Today in health, it, we start down our list of the top five things that

are top of mind for healthcare CEOs.

And today.

The conversation is about labor.

It's about staff.

It's about the competition for staff.

That's what we're going to talk about.

My name is bill Russell.

I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system.

And creator this weekend.

It a channel dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged.

All right.

A couple of things I want to cover before we get to this topic.

If you're unaware, we have launched four channels for

2022 this week health academy.

This week health community, this week health conference

and this week health news.

All right, so we have four channels for next year.

Let me give you a little rundown of each one.

Here's what I want you to do.

I want you to hit the website.

Click on them and go ahead and subscribe to the new channels.

You can subscribe to all of them except for community and academy on iTunes.

We're still waiting for those to be approved for some reason, but hopefully

there'll be approved this week and you can subscribe to them there.

Let me tell you about each one.

News is about the news.

It's going to be the today show and the new stay show shows that have

been very successful on our channels.

And I look forward to you subscribing to that.

And keeping up to date on the news conference is, we want to develop a

channel that is a year long conference.

It's just keeps going.

And we're going to have a show called keynote, where we have keynote

speakers and we talked to them for.

You know, 45, 50 minutes here, what's going on in their world.

How they're impacting health.

It.

, this is going to be about the intersection of healthcare and

technology and how things are shaping up.

, we're also going to do solution showcases, which think about that as

the walk of the floor, to look at the different solutions that are available.

This week health community is a new channel for us.

Here for the first time we're going to have guest hosts and they are going to

bring their own guests onto the show.

So this is going to be.

, a channel that is community based and focus.

We want to go a little deeper in this show.

We want people to be talking to a frontline people who are

working with,, analytics, clinical informatics data, you name it.

, but this is the show.

We're going to be hearing that three times a week or twice a week.

Tuesday, Thursday is the community show and we have some guest hosts

already lined up and we have more invitations out there and you

can, can subscribe to that as well.

And this week health academy is where you go to get educated

on healthcare and healthcare.

It.

Our first show in there is going to be insights.

It's going to air on Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

What we heard from you is that you use our show to bring new people into the

industry up to speed quickly, and that it isn't a very effective way to do that.

Here's what we're going to do.

We're going to take excerpts from our first four and a half years of shows.

We're going to take the highlights and we're going to put them

into a show called insights.

It's going to air Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

How are, do you see that as people who are new to the industry, or if you're

mentoring, somebody have them listen to that show, listen along with them

and tell them, you know, what your thoughts are on it and bring them

up to speed on what you're doing.

You can subscribe to any of these shows, go to this week.

health.com.

And on the homepage, there's the four shows right there.

You could also go to this week, health.com/shows and subscribe

there, or anywhere you listen to podcasts, you could do it there.

All right.

Let's get to today's topic.

The top of mind issues for health it execs.

And if you remember, we sorta laid them out.

There was labor was number one, cybersecurity.

Number two.

All things digital, number three, automation was number four and caravan

used to change and care vendors.

It's number five every day.

This week, I'm going to be touching on one of these and talking

about what I would do as a CIO.

Based on what I'm hearing from the CIS.

So let's talk about number one.

It is labor, and this is the competition for staff.

It's about retention.

It's about attracting new staff, all things having to do with staff.

There is a significant competition that's going on for staff right now.

Here's how I'm going to break this particular one down for you.

Number one, we're going to be looking at.

, retention, then we're going to be looking at attracting and finding new talent.

And then the final thing I want to talk about is developing staff.

Okay.

So let's talk about retention.

I think a 0% retention goal is a bad goal.

I've always thought it was a bad goal.

And I know some of the things I'm going to say here might ruffle some feathers,

but this is just the way I think about it.

Adapt it to how you think about it.

A 0% retention rate tells me you're not developing people.

If you're developing people, they should be in high demand

outside of your four walls.

And quite frankly, you're going to lose some of them.

You should lose some of them.

It's okay to lose some of them.

, the only way to get a 0% retention rate is to hire people , pay them well above

what they're worth or hire them well beyond what their capabilities are, or to

not develop any staff and not make them more valuable than the day they started.

With your organization.

So again, 0% retention rate is not a good retention rate.

So you're going to lose some people let's assume.

90% retention is a good retention number.

If you're going to lose 10% of your staff, you should know which staff.

You are going to struggle if you lose.

Right.

So I always, in my mind, Alyssa people that I could not afford

to lose as an organization.

And so I have talked to some people who have lost key staff recently, you know,

the person who, really knows the network inside and out, who knows all the routes,

who knows how all the,, the V LANs are set up and all that kind of stuff.

Not that you couldn't recreate that, but that is a, significant

role in some organizations.

You need to know who those people are, just do it once twos and threes.

If you lost them, ones are, if you lost them, you would struggle.

You'd have to pay a consultant to come in.

You would have to, uh, potentially pay a recruiter to find somebody.

If there are ones you need to make sure you're taking care of your ones

need to make sure they are connected to you, connected to the organization.

That they are being taken care of, that they are being paid.

Appropriately for the role that they're doing within your organization,

that they clearly understand.

The lines of communication that they clearly understand what's expected of

them, that they clearly understand what's next for them, with my ones, actually,

with everyone in my organization.

I want it to be able to ask them what's next in your career and

I wanted to get a very crisp answer from them.

Part of that was my job.

As the leader, I needed to make sure that the career tracks were very well

understood and I needed to make sure that the managers were having conversations

with each individual employee to make sure that they understood why or they

wanted to go within the organization and that they were developing them,

that they were investing in them in ways that were going

to get them to the next level.

