Does your company have their future work arrangement figured out yet?
Will remote workers become a new class of worker or will it be seamless?
What geographic boundaries will you place on workers? Will they be able to live in adjacent states and still be required to come on site a couple days a week? and cover their own cost of travel?
Some items from the article
we are hearing from CHROs that the surveys of their own employees are showing that men are more likely to decide to return to their workplace, while women are more likely to continue to work from home...
Given this breaking of company location and employee location, states and cities will start to use their tax policies to create incentives for individuals to relocate to their jurisdictions rather than giving tax credits solely to large companies to relocate...
Gartner’s 2020 ReimagineHR Employee Survey revealed that only 36% of employees were high performers at organizations with a standard 40-hour work week..
...
Perhaps there are still a lot of questions to answer.
#healthcare #healthit #cio #cmio #chime #himss
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Today in Health it. This story is Nine Trends Shaping Work in 2021. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. I wanna thank our sponsor for today, Sirius Healthcare. They reached out about this time last year and said we'd love what you're doing.
Really appreciate your mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. And the rest is history. If you believe in our mission as they do and wanna support the show, please shoot me a note at Partner at this weekend, health it.com. Alright, here's today's story. I told you yesterday that I read a lot over the weekend and I was looking at work from home trends and came across this article from the Harvard Business Review in January titled Nine Trends That Will Shape Work in 2021 and Beyond.
And I thought my listeners should have this information even if I didn't cover it in January. So here are some article excerpts and I may comment throughout this piece as it goes on since it is a little longer. So, as I said, January 14th, nine Trends that will shape work in 2021 and beyond. Harvard Business Review.
Here we go. It would be nice to believe that 2021 will be about stability and getting back to normal. However, this year is likely to be another full of major transitions while there's spending a lot of focus on the increase in the number of employees working remotely, at least part of the time going forward.
There are nine additional forces that I think will shape business in 2021. Alright, ready for this? Number one, employees will shift from managing the employee experience to managing the life experience of their employees. So we got to know the employees better over this past year, and it is become clear that supporting employees in their personal lives more effectively enables employees to not only have better lives, but also to perform at a higher level.
And then they quote a bunch of things from a Gartner survey. Reimagine HR employee survey, 23% increase in the number of employees reporting better mental health and 17% increase in the number of employees reporting be better physical health. There's also real benefits to employers who see 21% increase in the number of high performers compared to the organizations that don't provide the same degree of support.
What kind of things are they talking about? They're talking about mental health, financial health, even things. That were previously out of bounds, like sleep will become table stakes for benefits offered to employees. I think what I'm gonna do is comment on each one of these. It's important to note that this is not talking about the individual managers providing this kind of support.
Mental health obviously is not something that's provided by the individual manager, although they contribute to it. Financial health is no employee's gonna sit down with their manager, nor should they and disclose their financials and those kinds of things, but we should provide those kinds of . Benefits to employees.
Same thing with sleep. So this is just something to keep in mind for the HR departments. How are you gonna shape the benefits moving forward? Number two, more companies will adopt stances on current societal and political debates. Gosh, I hope not. Anyway, I'm gonna read what they say. Employees desire to work for organizations who values align with their own and has this has been growing for some time.
In 2020, this desire accelerated. Garner research shows that 74% of employees expect their employers to become more actively involved in the cultural debates of the day. I believe the CEOs will have to respond in order to retain and attract the best talent. So here's my comments on this. The, the, the reason I hope not is because, you know, we're extremely divided as a country.
You have . You know, it's, it's almost 48, 50 1%, uh, in any given election. And that changes depending on the demographics in the area. But a, as a general rule, you're still gonna have over 30 to 40% of your employees, even in the most hardened blue or red place. That are gonna be the opposite opinion. And so if we start creating this, we're gonna create companies that have a, a political bent, and it's gonna create, uh, I, I think, more strife than it solves.
With that being said, I think there are issues that people expect their CEOs to weigh in on. I think diversity is one of those things. Diversity, equity, inclusion is one of those things that they expect them to weigh in on. I think they expect them to weigh in on. The inequities in, in healthcare, in the local communities and those kind of things.
And I, I think there's a, there's a host of things that organizations need to step forward and take a mantle of leadership in the community. And I think those things are important, but a political debate. Do we really wanna be having political debates in the office? I, I don't see this heading in a good direction and I really don't want organizations to get all that politically
Activated. Again, I wanted them to be socially activated but not politically activated. Number three, the gender wage gap will continue to increase as employees return to the office. We're hearing from CHROs, this is from the article that the surveys. Of their own employees are showing that men are more likely to decide to return to the workplace while women are more likely to continue to work from home.
Alright, so that sets it up. According to a recent Gardner survey, 64% of managers believe that office workers are higher performers than remote workers, and in turn are likely to be given in-office workers a higher raise than those who work from home. So this is gonna exacerbate a gap that already exists.
And it's just something to keep in the back of your head, actually, not even the back of your head, in the forefront of your head. How are you going to handle those who choose to work from home versus those who choose to work in the office? How are you gonna create the culture that rewards the right things, that rewards the work that's produced and the value that's created for the organization versus.
Just their proximity to the work being done. So that's my 2 cents on that. You, you really have to be aware of this. This has to be top of mind, and this has to be one of the primary conversations you're having, creating the culture that works, creating a culture that doesn't create inequities based on where people are going to work from.
