table and we are there to drive the organization in a lot of things like engagement, sometimes kicking and screaming,'" Walters says. "A lot of people aren't interested in engagement, but once they see the results it makes all the difference in the world."