Manage a Successful Remote Work Model at Your Health System

The pandemic has shown healthcare organizations that many jobs can be done successfully from home, at least partly. Here are tips to make the program work, says one CFO.

(Editor's note: This is the second article in a series on the healthcare labor market from the CFO perspective.)

Most healthcare organizations are hoping to bring remote workers back into the workplace in some capacity. After all, the pandemic has been disrupting the workforce for almost 20 months now.

But having tasted their first experience with remote work, many workers say they now don't want to go back to the workplace, at least full time. Those workers saved money, gained back time, and better juggled personal commitments during the shutdowns and ensuing surges. Still, there are downsides to remote work, such as the loss of face-to-face communication and camaraderie in a virtual work environment. Remote workers often complain about the loneliness of it.

Meanwhile, healthcare organizations discovered during the pandemic that many employees can be productive working from home. This lesson has come as a surprise to many since organizations have historically discouraged remote work arrangements. Before the pandemic, a small percentage of the U.S. workforce did their jobs remotely.

Many roles obviously can't be done from home in healthcare since most jobs are hands-on and centered on patient care. But healthcare organizations know now that many can, and they are reevaluating how they organize and manage their overall workforce.

"The pandemic impacted all facets of the organization. If the job could be performed in a remote way, the staff was asked to work from home. In some situations, the entire function transitioned to a remote environment, and in others—where the function needed some on-site presence—there is a more nuanced model," explains Brad Haws, CFO at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta.

In many of those situations, the remote environment persists today.

"The initial waves of what I would call administrative or back office (management, business, IT, and financial operations) functions were the first to move," Haws says. "I believe that many of those roles will have ongoing work-from-home presence."

The movement within other jobs such as customer service or healthcare providers has been most interesting, Haws notes.

"Some of those have been enabled by modifications to the underlying business, [that is], reimbursement rules that allow for remote models. The ongoing nature of those will have a lot to do with how the government and payers view the underlying service," Haws says.

The challenge of managing remote and hybrid workers

Most managers have little experience with managing in a remote or hybrid (alternating remote and in-office work) environment. As a result, organizations need to retrain managers to be sensitive to employee needs for flexibility. But the biggest challenge is probably how to best engage with remote or hybrid workers.

"You can find articles that discuss the benefits and pros of remote work alongside other literature that discusses the risks or cons to the same dynamic," Haws confirms. "The change will require us to be much more intentional about our management. We will need to be much more intentional about the culture we are creating, the training we offer, the personal connection, and the tools we provide to the staff."

The key is to foster a culture of empathy in the management ranks and encourage supervisors to get 'close' to their workers, Haws says. They should take a humanistic approach to managing workers, and understand what people are going through and help them succeed.

On a personal note, as someone who recently on-boarded to a new role, organization, city, and team, Haws says there are new challenges that come with the change. 

"We have to be proactive in addressing the risks or we might find unintended consequences that we are forced to manage after the fact," Haws warns.

The role of the CFO in promoting the right strategies

As each healthcare organization figures out the new model that works best for it, Haws says there is a role for any CFO to promote practices for managing remote or hybrid healthcare workers in a manner that ensures or increases productivity and efficiency and adds to improved patient care.

"First, the organization needs to be strategic in the approach," Haws advises. "The organization should ask itself, 'How should this impact our space planning, our recruitment, our IT, and our management systems.' Many organizations, because of the rapidity of the change, have left it to the local units to make decisions about what works best. Or many have coordinated central functions such as recruitment, but left the local units to manage training, onboarding and evaluations."

"I don't know if that is necessarily the best approach long term, but that remains to be seen," Haws says. "Certainly, different areas have different drivers, but a larger approach to things like space and IT will require coordinated approaches. Just recently Google and Microsoft announced that they were allowing some units to go remote permanently; it will be interesting to see if many follow suit."

Secondly, Haws says that healthcare organizations need to revisit their management approach.

"Some roles have measurable activities, and remote management is more of an extension of the same metrics. Others are more difficult to measure in terms of management success. The outcomes are more nuances and the team dynamics associated with the work are different. Not necessarily better or worse, just different," Haws says.

But one thing is clear: "We can't simply do the same thing we have always done," Haws stresses.

The advice to CFOs on how to make a hybrid work model successful is simple, Haws says.

"Approach it like any other management challenge. Identify gaps and opportunities. Understand successful and unsuccessful models deployed elsewhere and learn from those," Haws says. "There is no reason to reinvent the wheel or suffer from some of the same mistakes others have made. I don't believe blanket strategies work across varied entities or units. There can be common themes, but we must recognize that some areas have different needs."

Brad Haws is a HealthLeaders Exchange member. The HealthLeaders Exchange is an executive community for sharing ideas, solutions, and insights. Please join the community at https://www.linkedin.com/company/healthleaders-exchange/. To inquire about attending a HealthLeaders Exchange, email us at exchange@healthleadersmedia.com.