Winning strategies for creating a people-centric technology culture

Organizations in nearly every sector are investing in a wide range of advanced technologies, including cloud computing, digital transformation, automation, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. AI, in particular, has captured the imaginations of countless firms, and generative AI has become the fastest growing technology since the development of the internet.

Driving all of this interest are expectations to increase speed and efficiency, reduce costs, generate revenues and make smarter business decisions.
But too often the tech strategy short-changes what should be one of the most important goals — using technology to make each organization a best place
to work.

Adopting a people-centric approach to technology investments is more than just a nice perk for employees. Research from Gartner Inc. found that employees that work in “human-centric work models” are 3.8 times more likely to be high performing. Gartner defines human centric as meaning that company practices treat workers as people and not just as resources.

In an HFMA Roundtable held in May, healthcare executives discussed the concept of a “People-Centric Maturity Model.” Discussion centered on the maturity model from UKG Workforce Institute, the key elements of that model, why it is important in healthcare and what metrics an organization should use to measure a successful people-centric strategy.

The model from UKG enables organizations to gauge their ability to align digital transformation efforts with people-centric strategies. It helps ensure that technology investments help workers better do their jobs, engage with the organization and feel valued.

The maturity model offers organizations a series of priority action items and key discussion questions around strategy, technology, people processes, process outcomes, and data analysis and data visualization.

Roundtable moderator, Todd Nelson, HFMA’s director, partner relationships and chief partnership executive, notes that organizations today often struggle to strike the right balance between business performance and people performance. The changes our society experienced during the pandemic illuminated for us that organizations are, at their core, not about their brick-and-mortar but about their people.

As organizations continue to grow and transform, the people who comprise them must remain a major focus. After all, they are an organization’s single greatest asset.

In order to drive innovation and growth, organizations need to focus on providing a Best-Place-to-Work environment. How does a people-centric strategy help accomplish that goal?

Todd Nelson: Currently, organizations are very focused on how to transform digitally. Executives must balance that strategy with understanding the people part of the business — and the impact on the people operations. Using customer input, the People-Centric Maturity Model was developed by UKG to ensure that organizations can align their digital transformation with people operations. That way, the two can advance together, and the digital transformation efforts will support and enable staff to do the best work they can.

Nanne Finis: From a technology standpoint, everything impacts your people — some technologies more so than others. Rapid technology changes are adding to an already challenging workplace in healthcare. If you think back only a couple of years ago to the pandemic, people left, many were burned out and most were working longer hours. Now, from a technology perspective, healthcare workers are asked to embrace many different technologies that they may have had no say in acquiring. Sometimes they’re not even considered, and it’s just adding another burden to them. The result can be that healthcare providers are challenged keeping up with what should be their core focus — their people and patient care.

Why is a people-centric strategy especially important in the healthcare sector?

Finis: What’s happening in healthcare is that disparate technologies are in place at many hospitals and healthcare entities because work is often siloed. For example, HR is doing their own thing, payroll is doing their own thing and nursing may need different systems. Post-COVID-19, all of a sudden, there was a sense that we’ve got to standardize systems across the organization. What’s changing is a growing appetite to look comprehensively at the systems and processes in place and how they can be improved.

About a year-and-a-half ago, I was at a digital summit where CIOs were presenting their digital strategic plans, one after the other. But there was no mention of how the strategy affects the people that are using the technologies. So they’ve defined the digital strategy, and they’re just hoping that adoption and improved work processes will occur. That really hit me.

What we often see in healthcare organizations is that technology is not being used to its full capability. Even in more mature organizations, they’re not using it to the full extent possible. Being a great place to work is not about your bricks-and-mortar and your technology stack, it’s about your people, and how organizations can use technology to improve the work and care experience.

What are the stages of the UKG people-centric model?

Finis: There are five stages of the UKG model: Initializing, measuring, managing, configuring and optimizing. In the assessment tool, we have five key themes that we’re calling organizational attributes. They are strategy, technology, data processing, visualization and process outcomes.

