As HR leaders in health care prepare for 2025, they’re concerned with many of the same challenges as their cross-industry peers, such as talent shortages, retention and culture. But they’re also grappling with heightened regulation and the fact that adoption of strategic or technology solutions for their workforce challenges can take longer to implement.
“A top priority for health care HR leaders today is to strategically use emerging technology to streamline the hiring, staffing and employee engagement process,” Cary Grace, CEO of AMN Healthcare, the largest publicly traded health care workforce solutions company in the United States, told Newsweek via email. “The number of health care professionals is limited and staffing shortages persist, so retention is a key issue. In 2025, the goal is to use technology to gain more efficiency from the workforce and to ensure we keep our health care professionals fully engaged and supported.”
At the WBR HR health care conference in Boston last month, technology and innovation were the key themes discussed as talent shortages and burnout remain key issues in their workforces. As the working world rapidly evolves, HR leaders in health care say they’re feeling a push to innovate, but driving new ideas forward can be tough in their organizations.
For the HR executives at places like Northwell Health, Jewish General Hospital and JPS Health Network discussing their priorities on the panel, the first steps are acknowledging how much has changed and how far they may have to go to get ready for the future.
“We have to get back to being good to each other and supportive of each other,” Beverly Kravitz, director of HR, communications, legal affairs and global security at Jewish General Hospital, said at the conference’s closing panel on September 24. “I think the pandemic threw us for a loop, and I’ve seen a lot of people have changed.”
Kravitz’s strategic response has emphasized retention.
“We work so hard to recruit them,” she continued. “If we’re not going to work even harder to keep them and keep them safe, healthy, happy, with great career trajectories, we’re wasting our time.”
To boost engagement, Tony Pellicano, SVP and CHRO at Catholic Health, told Newsweek: “Our primary strategy to support this includes improving recognition, offering frequent feedback, providing opportunities for personal and career growth and ensuring that team members have a voice in the decision-making process regarding quality, safety and patient experience improvements.”
Sometimes, if keeping an employee isn’t possible, Kravitz suggests putting your pride away and finding ways to retain that institutional knowledge.
“Bring them back, either as coaches or consultants,” she said.
Alumni programs can also help circulate institutional knowledge and even be a boon for referrals if they have a good experience while there, David Gill, vice president, team member and family services at Northwell Health, said on the panel.
“The establishment of alumni programs…[is] going to help build the workforce that you need, because that time, that talent, but also importantly, that institutional knowledge leaves with the individual,” he explained.
Gill added that he’s pushing toward customization, or “personalization,” of total rewards and employee experience, acknowledging the multigenerational workforce and myriad lifestyles people can have while working full or part time in health care, leading to a vast array of preferences that are hard to keep up with. He said he sees a lot of room for growth in this area.
In order to address burnout, leaders are advocating for stronger prevention and identification measures.
“The key to addressing and preventing burnout is to recognize the signs and act quickly,” Pellicano shared. He said his company’s turnover rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels thanks to a wide range of improved support including training for managers, peer-to-peer support, employee assistance programs, recharge rooms and a 24/7 online behavioral health offering.
Bill Kong, COO and president of Vivian Health, a health care talent marketplace, advocates for building resilience, adaptability and flexibility within the structures and supports available to the workforce.
“Leaders are aiming to create more agile staffing models that can quickly respond to fluctuating patient demands and future crises,” Kong told Newsweek via email. “Coupled with this is a pressing need to focus on upskilling and reskilling the workforce to handle new technologies like AI, which are reshaping care delivery models. HR departments themselves will lean into this by leveraging advanced analytics and AI-driven tools to streamline recruitment, optimize scheduling.”
“To reduce feelings of burnout, employers are offering flexible schedules and the opportunity to work remotely or in a hybrid practice model,” Grace said. “Employers are reducing the time health care professionals spend on nonclinical duties such as data entry or administration and giving them more face time with patients….This serves the dual purpose of both enhancing worker retention and enhancing quality of patient care.”
