PeopleHosp Bangalore: Voices from the Conference

The conference on Human Resource Management in Healthcare, named PeopleHosp, was organized by AMEN on July 4^th at Ashraya International Hotel in Bangalore. The conference attracted HR professionals from hospitals from Bangalore and outside.

The conference opened with an interesting talk by Mr. Siddharth N, General Manager & Head HR for Cloudnine Hospitals, Bangalore. His topic covered a futuristic view on HR competencies required in healthcare. The presentation, made enjoyable with a healthy dose of cartoons, discussed some key challenges facing the industry, like training, retention, sourcing, lack of discipline among the new breed of employees, lack of English speaking skills among the prospective employees, professionalism, skill-levels, employability and ramping-up of operations.

He put forth questions on how to deal with a large employee-base who is required to deliver personalized care to the patients, how to design systems that ensure customer centricity at each employee level and how to ensure sensitivity among the staff on medico-legal aspects of their profession. In the end, he emphasized the role of HR in driving critical circuits in the organization, in being the advisor to the business head while managing the core responsibilities of the function, managing risk, creating change and making a difference to the enterprise. He signed off by proposing the ‘competency way of thinking’ for managing HR in healthcare.

Ms. Nagarathna A, Asst. Prof. of Law at National Law School – Bangalore, shared her insights on ‘Statutory and Legal issues related to HRM in hospitals. Dr. Navin Chugh, who heads Quality at Global Group of Hospitals – Bangalore, discussed the requirements of NABH quality standards applicable to HRM. He took up the discussion based on the latest 3^rd edition of NABH standards for hospital and provided suggestions to audience on implementing the standards and facing the audit. When asked whether doctors practicing alternative medicine (AYUSH) can work in an allopathic hospital through privileging, he cited MCI regulations and said that this practice is illegal and therefore will attractive non-conformance in an NABH Audit. He also shared the practice of daily quality rounds as a means to monitor process compliance in his hospital.

Ms. Reshma Lobo, Principal – Padmashree College of Hospital Administration Bangalore, gave a talk on ‘Manpower Requirement & Planning for hospitals’. The topic on training of hospital staff was taken up by Mr. Schreyas Nair, GM – Training and Development, at Fortis Hospital Bangalore. She explained the approach followed at Fortis hospital in ensuring that the staff is appropriately trained to work in the hospital. Her talk began with a discussion on finding out how the training fits into the agenda of the organization. This, she said, is achieved through an identity statement for the training department, which in their case covers aspects like anticipates requirements of the business, be a catalyst of change, contribute to performance excellence, have people focus and connect, raise the bar of excellence and enable the organization to fulfill its vision.

She explained that the training department plans its activities through a 4 step process, which involves training needs investigation, needs analysis, creation of training modules and creation of training calendar. One interesting insight she shared about training at Fortis hospital was the Nurses Leadership program. The program is undertaken for nurses who show commitment at their work and consistently excel among their team members. The nurses who undergo this program are selected to lead floor teams or even head smaller hospitals’ nursing teams. For their performance management, the balanced scorecard is used which even includes financial metrics. The metrics focuses on cost reduction through a reduced Average Length of Stay (ALOS). She highlighted the importance of nurses in implementing strict infection control processes, thereby reducing the overall risk to the patients and ensuring a lower ALOS.

Mr. Kiran Gautham, Dy. Director at Alliance University Bangalore spoke about strategies for effective selection, recruitment and employee retention. This was followed by a talk by Mr. Marian Jayson on ‘Performance Appraisals – Tools and Techniques’. His talk focused on managing performance in the organization and linking the same through a robust appraisal system where the superior performance is rewarded and a below-expectation performance attracts strong feedback and strict action. He also shared insights on ways and means for deciding KRAs (Key Result Areas) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of various staff levels.

The conference ended with Mr. Ganesh Selvaraj, VP – HR at Manipal Health Enterprises, sharing his views on ‘Motivating today’s hospital staff’. His presentation was centered on techniques used at Manipal for motivating its employees. The methods which were employed by the company included staff-management interaction, employee engagement exercise, appreciating contribution by senior-most employees of the company at important events etc.

The conference successfully touched upon the various aspects of Healthcare HRM with the views of various industry leaders. The audiences were thoroughly engaged by the speakers and the question-answer sessions saw good participation from them.

The success of PeopleHosp in Bangalore has raised the expectations from the conferences which are going to be part of this series at other cities of India. The next edition is going to happen in Mumbai on August 29th.

