HR Pulse - Summer 2008 - (Page 43)

comprehensive, real-time data on performance and goals to feed their recruitment, succession, compensation, training, quality, and strategicplanning processes. This is where the true power and value lies. Taking a Holistic Approach to Talent Management While employee appraisals remain the heart of employee performance and talent management, organizations are recognizing how appraisals form the basis of many key talent management functions, including succession planning and learning management. This holistic approach recognizes that appraisals are vital to the organization’s ability to manage and administer talent management processes. For example, with a rapidly growing number of health care professionals retiring in the near future, HR teams need an effective strategy to ensure that they have skilled workers ready to replace retiring workers. By incorporating and tightly integrating succession planning into the overall employee performance and talent management process, health care providers can eliminate duplication and streamline this critical HR function. Succession planning is no longer just about grooming senior leadership; it’s about ensuring there’s a pool of employees who are ready to ﬁll vacancies in critical areas throughout the organization. An integrated approach enables organizations to leverage all the information gained during the employee performance-management process to quickly provide insight into areas of performance strength and weakness, high-performing employees and employees at risk. It also provides a quick view of your bench strength for skills and roles in key areas—pediatric nursing, for instance. The end result is a better understanding of retention risks, skills gaps, and workforce potential. Regardless of a health care organization’s size, compensation and pay-for-performance programs are a major part of the ability to become and remain an employer of choice. With an approach that closely links compensation and its programs with appraisals, the entire process of managing, administrating, and delivering adjustments and bonuses is more effective and streamlined. For example, a pay-for-performance system that links compensation to the realization of speciﬁc goals requires a consistent means of measuring and reporting on each employee’s achievements. Manual systems, in which information is collected and analyzed from multiple documents, are complex, laborious, and error prone. An automated system that embeds performance data within compensation processes allows organizations to quickly and easily allocate merit-based compensation including base salary, variable pay, and bonuses. Major productivity gains can be made by automating the workflow and eliminating the tasks associated with paper-based systems. Driving Value at All Levels In most cases, health care organizations begin looking at automating employee performancemanagement functions in a drive to reduce the administrative burden of coordinating and managing the appraisal process. Web-based systems provide proven beneﬁts, reducing both the time and cost of managing the appraisal process for all involved. CentraState Healthcare System in New Jersey implemented a Web-based system and achieved major time savings. They have estimated that managers alone are saving 15 minutes per appraisal, which works out to 575 hours saved by managers, and doesn’t even take into account the time saved by HR. From a cost-savings perspective, by moving 2,200 employees to a new Web-based system, Cabell Huntington Hospital in Huntington, W.Va., estimates it has saved at least $50,000 in the ﬁrst year alone. While the time and cost savings of an automated employee performance-management system are quite obvious, these systems offer many other beneﬁts to employees, managers, and executives. At all levels, automated goal management functions provide immense value. By linking individual goals to strategic organizational goals, health care organizations get a powerful tool to ensure the entire organization—not just its management team—is pulling in the same direction. Executives, managers and employees gain insight into the progress being made on corporate objectives. For HR, goal management provides a measurable way to track employee performance year-over-year and to report progress on achieving objectives. Goal alignment also increases employee engagement by giving employees a strong understanding of how their contributions tie to overall operational plans. Traditionally, a major shortcoming of employee performance-management processes has been that they are highly tactical in nature. By moving to a Web-based system, organizations get advanced reporting capabilities that enable them to effectively track and measure employee performance management initiatives, which is critical to any organization’s retention strategies and overall success. Additionally, the important task of tracking certiﬁcations and then keeping them updated is streamlined with an integrated development/ employee performance management system, as all the information is available at everyone’s ﬁn- 43 HR Pulse Summer 2008 >>

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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