A New Starting Point for Workforce Planning

Many health care organizations are trying to meet tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s workforce. Our study offers 13 tools HR executives can use to partner with operational leaders and identify the staff they’ll need to succeed under value-based care.

Keeping up with care transformation

While hospital leaders are dedicating time and energy to developing their overall care transformation strategy, many are overlooking a key component: building the right workforce to bring that strategy to life.

Organizations that fail to adjust their workforce blueprint to account for the changing demands of value-based care risk being caught off-guard—and without the type and number of staff they’ll need to succeed.

But how do you adjust your staffing blueprint to account for an uncertain future? It’s not easy because current staffing levels and past turnover are no longer accurate barometers for future hiring needs. Instead, HR leaders must calculate the impact of new care models and factor this information into their staffing blueprints.

Focus the conversation on four market disruptions

To build an accurate workforce blueprint, HR leaders must have concrete conversations with operational leaders to identify the future staff they’ll need.

Rather than broadly discussing care transformation, HR leaders must focus their conversations with operational leaders on the four specific market changes that will drive the vast majority of disruption to future staffing plans:

• Increased importance of patient transitions
• Rising patient complexity
• Evolving health care technology
• Internal executive staffing imperatives, such as changing educational requirements for staff or seeking external rewards

13 tools for your new 'step one' in workforce planning

We’ve developed a set of resources to help HR leaders discuss each of the four major disruptions with the appropriate operational leaders. Our cheat sheets, discussion guides, and worksheets cover a range of critical issues, from increasing percentages of BSN-prepared nurses to accomplishing EMR implementation goals.

With these tools, HR leaders can learn the critical information they need to build their workforce blueprint.