And so that's gonna be one of the key things that we have to address. Number four, new regulations will limit employee monitoring. Gosh, I hope so. During the pandemic, more than one out of four companies has purchased new technology for the first time to passively track and monitor their employees. And these are those tools that sort of sit on top of email and sit on top of the, uh, Microsoft teams and other things, and track productivity.
However, many of these same companies haven't determined how to balance employee privacy with the technology, and employees are frustrated. And they go on to site some surveys and those kind of things. I think we're gonna have to be really careful here. I, I think we can go over this line as new technologies start to emerge.
Machine learning, ai being applied to workforce productivity. So we have to be careful how we implement those things. And the general rule of thumb here is as much transparency as possible. You know, ask for permission, make them aware of what you're trying to do with it. Show them how you're going to reward them for it, or how you're going to use that information to be more productive as a company.
Potentially provide better outcomes to the communities that you serve. So again, transparency in. Anything that you implement that is monitoring employees. Number five, flexibility will shift from location to time, and this will be an interesting one while enabling employees to work remotely became commonplace across 2020.
The next wave of flexibility will be around when employees are expected to work. Gartner's 2020 Reimagined HR Survey, which they quote often. Revealed that only 36% of employees were high performers at organizations with a standard 40 hour work week, and 55% of the workforce were high performers In those where it was a flexible work week, this one's a little bit more challenging, especially in a meeting centric culture.
And maybe that's the thing we have to address. Do we need as many meetings as we have? And if we do, and we may determine that we do based on the the amount of collaboration that we want as healthcare organizations, and if we do, then . We, we are gonna have to stick pretty close to the 40 hour work week so that we can have those meetings, so that we can schedule those meetings.
If all of a sudden you're saying to people, Hey, go ahead. Work a night shift whenever you're comfortable, whenever you're the most productive, go ahead and work there. We may not be able to go that far in healthcare given the culture of collaboration that we're looking for. Number seven, mental health support is the new normal.
I believe this is true, and it's about time. Quite frankly, uh, Gartner research revealed that 45% of wellbeing budget increases were being allocated to mental and emotional wellbeing programs. And that is as it should be, and this should be a standard benefit in every healthcare organization for sure, but probably in every organization that's out there.
Number eight, employers will look to rent talent and fill the skills gap. Okay, so they talk about two different strategies in this section. One is go out and hire the best talent you possibly can and, and then try to fill roles. I don't think we're gonna have the budgets to do that kind of thing. I think we are going to start renting talent more and more.
We, we already have rented talent. I, at any given time in my IT organization we would have, you know, upwards of 25% . Of contractors in the organization, depending on the amount of projects, capital projects we had going on and the type of projects we had going on, there's a couple different kinds of skills.
There's skills that we just couldn't hire that we would have to rent, and then there's skills that quite frankly, we just didn't need over a long period of time. We just needed them to fill. A certain project gap that we had. And so we would bring in that kind of talent. And what they're saying is that we will probably see that more and more and we will probably see that be remote more and more.
Something to keep in the back of your mind. Will we see an uptick in renting talent? I know that my CFOI. Hated that aspect of my budget because it was so variable. And number nine, states will compete to attract individual talent rather than trying to get companies to relocate. And I think this is interesting.
So they're saying they're gonna go after individuals instead of trying to get Coke or Toyota to move to their state. They are going to start going after individuals who have the choice to live wherever they want. So here's what they're saying in the article, the belief being if you can incentivize companies to come, they will bring jobs with them.
The new area of remote and hybrid work will evolve this strategy where an employee lives will be less tied to where their employer is located than ever before. Given this change, states and cities will start to use tax policies to create incentives for individuals to relocate to their jurisdictions rather than giving tax credits solely to large companies to relocate.
So they talk about already seeing programs pop up in cities like Topeka, Kansas, also hoa, where they're offering remote employees up to $15,000 to move there. These jurisdictions will compete for individual employees and their jobs, not just the employer. And those are the nine trends that they talk about, and here's how they close out the article.
While 2020 was the most volatile year in modern history, we would be mistaken to think that the disruption is over. Rather as we move into 2021 and beyond, the rate of disruption will potentially accelerate. . As the implications from 2020 play out across the next several years, and I believe that that is absolutely true.
Here's my so what for the entire article. You have to know your community. You have to know your people, pull them, whatever it takes to understand what they're thinking and what they're feeling. Make sure that you're getting that information. Don't just rely on HR to do that as well. Come up with your own mechanisms within it to get as personal as you can with them to understand what their expectations are.
You need to know the forces at work. Who is hiring in your community, and how are they coming into your community? It used to be pretty straightforward. Here are the five to 10 major employers in your community. Well, that may not be the case anymore. You may be looking at other employers who are making their way into your community to hire away some of your best workers.
Create an environment where they want to be a part of. Right. That is the best thing that we can do to retain employees. I mean, just create a place where they want to be. Give them managers that they like to work for. Give them rewarding work. The next thing, remote work creates options, right? We have to be aware that it creates options.
Options create mobility. You can't assume that you have them because. You're the largest employer, as I talked about earlier, or even that you're the only Cerner or epic implementation in the area. People have options. These people are being hired to do work around the country, around the world even, and so if you have trained them up and given them the skills, but you have not addressed the work environment that they live in and are not creating a work environment that is conducive to the lifestyle that they want, you're likely going to lose employees and that is not an option.
Going into the next phase of really high transition within healthcare. Alright, that's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, you get the picture.
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