Technology in Human Resource Management in Healthcare

I had the privilege to be a speaker during the PeopleHosp conference organized by AMEN at Bangalore on July 4th. The topic of my talk was "Technology in HRM in Healthcare". For the benefit of the community, the presentation is available for reference on Scribd.
Technology in Human Resource Management in Healthcare

HospiArch comes home in Bangalore in August

Are we serious about Performance Appraisals?

In the upcoming conference PeopleHosp on the issues pertaining to human resource management in healthcare industry, one of the topics for discussion is performance appraisals. Having spent couple of years in IT and healthcare industry, I belong to the category of cynics for the relevance of performance appraisals. This is not to mean that I do not believe in performance appraisals. My disappointment is with the way appraisals are carried out. In our corporate scenario, both appraiser and appraisee are clueless about the concept of performance measurement and performance management. Appraisals are thought to be an activity which has to be performed during April-May and are seen as a burden and not as a performance improvement exercise. Most people would agree with me that, as employees, we have lost trust in the appraisal process because our managers never set performance goals on time, they are not clear about how to measure the performance itself, ratings are seen as a subjective indicator of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the manager with his juniors and favouritism is a norm rather than being an exception.

So what can be done to respond positively to this situation? Can something be done to transform performance appraisals as an employee motivation exercise?

As you would have noticed, primarily the organizations need to drill down the concept of performance linked to organization’s goals at every level. For doing that, the company leadership should have goal-setting exercises during February-March of the year so that it sets the direction for goal-setting for the individuals down the hierarchy.

Another important aspect here is for the managers to understand the job description and scope of the work of their subordinates. The performance goals have to be set ultimately in the scope of the work of the subordinates. This is where the HR comes into sharp focus. Each year the HR should engage the managers in a discussion to re-emphasize the concept of job descriptions. The scope helps the manager and the subordinate to understand whether the performance was as per the expectations or not and in which aspect did the subordinate performance outstandingly. No work outside the purview of job description can be seen as exceeding expectations because it may not be useful to company goals. For example, if person X does person Y’s job, it can’t be said that person X did more work, rather it was the inability of the manager to get the work done from Y. in the instance that Y was not able to function, say because of medical leave or pregnancy, then one can appreciate X for taking the burden of her colleague.

Most organizations follow the bell-curve (normal distribution) or the forced ranking method for rating their employees. Again, most employees don’t understand how it works and even HR people lack confidence in explaining the functioning of the method. Forced ranking method requires that each individual in a unit/department be compared to each other (forced comparison) and then a descending list of performance is prepared. So if there are 20 employees in a department and all happen to be great performers, still the manager has to arrange their performances in a descending order. How you do it is the trick. The manager and the HR have to carefully develop metrics that can objectively measure the performance of these set of people and arrive at a score. These scores can then be sorted in a descending order.

The normal distribution concept of appraisals relies on the fact that the organization has a pre-set budget to award compensation and increments to their staff. So the quartiles are identified and linked to increments. Therefore the 25^th percentile may get the lowest increments and the 75^th quartile may get the highest increments. The organization may also be using the concept of percentiles. So the 10^th or the 20^th percentiles get the lowest increments and the 80^th or the 90^th percentiles get the highest increments. Since the performances have been converted into a score and ranked in a descending order, identifying the employees who fall in which quartile or percentile is easy. What is difficult is to explain to a well-performing employee on why he has to be in a lower percentile even when his/her performance was very good. Probably that is where the HR needs to take efforts in explaining to the employees in advance how the forced ranking system works and what is the company policy in deciding the percentiles, the rationale behind it and the method of computing the same.

If we look at the situation from the NABH standards perspective, HRM 5 (Chapter 9, Human Resource Management, 3rd edition) also deals with performance appraisals in detail, requiring that such a system exists in the organization, employees should be aware of this system, pre-determined criteria for performance evaluation should exist and the evaluation should be carried out at pre-defined intervals and should be documented. Therefore, performance appraisals are linked to quality healthcare set-up in hospitals as well.

From my own experience, I have found that a communication in advance with the employees on performance goals, measurement technique and percentiles linked to company’s increment policy can reduce the heart-burning to a large extent when certain good performers have to be pushed down the percentiles because of the forced ranking.

We would be attending PeopleHosp in Bangalore on July 4^th, 2012. Hope to see you there. Talk to us and we’ll be happy to get you discount for attending PeopleHosp in Bangalore.

AMEN presents PeopleHosp - a Conference series on Strategic Human Resource Management for Hospitals