What Each Hospital Leader Wants from the Workforce

Healthcare leaders will showcase strategies and find answers around the most puzzling topic in healthcare: workforce. 

No good leader goes into a BIG discussion about something as fundamental as the workforce without respecting that everyone at that table will have a different viewpoint. Modern expectations of collegiality mean that executives in critical conversations will listen actively to other perspectives, even express sincere support for all other viewpoints. Healthcare leadership is a team sport, after all.

But really, pushed into corporate truth or dare, each leader is a passionate advocate for a piece, not necessarily the whole. The CNO must be the voice of nurses because they feel no one else may be. The CFO is the voice of risk. The CHRO is the reminder of compliance but also the preacher of culture. These diverse viewpoints must be passionately stated in the discussion to come, as the workforce in healthcare will be pushed and pulled by demographics, economics, and technology.

What happens when these diverse voices come together? The HealthLeaders Exchange is going to find out Sept. 21-22 with the Teams Exchange, a curated roundtable of leaders in financial, clinical, operations and strategy roles discussing the dynamics of the future workforce. The agenda features panels on strategic workforce planning, recruiting and retaining talent, innovation and physician alignment, among others.

Each invited panelist will bring their perspective, defined somewhat by their role. Our educated guess on what each voice might say:

The CFO wants predictability. Of course, every CFO worth the title sees their purpose as one of enabling the team to take care of people. But CFOs are planners by nature. A little shift here, or pivot there, is no big deal but in their heart of hearts, most CFOS would love to look out 5 years and have a very clear picture of what their labor costs are going to be.

The CNO wants flexibility. There is a process built into everything a nurse does, from how they administer medication to how they work with the physician team. But leading the largest single workforce unit in the health system requires a great deal of flexibility. CNOs want to be able to shift to meet demand without having restrictive financial barriers, or wires of regulation. The CNO knows there are major shifts coming in the practice of nursing and how teams of nurses will work together in the future. They will be vocal in advocating for flexibility to meet those challenges.

The CHRO wants agility. Not quite the same as flexibility. Having an agile workforce means you have forged the “tempering” to allow for the team to bend without breaking to meet new needs or explore new opportunities. Achieving an agile workforce hasn’t gotten any easier, with a shift to a virtual workforce, inflating labor costs and shrinking operational margins adding pressure to the HR team.

The CMO wants autonomy. Above all, doctors want to make decisions about what is best for their patients. It has always been this way. What has changed in recent years has been the competitors to that autonomy. Does the electronic health record or generative AI take away even a small piece of that decision making, or do they enhance it? Does private equity or payor ownership of physician enterprises downgrade physician autonomy or liberate it? There are views on either side, but physician leaders want to at least own the dialogue.

The CEO wants transparency. Perhaps no word has been abused and stretched as much as transparency in healthcare. It has become more of a cause and less of a value. But stripped back to its true meaning, transparency is simply “the quality of being open and honest.” If the CEO is going to make the right choices for the direction of the team, they will insist on no less that true transparency.

Join us at our TEAMs Exchange September 21-22, 2023 at the Hutton Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. To reserve your seat, please contact Abby Mathis at: amathis@healthleadersmedia.com.