HR Pulse - Summer 2008 - (Page 15)

[HR LEADER] Carol Bank, SPHR t took Carol Bank a while to find her way into health care, but once she did, she knew she was home. She started her career working for several manufacturing companies in Wisconsin and Illinois, gaining experience at the plant level as a personnel manager and later as a corporate HR manager. After 12 years in that industry, she went to work as an HR generalist at the Regional Transportation Authority in Chicago. But the ﬁt still wasn’t right. “I made a conscious decision to move into health care because I was looking for a place where the values were congruent with what I believe in—where the question was, ‘How can we improve people’s lives?’ I wanted to believe in the organization I worked for and the people I worked with,” says Bank. “I didn’t fully realize how important that was to me until my 40s.” In 1991, Bank took on the role of vice president of HR at Divine Savior Hospital and Nursing Home (renamed Divine Savior Healthcare in 1999), a small rural facility in Portage, Wis., with the idea of gaining experience in the health care arena and then moving back to Chicago. Seventeen years later, she’s still there and continues to love her job, the organization, and the industry. “Health care people in general are much more collaborative than {the ones I’ve known} in other industries. People tend to be very helpful and supportive and are willing to share information with newbies and old timers alike,” explains Bank. After all these years in her role at Divine Savior, she says that every day is still different and that there’s a never-ending amount of work to do. The Generalist’s Hat When she arrived in 1991, the organization had 350 employees at two locations, and Bank had one staff member. Today, it has four facilities, more than 700 employees, and six full-time HR professionals. On day one Bank found no computer on her desk—let alone an HRIS system—and one of the ﬁrst things she did was help bring the organization up to date in terms of technology. “Clinically, we were state of the art, but we were seriously behind in terms of the technology we needed for operations. Being small was no excuse not to put technology to work for us. I convinced my boss pretty quickly that we needed an HRIS system, and we never looked back,” she explains. Bank has worked hard to make sure that Divine Savior keeps pace with technology. Today, the organization boasts an online performance management system with employee tracking capabilities—something that many, much-larger organizations have yet to implement—and an online education system will be added later this year. This HR veteran has always enjoyed the variety that comes with the role and has vowed to remain a generalist. I 15 HR Pulse Summer 2008 “I made a conscious decision to move into health care because I was looking for a place where the values were congruent with what I believe in—where the question was, ‘How can we improve people’s lives?’”

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of HR Pulse - Summer 2008

HR Pulse - Summer 2008 Contents Pulse Points Executive Director's Letter President's Message HR Leader Profile: Carol Bank, SPHR Special Report: Building a Thriving Workforce Creating A Best Place to Work Employee Morale Don't Set Up Your Managers to Fail From Tedious Task to Strategic Process Employer-Assisted Housing Changing the Paradigm of Nurse Recruitment Workforce Recognition: Simple Gestures Go a Long way Advertisers' Index

HR Pulse - Summer 2008

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