If you’re in healthcare HR, you probably already know that there are many pieces that go into human management—and that it’s easy for these duties to fall into silos. Integrated talent management offers a solution.
Integrated talent management is a business strategy through which all aspects of HR are handled in an integrated way, aligned with the business’s goals. In other words, it’s what happens when you realize the recruitment folks should talk to the people in succession planning. The integrated talent management philosophy suggests that every piece of HR is interconnected. This includes recruitment, onboarding, performance, workforce readiness, talent development, and recognition.
When HR processes are siloed, different teams manage different aspects of HR (like wages and benefits) without necessarily consulting each other. These discrepancies can cause problems. If you’re not careful, you might wind up with inefficient or contradictory business practices (think along the lines of one manager realizing your company needs stronger communicators but having no opportunity or motivation to pass this information on to recruitment or onboarding).
Let’s go over the most important benefits of integrated talent management, and the best practices to make the most of them.
Be A More Attractive Employer With Competitive Benefits
Integrated talent management can ease recruiting by making it easier to see the job opening from a potential candidate’s perspective. When you’re trying to find new healthcare workers, you need to understand what you’re actually offering them—but this can get confusing in a siloed management system.
Imagine this: you put together a great job description, include all relevant information about compensation and benefits, optimize it for the web, and post. Without an integrated approach, it can be hard to understand at a glance whether this package is actually appealing. Are the wages you offer fair when you consider the costs of medical benefits? If you raise wages and slash commuter benefits, does the pay wage still come out in front? You might think that you’re offering more than you really are (or miss out on opportunities to celebrate your fantastic benefits package).
A competitive benefits package is an essential component of employee retention. If an employee is struggling to pay their new deductible to get needed healthcare, they may consider other options. When you understand your offer, you’re able to both adjust it accordingly, and speak more transparently with new hires about the benefits they can access.
Build Pathways to Career Development
Helping your employees grow is one of the best things you can do to build a skilled and loyal workforce. Although career growth does mean employees will leave their current positions, this shouldn’t worry employers. If employees feel like your organization has invested in them, they’re far more likely to speak positively about their experience. This is valuable, especially when employees go on to refer friends to open positions.
One of the most common reasons employees leave their jobs is because they didn’t get enough chances to grow or use their core skills. Even knowing this, it’s tough to keep track of these things if your human resources team isn’t communicating effectively. Make career growth and leadership development integral to your talent management strategy, starting early.
One way to do this is by making sure your talent acquisition team understands talent strategy and succession plans. When they know what positions are opening up (and what employees, and therefore skill sets, are leaving) they’ll have a better idea of what your company needs from new staff. This will give recruiters the chance to advertise realistic growth opportunities. With these specific opportunities laid out, you can make sure promises of growth aren’t just empty words.
Integrate career planning into every step of talent management. During the application stage, make it clear that employee growth is part of your corporate strategy. Ask new hires directly about their career goals. Once you reach onboarding, check in about these goals and create a career development plan to help new employees grow their skills. Keep the conversation going with periodic “stay” meetings. When you get feedback, share it with the teams in charge of promotions and development.
Staff Effectively With Talent Planning
An integrated talent management system can be a huge help when it comes to talent planning. An integrated approach will help you understand what skills are already represented in your workforce. You’ll also understand what future roles will be needed, and how to assess your staff’s strengths and weaknesses. Strategic workforce planning can inform your recruiting, development planning, and recognition efforts. Be confident that you’re hiring and promoting the right people.
While staffing during the nursing shortage, it may be tempting to think of recruiting as purely a numbers game—the more hires you can make, the better. Sometimes this thinking is unavoidable, but understanding your actual staffing needs can help you recruit strategically. It also makes it easier to see the potential that a new employee brings when you’re decision-making. Top talent has more to offer than simply filling a vacancy.
This is especially true when managing candidates who have never worked in healthcare before. Even an applicant who’s new to the industry may have skills that will be helpful in their new role. Keep track of candidate and employee skills and interests by maintaining open communication between human resources and individual managers. Use this information to set up mentorships and provide educational opportunities. This kind of talent planning, which embraces career growth and targeted recruitment, is only possible when your talent management is healthily integrated.
Find Opportunities For Your Business To Grow
Employee development goes hand in hand with organizational growth. Conduct exit interviews and “stay” meetings—and use your integrated talent management strategy to actually implement the feedback. Solicit feedback about job satisfaction and your talent management strategy, both from employees on the floor and within HR. Encourage employee engagement by asking specific questions about where your staff sees inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
Exit interviews get a bad rap. Many workers feel like they’re being asked to lodge complaints into the void, with no chance of their feedback being taken seriously. Whether you’re at the beginning or end of an employee’s lifecycle, you can make sure this isn’t the case. Make talent engagement more meaningful by sharing input with the relevant teams. To do this, you’ll need to maintain clear communication and positive relationships between the members of your HR team.
It can help, here, to articulate a strong statement of your business’s goals. If every employee understands your vision, there’s a better chance they’ll speak up when they see practices that don’t align with your organizational values. If, for instance, one of your core values is saving resources, you might encourage staff to mention if they’re dealing with inefficient and wasteful paperwork, which could kick off a conversation about how to cut down on paper and go digital. No matter your business needs, an integrated talent management approach can help ensure you can actually make changes.
Nurture Harmony In Your Workplace
Finally, a major benefit of integrated talent management is its ability to foster harmony in your workplace. When teams recognize their work is interconnected, they may more easily see that they’re striving for the same goals. Encourage team members to recognize that feedback is all in service of your business’s bigger, shared goals. Understanding these goals will also help individual employees feel that their work is important, which is vital to job satisfaction.
Integration is a kind of transparency. At its core, integrated talent management is a practice of being open about your work and respecting the work that others are doing. This involves honesty, active listening, and teamwork. When implemented well, it can give the feeling that all participants are working together, rather than against each other. That amounts to greater understanding between teams, which can lead to better talent retention rates. With strong transparency, employees also get a better sense of what’s being accomplished, and, therefore, what they can be proud of.
Easier Talent Management With Apploi
Apploi is on a mission to help healthcare manage talent more successfully. We give employers stronger oversight into their staffing by integrating recruitment tools, digital credential management, and onboarding technology within a single platform.
Interested in learning more about how you can recruit, hire, and onboard healthcare staff quickly? Contact us today for a free demo of our end-to-end talent management solution.