The UKG model has a self-assessment component. Collectively, as an executive leadership team, leaders can assess ‘Where do we think we are right now? Looking at our people and technology alignment, where would we like to be in six to 12 months?’ From there, recommendations for addressing the gaps are offered.

What are some additional elements you would like to see in a maturity model?

Adam Gobin: I have gone through two digital implementations in the last three years. One of the things I’ve noticed is that different areas of organizations have different philosophies. Contemplating how technology can be interwoven into the overall landscape — whether it’s a nursing unit or an administrative area — in a way that can be an enabler and accelerator is challenging. Success falls back to the readiness to undertake the transition. Readiness for change is an important aspect of culture to analyze.

Holly Lee: Not just assessing readiness, but also their appetite, their desire, their awareness for the need of change. Being able to identify: Where is the greatest need? How is greatest need defined? How do you prioritize these within a model? Should change occur right now versus over time?

Nelson: Building off of what you just said, being aware that there’s a need for change would be a foundational step in the model.

How is the process of continuous improvement in an organization impacted by the model?

Gobin: I thought about two different sets of things here, including foundational elements and strategic themes. The foundational elements are what’s important to all healthcare systems, such as quality and safety, and performance management. Strategic themes include culture, customer engagement and connections.

Under strategic themes, impacts can include culture — improving the organization’s culture to make it a desired place to work and stay — engagement score, retention and turnover rate. From a consumer perspective, the impact can be differentiated between inpatient care and outpatient care experiences.

How can a hospital or healthcare system best transition from a manual company-centric approach to a digital people-centric one?

Finis: A first step is to assess whether your organization has the capability for change? Obviously, you may want to, but what are the full impacts on the business from changing processes, policies and strategies? Also, what does your technology profile look like? What we do is go into organizations upon request and look at all their technologies and disparate systems and assess where any gaps in systems and capabilities are — and then assess what is the impact on the people of those changes.

Jana Danielson: Even though a company may want to become digital, some workers may want to stay manual — so the model needs to be flexible to account for that. If the model shows that manual is company-centric and digital is people-centric that may not universally apply at every organization.

Perhaps a better way to think of it is growing together or moving to the future together. Our colleagues and the organization are a team. From a maturity perspective, we’re getting everybody engaged. We want to grow, learn and move to the next step as a team.

Will the language and wording within the model resonate with financial leaders, or should it be adjusted in any way?

Lee: Ensure that the people-centric model has a clear focus on people throughout each of the five levels of performance maturity and five fundamental attributes will be crucial. A clear connection between the progress of maturity stages and the fundamental attributes that it impacts is needed as well to allow leaders to measure maturity across the model. 

Gobin: Ensure that the model has a people-focused maturity approach that accounts for different organizational styles and strategies for people-centric being digital versus manual. Not all organizations will see digital as being more people-centric as manual in some instances.

How can organizations best apply the principles of the UKG model to improve processes in healthcare?

Finis: We often hear leaders can’t envision what a people-centric organization looks and feels like, that they don’t have this vision and they don’t understand it. That can be challenging. We’re seeing organizations that are not contemplating their workforce needs and impacts when moving to digital. Using this model could help them to bring these two strategic pillars together and align them.

How would this model be used?

Gobin: We see this model as the beginning to an executive conversation. Operational and strategic leaders at the highest level in organizations should come together as a team to assess the business problems the organization needs to solve, which are most critical to the business, and if there is a role for digital tools to play in addressing them.

Finis: Those are some of the key objectives we were trying to achieve in this early stage of model development. What we hope to do was ask, ‘Where are the natural linkages to financial metrics?’ To say, ‘This is what we’re typically collecting. This is where there’s some financial opportunity to be advancing with an aligned strategy between digital and people.’

Are these core group of metrics easy to quantify, obtain and report on a consistent basis?

