Healthcare workforce strategy has long operated on a simple premise: post a job, fill a seat, move on. Jeremy Stephens, executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Tidelands Health in Georgetown, S.C., says that model is becoming obsolete.
“The day of the 1.0 FTE is gone,” Mr. Stephens said during an interview with the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “What you need is a more flexible workforce that you can scale up and down based on volumes, but give them the flexibility to work as much as they want. Getting around the mindset of people that have been around the industry for 40 or 50 years thinking differently. Yes, you used to come to work every day; you did that for a long time and had a wonderful career, but some of the people coming into the workforce now only want to work a 3.5, a 0.7, whatever, and we’ve got to figure out how to adapt our program levels.”
The shift comes as Tidelands, a regional coastal system operating in one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States, manages simultaneous pressure from a new partnership with MUSC, a hospital it plans to build and a workforce spread across geographies with starkly different recruiting dynamics. The health system operates in both a rural southern corridor and a more transient, high-growth northern one.
But the answer is not just operational flexibility. Mr. Stephens sees a fundamental redesign of how policies, benefits and systems are structured. With five generations now active in the workforce, rigid benefit tiers and FTE thresholds are effectively deselecting entire segments of potential employees.
“You want to have your policies as flexible and adaptive as possible so that as many people that want to come can come, and you can find a home for them and get them going,” he said. “And who knows? A year from now, five years from now, their needs may change.”
The workforce design challenge connects directly to how Mr. Stephens is deploying technology. He described a deliberate shift from reactive HR operations to predictive modeling, using data to project turnover, retirement rates and promotion pipelines years in advance rather than responding to vacancies as they open.
“It’s all about predictive analysis now and shifting from that reactive to predictive, and that’s key to understanding where the gaps are going to be,” he said. “You’re looking into the future to say, this group has ‘X’ amount of turnover projected with retirement of ‘Y’ plus people we plan on promoting. So you start walking through all that and you’re doing it in advance.”
Artificial intelligence is accelerating that shift by absorbing the data-intensive, administrative layer of HR work and freeing the team to focus on the work that actually drives retention. For many hospitals and health systems, strong retention is the next frontier to tackle as they aim to increase quality of care and lower staffing expenses.
“I’m loving the AI,” Mr. Stephens said. “I still think you have to leverage lean process improvement type models. But once you do that, you can start looking at how AI can come in and help standardize and take away some of the monotonous, boring work that is just data-driven stuff. Now you can shift the work of the person to more people-centered things — discussions with people, communicating with people, talking to candidates.”
Engagement is the underlying variable the redesign must support. There is a generational divide in how employees respond to engagement initiatives and what they’re looking for from employers. Many health systems have found building a strong culture around their mission and investing in team wellness and professional growth has a positive impact on employee engagement, retention and care outcomes.
“Without engagement, you’re going to lose your workforce,” Mr. Stephens said. “So all of those variables that now you can focus on for retention and engagement, and not have to spend your time on the data and the monotonous sort of day-to-day things that AI can really come in and help you do.”
Execution on the workforce redesign and then focus on positive results will help leaders make the shift as painless as possible. Take time to inquire with frontline employees and leaders but then take decisive action to move in the right direction.
“You can sit around and talk and talk and talk and then not be able to act,” he said. “Getting it to 90% [right], sometimes it’s good enough, and you’ve got to move.”
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