HR Leader at Centura Health Promotes L&D in a Slower Economy

The transformation that is taking place at work is having an impact on everything in HR. A possible looming recession is complicating matters more. So, HR leaders are getting creative when it comes to learning and development. 

Sebastien Girard, SVP, Chief People Officer at Centura Health, will be joining HR Exchange Network's Corporate Learning online event to share his thoughts on developing online learning for the modern workforce. Learn about the message Girard hopes to convey and what's happening on the ground now in the world of L&D. 

HREN: What do you think right now is the biggest learning and development challenge and how are you tackling it?

SG: We’re truly in a world, where tension is the name of the game. We keep talking about the Great Resignation, a term I really dislike. And the reason is that the Great Resignation implies that it's a point in time. I don't think we are in a point in time, I think we are in a generational shift. There are 1.5 Boomers retiring for every one Gen Z coming into the employment market. In Human Resources, we're already having a gap to fill. Talent acquisition is stepping up to the plate two strikes every single time.

Retention is everything, experiences are everything. In healthcare, our leaders had to change their leadership style during the pandemic because they had to go into crisis management. During the pandemic, in healthcare, it was a matter of life and death. It was a matter of moving extremely fast, and it was a matter of doing things that take months within hours.

We became amazing at crisis leadership, while forgetting how to do leadership as a marathon. Now, we need to retrain leaders to do all the great leadership steps that were taken before COVID. This includes one-on-one meetings and discussing  career ladder and leadership vsibility.

Then, we must adjust to remote work or hybrid work. Do you have a very specific curriculum on leadership development for leaders that has people working remote

We're taking our leadership development curriculum, and we are adapting to for leaders with remote employees. We're also looking into our library of leadership development training.. What we're finding out is that the people who need it the most use it the least. The people who need it the least, use it the most. To address this, we are building a mandatory leadership certificate.

HREN: Have you come up with any solutions that you're experimenting with for some of those problems?

SG: We have a leadership development certificate, which includes 12 modules offered once per month. We are retraining our leaders so that they all can have the same information, the same language, the same tools. We’re going back to the basics that may have been lost during the pandemic.  

For example, we consider performance management. What motivates your associates? Do you care about them? Do you care about their career? Do you know what's next for them? Do you know how to bridge the gap, so they can get where they want to go? Are you able to celebrate internal mobility even if it's a lateral move. After all, some of the Gen Zers and Millennials celebrate having a new project even if it's not a promotion.

HREN: What can you do to provide learning and development in a recession or lean times?

SG: The best piece of advice is don't slow down. I can understand that getting more resources can be challenging in a recession. Everybody needs to do more with less. But I highly recommend avoiding the temptation to slow down. In a recession, the unemployment rate goes up because there are fewer opportunities. When the unemployment rate goes up, people change jobs less often. People have a tendency to be more engaged. You might be tempted to slow down because retention is better. Your data is telling you that you're doing everything right.

But you're being fooled. The recession will end, and people are going to start resigning again, and your engagement will decrease. This is the time to keep pushing, even if the data looks good. It doesn't mean it's going to look good on the other side of the recession.

HREN: What message about learning do you hope to offer to the audience at the event?

SG: We have 21,000 caregivers. We conduct three engagement surveys per year. We have an amazing participation rate, close to 85%. In addition, our chief nursing officer met with the caregivers in person to see if she could get more information. She went into a listening tour. She met with 2,500 nurses in person in small groups, 90 minutes each. Some groups were five people, and others were 50 people. She only asked one question, ‘We absolutely love you, we don't want you to leave, we want to retain you, how do we retain you?’

For 90 minutes, she was just listening. And what she did is she pulled the top five things that they told her, and we acted on it, regardless of the amount of the investment. I think this is the strongest message because what you think is best for your leadership development, what you think is best for your culture might not be true. Go ask them in person.

Our nursing turnover went down by about 20% points in less than six months. We act on each of the five priorities, some of which were related to leadership development, like tuition reimbursement and loan forgiveness. We're providing $200 A month as a program for people who qualify. We increased our tuition reimbursement to the maximum.

They asked for childcare support. Many of them said, ‘I would love to have the time to develop. But my life right now is family and work, and I don't have time for anything else.’ But if we could help with childcare, they may be able to do it. So, we're providing a childcare stipend.

Some of the nurses and technicians told us they were confused that we gave a sign-on bonus to new people who had never been with Centura while they get nothing. So, we provided a retention bonus. It was $15,000 for two years, in exchange for two years retention. That improved turnover drastically.

The housing market in some areas is 40% above the national average. So, we are providing a housing stipend, so everybody who is living near the hospital gets $400 a month of their mortgage or rent.

We also increased our living wage drastically by almost $5 in Colorado and $7.50 more in Kansas. So those were life changing events for some of our more entry-level associates who are key to our success. Don't get me wrong, we absolutely need the nurses and the physician. But you need people to clean the rooms, etc.

Don't miss Girard's session and all the others at the Corporate Learning online event, which takes place September 28 and 29. It's free to register. Those who join HR Exchange Network for the live event are eligible for SHRM credits.