On Friday, November 15th, we held our Q4 Human Resource Directors Workgroup in the CHCACT Training Room in Cheshire.

What a great morning to introduce myself to the HR Leaders in the FQHCs! The team brought energy, questions, possible solutions, and all their turnover numbers!

First and foremost, we re-established the purpose (and benefits) of our workgroup: by interacting collaboratively, transparently, and confidentially, we as HR leaders can positively impact our workforce needs and staff engagement for the ultimate end of improving health and wellness of all.

Turnover/Retention

To that end, we agreed on group norms and commitments before we launched into our turnover exercise by first, telling our quick 10-second by-the-numbers turnover story (this many people is this percentage which is above/below/same as 2018). But then, we dived into applying different lenses to those very same numbers.

These are the lenses we used:

• Organizational level
  • Are we losing entry-level staff? Could pay or hours or something else be affecting retention?
  • Are we losing clinicians and individual contributors? Are they feeling recognized and supported? Do their supervisors discuss with them their ability, engagement, and aspirations? Are they leaving for opportunities that we have not offered them?
  • Are we losing managers or team leaders? Is there a work-life balance issue? Do they feel properly trained and supported to make people and process decisions?
• Tenure (in role and with organization)
  • Are we losing brand new staff? Is it because our hiring process isn’t making good hires or is it that our hires were great but our on-boarding left them disoriented, overwhelmed, or feeling unwelcome?
  • Are we losing staff at the 2-3 year mark? Is it because we don’t have a clear succession or developmental plan for them that they know about? Are they leaving because their NHSC time has come to an end?
  • Are we losing staff after 5 years or more? Is it because they have the opportunity to advance elsewhere or is it because cultural changes have rendered their workplace unrecognizable from when they began? Or could it be that previous inconsistent performance management did not accurately identify staff’s performance and we recently had to move to involuntary terminations?
• Team/Site
  • Is there a team or a site that does an incredible job of keep and developing its people? Who are those leaders and what do they do differently?
  • Conversely, which team or site is like a revolving door? Why does that team experience higher turnover: is there a process or a person that’s affecting whether or not staff wants to stay? If it’s a process, who are the partners we should take to analyze and redesign? If it’s a person, who is their supervisor and how can we retrain and reframe our expectations of their leadership?
• Demographics of Diversity - this can be a difficult lens to use but it’s important to put faces to those numbers:
  • Did we lose more young employees or older employees? Why? Is there anything we’re unintentionally doing or allowing that’s making this subset want to leave?
  • Did we lose employees once their family status changed (marriage or addition of children)? Is the perception that young families won’t be successful with us due to work-life balance or flexible work schedule or something else?
  • Did we lose our employees of color or differently-abled employees or white employees? Could we inadvertently be placing institutional barriers in front of those employees? Do we need to re-examine implicit bias? Do we have diverse leadership to serve as proof points?
  • Did we lose men or women or staff that don’t subscribe to a binary gender? Is our health center welcoming and accommodating?
    Is there anything going on in our health center cultures that is disproportionately affecting a subset of employees or causing employees to feel that a long-term career is not possible or desirable here? Do we have a blind spot?

Recruiting

Closely related, we discussed recruiting and the many obstacles that come with filling the vacancies left behind by the above turnover or your health center’s growth. In particular, we dived into sourcing and interviewing and HR leaders shared their health centers’ processes in both areas of talent acquisition.

CHCACT shared two resources: ACU’s STAR2Center (whose access has been granted to all FQHC CEOs to review detailed data and resources on recruitment and retention) and Capital Workforce whose REACH program offers wage reimbursement of up to $20,000 to employers for hiring eligible jobseekers training to be IT professionals or Registered Nurses.

Potential 2020 Topics

With turnover and recruiting as evergreen topics, we then began to design our wishlist of additional HR topics for deep dives in 2020. This wishlist includes:

• CT Paid Family Leave preparation
• CT Leaves and Accommodations: FMLA/Pregnancy/Childcare/Worker’s Compensation/Occupational Health
• Summary of recent CHRO cases
• Health Insurance Innovations for Health Center staff: Leveraging our own FQHCs for staff health

Scheduling 2020 Dates

Having identified some people process gaps that we are all eager to fill, we then looked to the calendar to discuss 2020 workgroup dates. A Doodle poll will be distributed by week’s end to the HR Directors to identify the best dates for highest participation next year and will include space to capture any HR topics that should be on our 2020 wishlist.

Please feel free to reach out to Alex, Director of HR, or Meghan, Operations Assistant, with any additional feedback, questions, thoughts, or concerns.

Alexandra Ocampo, SHRM-SCP
Director, Human Resources