Many HR professionals across industries have noted an increasing strategic nature to their work and an increasing respect for the inputs that lead to strong cultures and high retention: empathy, listening and open-mindedness, with an eye for agility.
Technology will be an enabler, not the key, said Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, CHRO of JPS Health Network. The key is the mindset shift around people management and everyone’s collective understanding of optimal performance.
“We are now moving into a digital era that is allowing us to be a lot more strategic and have a lot more predictive analytics at our fingertips, and it really can inform the way we provide care, except our people aren’t conditioned that way,” she said. “So figuring out how to help people be smart like that and give them opportunities to practice that in their daily work” will allow organizations to handle anything the future brings, she explained.
The point of this, after all, is better patient outcomes.
“The overarching goal is to transform health care HR practices to not only meet immediate staffing needs, but also to build a workforce capable of adapting to the rapidly changing health care landscape,” Kong said. “This strategic shift is essential for ensuring high-quality patient care and operational efficiency in an increasingly complex and demanding health care environment.”
HR also has a responsibility to implore all organizational leaders to reflect these values, Ridgeway-Washington added, and health care leaders of tomorrow need to be more than good clinicians.
“It will be through being a good clinician if that’s what it takes, but it will also be that they are agile, that they have a growth mindset, that they understand critical thinking, are empathetic, leading with emotional intelligence, and that they’re adding value in a way that ChatGPT can’t,” she said.
Though the topic of diversity, equity and inclusion has become mired in political debate, HR professionals largely present the straightforward reality that companies benefit when employees get along, when they respect each other, and when their products and services reflect the needs of all possible buyers. Kong brought it up as part of the solution to burnout.
Ridgeway-Washington emphasized that it’s important to think about DEI’s relationship with business goals.
“What you really should be talking about is how we create a competitive advantage by using human ingenuity to build the best product for who we want to sell it to, which is all people,” she said.
She and Kravitz shared their journeys of acknowledgement for the ground that they needed to cover in the recent past. Kravitz said she felt good about her company because over 80 languages were spoken among the staff, and the team was very diverse. But she had not been thinking as much about how to drive equity or belonging.
Ridgeway-Washington shared that her framing of DEI was too “U.S.-centric,” she realized, once she took on a global ERG leadership role at Amazon. As a longtime self-identified “DEI champion,” she said she realized then that everyone has a journey to make and that we’re all still on it right now.
For business leaders, taking an organization through this now-thorny concept begins with some humility.
“It starts with people saying that ‘I am not so arrogant as to believe my context is the only context, and that that context that I had is the right context,’” Ridgeway-Washington said, ending with applause from the crowd as she finished her statement.
“Diversity of thought is really at the core of what we’re trying to achieve,” she said. “It starts with this notion of humility, vulnerability and fallacy. Those are the coordinates of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. If we can strip the ego out and destigmatize these labels, what we get is a much more competitive environment and a much more innovative product.”
Pellicano shared that at Catholic Health they’re training highly motivated team members to be DEI champions. Some are taking certificate programs or coursework at local colleges.
“These trained individuals will serve as campus champions, providing support and guidance on this important issue,” he said.
Inclusion is typically a staff matter, something to keep tabs on internally, but these topics are all interrelated as Kong has suggested. Multiple executives discussed including workers in major organization decisions and raising transparency as part of their solution for burnout, which also addresses inclusion, and a more inclusive environment can attract a wider range of candidates.
“Employers also are responding to the fact that we have a shortage of health care workers and can only grow the workforce by expanding opportunities to the most diverse group of candidates possible,” Grace said.
It can also help to think about how inclusive the health care services are, which can be a reflection of the staff but also the organization’s values, by providing translation services in order to accommodate patients as best as possible.
“Most health care organizations also reinforce multicultural inclusivity by providing in-person or virtual translation services to accommodate the hundreds of languages spoken by patients today,” Grace said. “Numerous studies show a connection between language and cultural fluency and better patient outcomes.”
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