Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: I know it sounds cliched, but the trust among the team that lifts this, it's beyond solid. The turf wars that sometimes exist in an organization where there are silos that lack of trust isn't there. Most of my team is in year ten plus and have held a variety of roles across the HR function over the last decade.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Welcome to our what works podcast series. I'm Josh Burson, and you just heard from Levi Loverkamp, chief workforce planning officer at Bansekur Mercy Health, a us based healthcare organization with 60,000 employees. In this episode, Kathy Anderis, our senior vice president of research and global industry analysts, will be talking with Levi and Alan Colonhe, the chief people officer at Bon Secour, about organizational transformation and how they have successfully implemented systemic HR practices.
Let's get started.
[00:00:59] Speaker C: Alan Levi, thanks for joining me on the what Works podcast. As we explore the relationship between systemic HR and career pathways, let me explain a little bit what we mean by systemic HR. So, over the last few decades, we've built our HR organization as service delivery organizations, really focused on low cost, on high efficiency, and with that, we've built all these functional silos. But today, that model doesn't work anymore, because all the problems that we faced, labor shortages or anything else, they're not single domain issues. They're really multi domain, interconnected issues. So we need HR to work together in much different ways. We need better capabilities. We need to use data in a different way. All of that is part of systemic HR. So I'd love to hear how you at Bon secure Mercy help have started your journey on systemic HR and where career pathways fit in.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: You know, Kathy, if you've met our CHRO, nothing is by accident. So, from. From my perspective, I know that as Joe entertained the partnership with Guild and the. The model that we, we are now living into, I know that he had this as part of his design. But I think what has been fun is to see that it wasn't a directive from Joe called out specifically that no longer would our tuition programming only be a benefit. Yeah, you know, he didn't say benefits work with our internal mobility. He kind of laid the groundwork. And with the programming that we've built with Guild, what I've seen over the last three years and experienced over the last three years is kind of an organic, cross functional alignment, like we are so more embedded across. You know, if you start at the baseline with our benefits team, designing the plan, our internal mobility team being the arms and legs, and shepherding the goodness of our tuition programming through our internal workforce, our talent acquisition partners, in leveraging it from an external recruitment as well as internal, our diversity equity inclusion team, in leveraging it to help us achieve our goals around diversity of workforce. Even from a compensation perspective, I think compensation recognizing that from a total comp perspective, the richness of our design is, is now part of their assessment. So, three and a half years in organically, we've kind of come to the point where what you're describing, the systemic approach, I was catching myself yesterday. I was talking to one of our benefits lead that works on the tuition benefit. And I was kind of directing her on something that four or five years ago, there probably wouldn't be that kind of sandbox agnostic. We worked in the verticals, so. And likewise, she is sharing things with part of my team that's responsible for internal mobility. And the silos aren't there like they were.
[00:03:57] Speaker D: I'll probably, like, double down and add a few thoughts on that. One of the things that I'm coming to really realize and understand and appreciate is the notion of culture and teamwork in relation that we've built within our HR function. And a lot of that has to do with Joe Gage as a Chro, being here for 13 years, really being dedicated to our ministry, our organization, and hiring the right people who work really well together. And I think it's, it's pretty cliche, but as an HR function, you know, we gotta have our own culture right before we're helping the organization with theirs. And. And Joe's been very intentional about hiring the right people, exiting the right people, and building, especially with COVID driving us to more of a virtual workforce, a team that is seasoned together in many ways. And so, you know, I used to run the total rewards function. So for me to work with Nicole Martell, our rewards leader, I hired her 1011 years ago. Right? So in some ways, the silos aren't necessarily built differently as much as we work together differently, maybe in some ways. I also think, you know, and Levi's right, like, this wasn't an edict from Joe as much as it was an edict from the collective reporting to Joe that this is the right thing to do. Jeff Button, our talent, culture, and talent leader as well, was involved in this right out of the get go, in part because he was leading internal mobility at the time. And he moved that to me when I came back three years ago. I do want to hit on that point, too. The structure of HR is a little bit different today than it was five years ago, where I'm leading our workforce strategy, with Levi as our workforce planning lead, our talent acquisition team, and our strategic partnership reporting to me and our focus is workforce. We pulled in internal mobility from our talent and culture team because it's scaled talent, right. This is talent at scale. Whereas Jeff Button maintained or retained talent management as the center of expertise, leadership development skills, et cetera, et cetera. As the CoE, we are basically the internal mobility team that reports to Levi is building those talented pipelines at scale. The vision, the strategy, and the execution accountability is defined within my function. Now, our strat partners are focused on retention of talent. Levi and our talent acquisition team are focused on acquiring and driving mobility through our population.