One of the biggest problems we have is that people always think it's about money.

It's not always about money.

Sometimes it's about the manager that they have.

Sometimes it's about the culture.

Sometimes it's about, they just don't know where what's next for them.

And so they start looking outside your organization.

If you don't make it clear, what's next for them within your organization,

they're going to find somewhere else to go outside your organization.

All right.

So retention, you have to be clear with them.

What's next?

You have to pay them accordingly and you have to create the right structure.

If they have a bad manager, that's on you.

You've got to do something about bad managers.

, we did, poll surveys on a regular basis.

And you could almost identify the bad managers within our department.

Now we had, 600 to 700, some odd people in the organization.

And you could just look at the responses and say, okay,

There's a group of people here that are really not happy.

Oh my gosh.

They report to two managers.

, so that is.

Generally an indicator.

All right, let's talk about the competition for staff.

We just did two great shows from the healthcare to healthcare event.

We did one with Doug king CIO of Northwestern medicine, and he

talked about what they are doing to.

, bring new talent into their organization.

If you haven't listened to that show, listen to it.

They've built a really good pipeline of people coming into their organization.

Young people, smart people, talented people.

, they're focused on diversity.

They're focused on, , Getting people early so that they don't, they're not inhibited

by what they have learned somewhere else.

So you get new thinking.

, new approaches.

They're tied into the universities and colleges and they're pulling people out.

Directly.

So, he shared a lot of things that they're doing it.

Northwestern medicine.

And I think it's valuable for any CIO to take a listen to that episode.

It's one of the today shows it was from November 15th.

All right.

The other one was November 10th.

It was also from the health care to health care event.

It was Stephanie Lahr with monument health, and she talks about culture.

Developing a good culture.

In a remote world.

And how important is to do that.

Not only to retain your existing staff, but to attract new staff into that.

, when people come into a vibrant culture and exciting culture, they

make connections very quickly.

They feel at home and it's a place that they want to stay

and you know, what else they do.

They tell other people about it.

, whenever I'm talking to people about.

Finding new talent, really attracting new talent.

If you like the people who work for you.

They are the best way to go about getting additional talent

within your organization.

Now, if they aren't saying good things about working in your organization,

you've got another set of problems, but generally speaking, if you

can get your staff excited about working where they are working today.

They will know people in the industry.

And if they don't know people in industry, you're doing a bad job, developing them.

You need to introduce them to other people in the industry.

But at this point when you're having a battle for staff, your

staff is your best ambassadors.

Your staff is the best.

I don't know a Sherlock out there.

They're going to be the ones who find a new talent to bring them in.

Plus the stuff that Doug talks about creating a pipeline.

Uh, all the way back to high school, they're bringing in a high

school kids and giving them a great experience at Northwestern medicine.

So that's, , you know, we talked about retention.

We talk about the competition for staff.

You've got to make your place a great place to work.

You've got to use your staff to find new staff.

And you've got to be working on great projects.

So you have to take the mundane tasks.

We've been talking about this for years.

For some reason we haven't made as much progress as we need to

make, which is we've got to take the mundane tasks and we've got

to automate the heck out of them.

And then we've got to take that off of people's plate.

We can't keep putting mundane stuff on them and then saying, come work here.

We're doing great stuff.

, we may be doing great stuff, but it's in that department over

there, or that department over there, it's not necessarily.

Here.

What you want is , you want to take that mundane stuff off the plate and say, look,

we are working on the next generation.

Of cloud for healthcare and it sort of looks like this.

You need, something that's going to, that's going to catch

people's eyes and bring them in.

Let's talk about developing staff.

You have to develop your staff.

And I've, I've talked about this a couple of times on the show, but you

can't send all of them to conferences.

You can send all of them to training.

So what are you going to do?

And the answer to that is you've got to figure out a way.

To invest in your staff and create a mentoring program.

Everybody in your organization who wants to be mentored should be mentored.

And you have to define what mentoring is and mentoring can be as simple as,

sharing your connections, sharing your experience, sharing your knowledge,

and creating an environment where they can take risks, where they

can go out and try the next thing.

And you can be there alongside of them To make sure that they don't fail and

to make sure that they are picking up and learning the right things.

You are going to help somebody to take the next step in their career.

Everyone should have that opportunity within your organization.

If you don't, you're just asking for trouble.

You're just asking for people to leave.

One of the reasons we developed this channel on this show.

Is because there are 700 people in my organization.

I couldn't send them all to classes.

I couldn't mentor them all.

And I wanted them to experience the conversations I was having at

the conferences with other CEOs.

And so I started to do these interviews so that they could

have access to these things.

Mentoring, somebody could be as simple as listening to the show with them

and having a conversation with them.

And you can pick the shows you want to have.

We've done 450 of them.

And you can pick the ones that are specific to data, clinical informatics,

cybersecurity, whatever topic you want, or the people you think might be interesting.

You might want to talk to them about what they're doing at Intermountain

or what they're doing at.

, NYU Lango and or what they're doing at, you know, fill in the blank.

We've talked to a lot of different health systems, a lot of different CEOs.

A lot of different perspectives and that's another way to mentor people and

you've got to be developing your people.

If you don't, you're just asking for trouble.

Well, that's all for today.

If you know of anyone that might benefit from our channel, like say

someone you're trying to mentor, they can subscribe on our website this week.

health.com.

We want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to

develop the next generation of leaders.

VMware Hill-Rom Starbridge advisors, McAfee and Aruba networks.

Thanks for listening.