Building a resilient workforce

I was able to listen to some of the Milken Institute presentations this week. Tracy Layney, EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer at Levis Strauss & Company, mentioned that they refer to benefits as offerings now.

It is often the subtle changes like that change how people think and feel about the company and their experience. Those subtle changes are also reflected in the operational and financial results of your company but without a health and performance lens analysts don’t attribute the results to those changes.

Wellness Works

Wellness Works Canada is a certification program for health and performance professionals. After each module, participants are asked to reflect on the learnings.

As a participant, it gave me the opportunity to reflect on my strengths and weakness as a leader and identify ways to improve, the toxicity of some cultures that I’ve worked over the span of my career and acknowledge the impact and the missed opportunities to measure health and performance initiatives in my own work as a healthcare finance executive.

What’s the missed opportunity?

The missed opportunity to measure impact dawned on me when I was writing about an experience to improve operating room turnover times. Facility Administrators are often looking at metrics such as physician productivity, financial performance and patient satisfaction scores. Those metrics are a reflection of:

1/ Staff training and development: Clinical staff are well trained on all of the medical supplies and equipment during morning staff meetings. They also understand the importance of the inventory management system and support it by returning unused supplies to the right spot.

2/ Inventory Management: The Inventory Manager coordinates with the sales representatives, ordering supplies and reviewing preference cards to ensure everything needed for the cases is available as needed.

3/ Staffing: Having sufficient staff for the cases and ensuring that everyone is supported to function at their highest level of human performance.

The missing measurement

The missing measurement is employee satisfaction. Like many other organizations, we waited for a problem to be reflected in the absenteeism, presenteeism, healthcare and recruiting costs rather than doing surveys to proactively solicit feedback from employees.

The question you might be asking is if other organizations aren’t doing it, why should your organization? Plain and simple, it’s a shortcoming and luckily one that can be easily addressed to ensure employees are empowered to function at their highest level of performance, that they are satisfied with their job and prepared for the future of work and retirement. The company benefits financially by having a competitive workforce and by becoming a desirable place to work.

Ten insights for building a more resilient workforce

Ten insights that I distilled from the panel presentation on Workforce Resiliency at the Milken Institute meeting last week.

1/ Offer a suite of solutions to meet the array of employee needs

2/ Encourage micro steps to engage employees and their families in healthy habits

3/ Shorten meetings to 25 minutes to provide a break between meetings

4/ Lead with empathy to de-stigmatize use of mental health services

5/ Encourage use of healthcare benefits and ensure all employees are accessing care.

6/ Work with healthcare providers to provide whole person care

7/ Steer employees to the right type of insurance plan for their needs

8/ Disclose the use of AI to build trust with employees

9/ Prepare employees for the reality of retirement including age, savings, work and planning

10/ Address burnout with leadership training for potential and existing managers

Why start with an employee satisfaction survey?

Which initiatives to prioritize depends on the size of the company, nature of the work, health and performance initiatives in place and the emerging needs of your workforce. Nothing is static no matter how much we wish it weren't so. Keep your fingers on the pulse with employee satisfaction surveys and remember, subtle changes make a big impact without a big budget.

Surveys and more

If you’re interested in enhancing your company's health and performance initiatives, please reach out to me. I am open to new projects in Canada and the United States.

Lastly, likes, comments and shares are appreciated.