The other thing I'd say, too, the workforce planning CoE that Levi leads was historically kind of distributed out in our markets as a strategic partner, accountability. And so it was very fractured, fragmented, and I'd say, at best, probably a middling capability for our ministry with defining it as a central true coe of our HR function. We now have established best practice and control of it that Levi is now leading, certainly in partnership with the strategic partners that are out in the field. But Levi is the one driving the data discussion, driving the analytics around it, driving the school partnerships, driving the definition of pipelines and career pathways, defining the guild education capability, and those partners. So it's just worked really well. But going back to my original point, in the absence of people who care about each other, that work well together, that Joe's worked so hard over 13 years with us, we probably wouldn't be where we are, quite frankly. Levi, any thoughts beyond that?
[00:07:46] Speaker A: I know it sounds cliche, but the trust among the team that lifts this, it's beyond solid. The turf wars that sometimes exist in a organization where there are silos, that lack of trust isn't there. And to Alan's point, Joe has been very thoughtful about his own mobility. Alan moving into his role, I'm in year 14 with the ministry in HR. Most of my team is in year ten plus, and have held a variety of roles across the HR function over the last decade. Joe's kind of the poster leader of mobility among his own team.
[00:08:22] Speaker E: I think that's such a critical point, and thanks for explaining that, because when I heard Elm that you used to run total rewards office, I'm like, okay, so this is actually happening within HR as well, which we see as one of the most critical factors of driving systemic HR is that people move around within the HR function, because otherwise, you don't really understand the other function. Right? If you have never been in them you can guess, right? But you can. You haven't really been there. And you also, to your point also about that, the current rewards leader, obviously, you already have a relationship with her because you hired her a few years ago. So I want to unpack a little bit of how Joe started that, specifically on what you're doing with guilt. So the way that I understand it was Joel and the team obviously saw shortages in many different groups, including clinical talent. And you have maybe too many people.
[00:09:16] Speaker C: In some other areas vacancy.
[00:09:18] Speaker D: They realized they were starting to click it more and more, and nothing was coming out. So there was a lot of frustration targeted at our recruitment team exclusively, whereas now a lot of what Levi's done is just engaging with our local market leaders, our operators, and our clinical leaders to really get them to understand that it's a much broader picture than just recruiting from the external, that there is a notion of retention, there's a notion of internal mobility and internal development and internal pools of talented that actually could be more cost effective, more attuned to our culture and our mission, and are more diverse. You know, there was a point during COVID when the vacancy actually dipped down because people were starting to freak out. Well, we can't afford more nurses right now, so they. They cut requisitions. It went down. And then as we started to see that the amount of clinicians that we had was starting to actually fall and the need for healthcare was going to reset. Right. And then you had agency coming in, like Joe understood. We got to figure out what to do now, which is why at the end of 2020, he asked me to come back into this role very distinctively to lead workforce strategy. That's kind of the birthing of it. Levi, any other perspective, the bedrock of.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: It was naming the math problem. And to Alan's point before, operators just assumed that you could go hit the buy button and talent would appear.
And concurrent with our partnership pursuit with Guild, we started workforce planning. We started forecasting supply and demand. Guild was an incredible partner in helping us design and narrow in on what our priority roles are. And then we built our pathways around that. Today we have operators using the term talent, supply and demand and gaps.
And so, you know, if we do nothing else, well, that in and of itself is a huge movement from where we were before COVID So there was no thought that we had this gap. The thought was, our talent acquisition team isn't doing enough to hire, and that's simply not the case.
[00:11:37] Speaker E: As you know, it totally makes sense now. Can you describe a little bit more detail. Ellen, you started describing how hrtainous is organized now and how it used to be organized a few years ago.
[00:11:51] Speaker D: Yes. So Joe is our chro. He has, I don't know exactly how many direct reports. I could probably count it out for you, but certainly I'm reporting to him. My focus is on our core operations. Right. Our workforce is delivering on our core acute health delivery capabilities. So I report to him as the chief people officer of the core operations. Talent acquisition, workforce planning, and our strategic partnership is kind of three distinctive centers of expertise within HR. All reside under my leadership. We then have our benefits leader and our comp leader. We don't have a consolidated rewards leadership right now. That's not. I think that would be Joe's desire, ultimately, to have a single rewards leader, but just for the sake of the type of leaders that we have right now, it's working for us. We have a benefits leader and a, um. And a comp leader reporting to Joe. We have our, um, diversity, equity, and inclusion leader, who also leads associate relations. So we do have a central associate relations capability that reports to Joe. We have our talent and culture and learning leader reporting to Joe. And then we have HR services reporting to Joe. So that's our operations team, our technology, our people, analytics and insights team resides under that function as well.
Levi, am I missing anybody else?
[00:13:22] Speaker A: I think you hit. I think you got them all.
[00:13:24] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:13:25] Speaker E: Super helpful. So this is different to what you did years ago, right? So how did it change?
