3 Priorities Top CHROs Will Propel in 2024

When setting strategy, put people at the heart and tech on the table.

With 2024 in sight, healthcare CHROs are charting their strategic courses amid some fierce headwinds.

“Our context has changed,” says Vishal Bhalla, MBA, MS, CPXP, SPHR, senior vice president and enterprise chief experience officer at Advocate Health. “Each of us is a little more unsettled than we were before … with all the catalysts that are impacting our lives.”

Those catalysts range from geopolitical conflict and economic downturn to skill shortages, nonstop disruption, and the pendulumlike swing of power when it comes to talent acquisition and retention.

To keep up with the pace of change, CHROs must (re)design bold, human-centric experiences for the workforces of today and tomorrow, experts say. It’s a tall order, and one that means getting smart with technology and analytics to enable, scale, and measure impact.

What’s at the fore for 2024?

These stakes are high for anyone, let alone the leaders who decide how to care for an organization full of caregivers, many of whom are exhausted.

“Burnout is a very real issue,” says Paul Bohne, a Boston-based managing partner in executive search and advisory firm WittKieffer’s healthcare and nonprofit and social impact divisions. That goes for clinicians, yes, and also leaders, says Bohne, who’s recruited more than a hundred of them to C-suites.

To buoy their teams, patients, and broader communities, CEOs are looking for HR chiefs with airtight core skills: integrity, communication, and emotional intelligence, Bohne says. But those foundations alone won’t cut it.

After surveying more than 500 HR leaders (a third of whom are CHROs) across 40 countries and all major sectors, Gartner, a global technology research and consulting firm, identified these as the top HR areas for 2024:

1.      Leader and manager effectiveness

2.      Organizational culture

3.      HR technology

4.      Change management

5.      Career management and internal mobility

Making headway on such rangy domains is no small feat when up against what Bohne calls “the tyranny of now,” but a dogged focus on talent—and a full toolbox—will set CHROs up for success in 2024 and beyond, experts say.  

Get smart with technology and analytics

Tech is a potential enabler across focus areas—and it’s a moving target. Gartner’s research shows 60% of HR leaders are uncertain about the impact of evolving trends, such as generative AI, on their priorities, while 56% say their solutions and strategy don’t match up with current and future business needs.

Despite the ambiguity, healthcare CHROs should see where they can use tools to get efficient and drive innovation, Bohne says. “Organizations are really seeking leaders who are facile and proficient with how to work smarter leveraging analytics and technology.”

At Advocate Health, Bhalla’s team uses both to shape and scale the experiences of employees alongside those of patients and others who touch the organization. This holistic approach cultivates a strong, integrated “human experience” across the enterprise, Bhalla explains.

The goal is to inspire all community members to “put their social capital on the table to recommend us as a place to get care, a place to work, a place to teach, a place to learn, or volunteer.” And that calls for insight that can be put to work.

“Use data and technology to go to the independent variable, which is actionable,” Bhalla says. “So people understand, ‘Yes, you want me to achieve the strategy. What do I need to do to deliver it? How is that measured, and can I impact it?’ ”

For a nurse leader, that might look like distilling data across the domains of team and patient experience, diversity, and safety into one or two high-impact actions that can be embedded in the flow of work “so it’s not one more thing to do, it’s how I act upon it,” Bhalla explains.

When choosing tech and data enablers, focus on which parts of the enterprise would benefit from timelier, deeper insight, Bohne advises. And lean into the values that draw so many service-oriented leaders to healthcare in the first place, Bhalla says. “Simplify and enable that sense of purpose.”    

Redesign with humans in mind

Thoughtful use of tech and data can help CHROs bring about big transformation—a growing expectation as CEOs seek out HR leaders with “a sense of urgency around results,” Bohne says. 

“Change leadership has just never been more important for a chief people officer,” he explains. “There's a lot more focus on HR leaders who can get stuff done, who can partner effectively with their CFO and operational and clinical colleagues to really help to not just improve current workforce strategies, but to redesign how organizations are approaching these issues.”

One approach he’s seen work well: “novel partnerships.” For example, one health system in the mid-Atlantic has teamed up with a concierge-style company to offer counseling and other services to employees who are caring for aging parents. It’s a “really creative way” to support well-being beyond a traditional EAP, Bohne says.

Continuous listening is another way to create positive people change, Bhalla says. “We have built systems and processes whereby our teammates can, in a psychologically safe manner, provide feedback about their leader and about the organization. And we close that loop all the time. ‘You said, we did.’ That's the key.”

Throughout 2021 and 2022, Advocate Health, like many healthcare organizations, was struggling with pandemic-fueled nursing turnover in parts of the enterprise. When temporary staffing and increased pay and incentives didn’t do enough to move the numbers, Bhalla’s HR and experience teams dug deeper. “We spoke to a lot of nurses—hands on. We spent a lot of time on the floor.”

What they found? Shortages in other departments—like environmental services—left nurses filling the gaps and operating below the top of their licenses. “I am doing all that, and I'm getting burnt out, and so I'm leaving,” Bhalla explains.

So his team increased focus on recruiting for those roles, putting themselves in the applicants’ shoes to pinpoint where they could outperform top competitors—in this case, major retail and fast food chains—in the acquisition process: “What’s most important to me is, [time] from the day I did my application to my first paycheck,” Bhalla says.

It’s something his team didn’t measure at the time, so they got to work reenvisioning the closest metric they had: time to fill. “We broke that down and looked at: from time of application, to time of interview, to time of hire,” Bhalla explains. “That’s what’s in our control.”

Then, in a joint effort between leaders and team members, they deconstructed the recruiting process “to identify what's essential—what can be done by a human, what can be done by machine, and what can be done after.” Then, they rebuilt.

In the end, Advocate Health crushed their reimagined metrics for their environmental services staff: Time of application to time of offer went from nine days to half a day, and time to start dropped from 15 days to three. Position vacancies dipped to less than 5%, and nursing satisfaction improved.

The takeaway? Think about how to redesign traditional systems and processes to measure what matters to people, not departments. “Are your metrics at a human-centric level?” Bhalla asks. “What you can measure, you will incentivize. What you incentivize, you will most likely achieve.”

Empower the talent of tomorrow

To keep top HR talent in today’s “soft market,” where early and mid-career professionals “have options,” CHROs should map and develop their teams, Bohne says. “There hasn't been a time I can recall where there’s more of an imperative.”

This can look like finding new talent in creative places—such as veterans’ organizations—and helping current leaders accelerate their progression through stretch opportunities, learning focused on the long term, and “robust, rigorous succession plans.”

With AI and machine learning adoption on the rise, also consider who—or what—constitutes talent.

“The talent of the future is not necessarily entirely human,” Bhalla says. Solutions like chatbots can not only enable talent strategy but also extend the team. “Are we including our HR in how that bot is built? Are they reflecting our culture, our values? Or are they reflecting the third-party vendor’s cultures and values?”

To ensure it’s the former, take care when designing, implementing, and training people on emerging tech. “It is so important that we’re inclusive from a DEI perspective, from a socioeconomic, from a thought-process perspective, of building those models so that they have less bias,” Bhalla explains. Once the models are built with the help of subject matter experts, democratize their use with clear guidelines and training approaches.

“How we define talent is very, very important,” Bhalla says. So is “making sure that we have a voice and are part of the group influencing the group that builds the talent of the future.”

Delaney Rebernik is a contributing writer for HealthLeaders.