Praveen Mekala: When you think technology, you determine return on investments. So from a macro standpoint, if the intent is to develop technologically-oriented people or a people-centered, technologically-oriented organization, then efficiency metrics are where my mind goes.

In terms of just functional measurements, these are difficult to generalize. Organizations, especially those represented here, have so many different priorities and programs in place that may be contributing to the overarching benefits.

Gobin: It’s different for different organizations. Reporting is very tough and not typically consistent. But if there’s one consistent metric, I think operating margin is it.

We use inpatient and outpatient experiences, satisfaction scores and experience scores, and things like that. You can then tie those to financial metrics. For example, revealed trends or events could be as a result of staffing turnover at a certain practice or location, or due to somebody’s negative experience. The higher-level metrics would be easier for organizations to attain and address. Because creating new metrics and getting down to granularity is not going to be consistent and will interfere with establishing a benchmark.

How do these metrics help an organization to improve their people-centric maturity?

Danielson: From a financial perspective, you could also take into consideration any reduction in turnover. Replacing people is extremely expensive. Also, employee engagement. If we have folks who are engaged, they’re happy, they feel like they have the tools they need to do their job and believe you are working together on their career growth and development.

Gobin: The results of these metrics are embedded in every single senior leader’s compensation plan. They truly tell us how our employees feel about a host of issues. These include: Do you have the resources available that you need? Do you trust your direct leader? Do you have trust in the organization’s executive leadership? Are you happy with the direction of the organization?

All of those things give you a little bit more insight than just ‘are you satisfied with your current role?’ It’s more about ‘Are you satisfied with the organization’s strategy, direction and leadership?’ So we have targeted action planning as a result of granular scores across different themes. They go beyond just ‘are you just satisfied with the person you work for,’ to include everything else. That helps us to be able to develop and expand on our technology.

Conclusion

Among the significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic was the loss of countless skilled and dedicated workers in the healthcare space. Some estimates place the percentage of those leaving the healthcare workforce as high as 30%. Some healthcare workers retired. Many others simply left the industry. The immediate impact is that healthcare systems must now place an even greater priority on employee retention. The industry simply can’t recruit its way out of this crisis. It must focus on retaining the workers still in the field. Successful retention starts with satisfied employees — workers that feel valued and properly rewarded. As healthcare organizations make investments in technology, they should seek opportunities to make smart investments that support worker needs and contribute to a people-centric culture.  

Panelists

JANA DANIELSON FHFMA, MS, is vice president of revenue cycle, Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, Neb.

NANNE FINIS RN, MS, is chief nurse executive, UKG, Lowell, Mass.

ADAM GOBIN FHFMA, is assistant vice president of revenue cycle, WellStar Health System, Marietta, Ga.

PRAVEEN MEKALA FHFMA, MBA, MPH, is assistant vice president, network finance, WMCHealth Network, Westchester, N.Y.

TODD NELSON is director, partner relationships and chief partnership executive, Healthcare Financial Management Association, Downers Grove, Ill.

HOLLY LEE CRCR, CIA, is vice president, internal audit, Parkview Health, Fort Wayne, Ind.

About UKG

At UKG, our purpose is people. We are on a mission to inspire every organization to become a great place to work through HCM technology built for all. More than 80,000 customers across all sizes, industries, and geographies trust UKG HR, payroll, workforce management, and culture cloud solutions to drive great workplace experiences and make better, more confident people and business decisions. With the world’s largest collection of people data, work data, and culture data combined with rich experience using artificial intelligence in the service of people, we connect culture insights with business outcomes to show what’s possible when organizations invest in their people. To learn more, visit ukg.com/healthcare.

_{This published piece is provided solely for informational purposes. HFMA does not endorse the published material or warrant or guarantee its accuracy. The statements and opinions by participants are those of the participants and not those of HFMA. References to commercial manufacturers, vendors, products, or services that may appear do not constitute endorsements by HFMA.}