[00:13:32] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, me coming in is the biggest change to lead that usually, and typically, Joe would have had talent acquisition, the strategic partnership, reporting to him. Workforce planning wasn't even a thing. It was distributed in the strategic partners. But now that we have a Cui, Levi is reporting to me in that function, along with the strap partners and the TA team, my prior role was.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: In the precursor to the strategic partner capability. And I can speak from that experience that the separation of those verticals often created friction, and it was prohibitive to alignment across. So it was often the business partners, if you will, jumping on the bandwagon of why can't Ta hire more people? And Ta feeling like the business partners were taking the position of the operators, which oftentimes we were. And so I think by having that singular leader, we're all driving at the same place. And I actually think that model has spilled out into how we work. Alan's, Alan's span of control, I think it spilled into how we work with the other coes, like benefits, like comp. So that was a game changer, from my perspective, both in this role and my previous role.
[00:14:58] Speaker E: Yeah, for sure. Well, this is fascinating. Thanks for walking me through that, Levi, that the guild programming is kind of under your guidance, obviously. Is that right? I mean, I know you collaborate with.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: All of the other areas, but it's.
[00:15:11] Speaker E: Kind of your thing. Is that right?
[00:15:13] Speaker A: I'd say the work of workforce planning has framed up our platform with Guild. So that math problem drove how we designed our partnership with. With Guild. Certainly not me alone, but I'd say more. The work of workforce planning is what has driven our programming and our partnership with Guild.
[00:15:35] Speaker E: Yeah, I think that's really key and fascinating, because in most companies that I've talked with, it's usually the learning team, L and D team that runs this, or the benefits team, which is more.
[00:15:45] Speaker C: The old school like, here's just a.
[00:15:47] Speaker E: Benefit that you can use whatever you want to use it for, and I'm not very directed.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Joe was an early adopter, drove us to use data to inform decisions and use data to inform program design. So rather than using anecdotes to decide what our tuition benefit looks like, we use the data of our workforce projections to drive that design. In fact, as we made some adjustments to it last year, all those adjustments were driven off of the workforce projections that we had worked through.
[00:16:21] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: The death of the anecdote is what he used to say.
[00:16:26] Speaker E: I love that death of the anecdote. It's great.
Wow. Fantastic. I know we only have a few more minutes left, but I think we covered lots of ground. So anything else that we should talk about in this kind of how the changing kind of HR organization or changing way of HR working together support this kind of program.
[00:16:50] Speaker D: Yeah. Cathy, I'd say one thing. It's been a critical, critical element of this, and Levi just mentioned the death of the anecdote being very data driven. One of the elements of our function, that is a. We would call it almost our secret sauce in some ways, is the notion of our people. Insights and analytics team Kroger is headquartered here in Cincinnati. It's the largest supermarket chain in the world, and they have a data analytics subsidiary that focuses on consumer insights. And you can imagine the amount of data that Kroger and Walmart and Amazon are collecting. Massive amounts of data. So how do they test consumer sentiment and drive, basically more foot traffic or purchase? So, four or five years ago, we hired a team of about five individuals from that organization who were consumer insights experts, and they now turn their attention towards associate Insights. So sentiment and insights and so that capability has been huge in terms of, we don't call it associate engagement, we call it associate experience.
We've built out a very custom set of questions built on twelve dimensions of associate perception and sentiment and affinity, if you will. And that data set, which we collect one time on a census wide survey every year, in fact, we're in the midst of it right now, our associate experience survey and then quarterly pulse. And that is a lot of what we do to drive associate value proposition, the development of benefits, design, et cetera, et cetera. But also they have an analytics capability that Levi leverages for all of our dashboards. The supply versus demand analysis. Like, that's all done in partnership with the analytics team. So that team is a huge enabler, probably the most critical enabler of everything we do within our shop and then outside our coes as well.
[00:18:50] Speaker E: Totally. We sense them.
That's fantastic, because that's what we see actually in the systemic agile study as well. You cannot what we call fall in love with the problem without people understanding what the problem really is and quantifying it, not just with any notes, but with actual data. So it totally makes sense. Wow, this is fantastic. Very aligned with what we're seeing in that research. So thank you so much. Really appreciate both your time. Really good to see you both. Thank you, Al. Thank you.
[00:19:19] Speaker C: So there you have it. What an incredible journey of HR reinvention at Bonsecourt Mercy help.
One of the most important points was the impact career pathways had on building a much more strategic, much more trusting and more connected HRT. This systemic approach has not only addressed their most critical talent and business challenges, it also transformed their organizational culture for the better.
I hope you found this conversation as insightful and as inspiring as I did. If you enjoyed this episode, dont forget to subscribe to our what works podcast for more deep dives into the latest trends and best practices in HR and organizational transformation. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible in Hrtaine.
