Identifying and providing constructive career development opportunities for your ASC’s top performing employees can be one of the most cost-efficient ways to ensure success for your organization in today’s complex healthcare environment. Cultivating the “A” players on your team is a key strategy to help meet staffing goals, improve employee communication and knowledge sharing, and bolster your ASC’s image in the marketplace.
“Every HR professional understands the importance of keeping employees challenged and growing,” says Tom Jacobs, CEO of MedHQ, “but having a focused, purpose-driven strategy and program for developing your best performers is a powerful driver of several of an ASC’s most important business metrics.”
Jacobs outlines four key business advantages to such a strategy:
- Retention & Succession: While most ASC leaders understand the need to retain top talent, the “how” is more difficult. Providing visible and specific career development opportunities helps top performers stay motivated, and encourages them to look within the organization when they need a change or a new challenge – rather than elsewhere, creating succession planning options.
- Cost Savings: Improving the effectiveness and satisfaction of your ASC’s top performers also can result in significant savings, both on the hard costs of turnover, and on associated “under the radar” expenses like the loss of company knowledge, disruption of customer service, and reduced morale and engagement among remaining employees.
- Closing Skill & Role Gaps: As the demands of leadership in healthcare become more complex, competency gaps are more common. Nurturing top talent is one way to create a culture and process that enables qualified employees to find roles best suited to them, filling the gaps without the more extensive costs associated with hiring, training, and onboarding outside hires.
- Brand Building/Recruiting: An effective career development initiative creates a positive buzz for an ASC in the marketplace that can help recruit new talent as well, leveraging happy, challenged employees as brand ambassadors.
So how do you go about implementing a strong program for developing “A” Players? Jacobs suggests working with them on four career development fronts:
- Education: Many researchers have uncovered the Millennial generation’s penchant for quality training. ASCs can support top talent with personalized investments in the learning they care about – such as technical or management classes, or even attendance at industry conferences – filling skills gaps for the individuals and the organization at the same time.
- Job Scope: Expanding their responsibilities within their function is another way to challenge your “A” players, growing their capacity as leaders.
- Increased Breadth: Or, challenging your “A” player beyond their function is a great way to increase their knowledge of the ASC’s business overall, and to introduce them to experts across the organization.
- Mentoring: Pairing top performers with senior leaders as mentors exposes them to the roles you eventually want them to grow into, and opens doors to the relationships they’ll need to get there. The process can be helpful to the leaders as well, keeping them in touch with the ideas and energy of the ASCs top talent.
Click here to learn more about MedHQ’s HR strategies designed to drive ASC success.