CHG Healthcare Services passed its 2014 training health assessment with flying colors. Standout training programs for the health-care staffing company were diverse, including an initiative to educate CHG employees on how to give back to their community, a comprehensive employee referral program, and a new program to address the retention of first-year employees. With so many innovative programs, this company’s continued growth in learning and development shows no sign of slowing.
TRAINING HOW TO GIVE BACK
“The 2014 program we are most proud of is the Heart of CHG, an initiative to educate our people on the opportunities available to them in giving back to their peers and the surrounding community,” says Learning and Development Senior Director Drew Clarke. “At a company level, our organization has always been actively engaged in the community, but we felt that a more formalized approach would provide better opportunities for individual employees to give back.”
Starting with a kick-off seminar in which CHG’s CEO and COO partnered in introducing the initiative to employees, this year-long rollout highlighted the different features of the program, including paid time off (PTO) gifting, Employee Network Groups, and the Compassion Fund (a program funded by employees, for employees, providing tax-free financial grants to help other employees in need or dealing with financial hardship). “In just the first eight months of this program,” says Clarke, “employee donations have funded 10 grants, and more than 10 percent of our employees are making automatic contributions to the fund each pay period.”
TAMING TURNOVER
Among CHG’s major challenges in 2014 was its turnover rate. Although CHG has industry-leading turnover at less than 21 percent (health-care staffing industry averages 55 percent), the company is careful not to underestimate the significant cost related to turnover in a relationship industry such as health care. “Because of the lengthy ramp-up time in the first few years of employment in health-care staffing, new hire retention has always been a challenge,” says Clarke. “To make sure new employees receive the resources they need during this time, one of our divisions developed Passport, a year-long onboarding program that escorts new hires through a series of functions within the company.” The way it works is employees earn a stamp in their “passport” with each new person they meet. Participants then share their first-year experience with division leaders as part of a capstone event.
The program has proven successful. Passport participants on average made placements three to five weeks earlier than new hires from the previous year. Clarke says this early success has helped keep new employees more engaged and less likely to leave within their first year. Since the implementation of Passport, the division’s turnover of first-year employees has decreased by 5 percent.
LEARNING TECHNOLOGY OVERHAUL
The most ambitious learning goals will be held back without the right supporting technologies. Last year, CHG took its first steps toward enhancing this essential training tool. “2014 was a year that we spent laying the groundwork for a major learning technology initiative in 2015,” says Clarke. He explains that in the past, CHG utilized several platforms throughout the organization for tracking and disseminating learning, each one operating in isolation from other systems in the company. “Although these learning management and document storage systems were meeting the most basic needs for individual teams and divisions, there was a low ceiling of what we could achieve with this approach,” says Clarke. These smaller-scale tools most often had a limited scope of functionality, and without a singular enterprise-wide solution, the company’s ability to leverage reports and other data points at an organizational level would continue to be limited. For that reason, Clarke and his colleagues worked as a committee to identify the individual needs of divisions, and after a long search and proposal process, partnered with SuccessFactors as CHG’s new learning technology solution. The Learning team then built an implementation and rollout strategy due to begin in the first quarter of 2015.
REDOUBLING ON RECRUITMENT
Finding the right employees to take your company where you want it to go is essential, so last year also marked a major effort by CHG to better utilize employees in the recruitment process. The company’s Talent Acquisition team launched a comprehensive employee referral program. In addition to the traditional $350 incentive for a successful referral, a series of campaign collaterals was launched to increase referrals. One such strategy was to educate employees on what a good referral looks like, as well as arming each employee with specifically designed referral cards that can be handed out when they encounter someone who embodies CHG’s core values. “Our people are our best resource to find new talent,” says Clarke, noting that 58 percent of the company’s hires in the last year began as employee referrals.
Another approach CHG is using to enhance recruitment is promotion of its culture at local colleges. “Our relationships with local colleges provide us the opportunity to get in front of potential job seekers,” says Clarke. CHG’s senior leaders frequently speak at schools, sit on panels, and conduct workshops with MBA students, teaching prospective leaders and employees about CHG’s business and culture. “We know these are some of the most effective ways to both share our culture and find those with qualities that best align with ours,” Clarke notes. “In fact, in 2014, CHG was selected by Millennials as one of the organizations where they would most want to work, based on a recent survey by the National Society of High School Scholars (NSHSS).”
WINNING CULTURE & COLLABORATION
Corporate culture at CHG is taken seriously. The company sees cultivation of the most productive, positive culture as key to its success. “Over the years, CHG has been recognized as outstanding in many different categories, from financial achievement to how we treat our employees. The number and variety of accolades are positively correlated with the number and variety of people-centric programs we implement,” says Clarke, who cites the following culture-oriented awards the company has earned in the last two years, in addition to earning the No. 4 spot on the Training Top 125 list for 2014 and 2015:
- No. 16 on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list
- No. 6 on Computerworld’s “Best Places to Work in IT” list
- DecisionWise’s “Employee Engagement Best Practice” award
- Staffing Industry Analysts’ “Best Staffing Firms to Work For” award
- Utah Council for Healthy Worksite Promotion’s Healthy Worksite and Wellness Program
An important part of creating a winning culture is nurturing employees to create a collaborative environment. “Perhaps our longest-standing effort to achieve collaboration, social learning, and peer-to-peer discussion is our tactical use of book clubs as a curriculum,” says Clarke. “Leadership groups, functional teams, and cohorts of specific programs utilize book clubs to target various topics. The method effectively introduces new topics, allows for ample time to absorb large amounts of content, and provides opportunities to test the material’s relevancy through thoughtful discussion and role-playing.” He says facilitators lead the class as they apply each concept to day-to-day challenges in the workplace. This allows participants to teach each other as they attempt to translate the contents of the book into real CHG situations.
CHG: NEXT GENERATION
All of CHG’s training efforts and successes feed into development of the company’s leadership pipeline. A major goal for CHG was to establish a 6:1 employee to leader ratio by increasing its leadership bench by 15 percent and simultaneously lowering leadership turnover. To reach this goal, the company launched a tiered approach to identifying and developing a future leadership bench from within. The first approach was to implement a nine-box assessment that analyzes employees on their performance and potential. Employees who are identified as high in both potential and performance then are slated to go through the TIP (Talent Inventory Profile) process. This process involves a survey of self, peers, and leaders on leadership readiness of the high performer. Based on TIP results and subsequent coaching by CHG’s Leadership Development team, employees designated as potential leaders are enrolled in the LEAP (leadership evaluation and assessment) program to further develop their potential into a skill set ready for promotion. “This nine-box assessment has been an effective tool in identifying employees with high leadership potential. With the right people in our LEAP program, we can focus on preparing these employees for the next step in their career,” says Clarke.
This targeted approach to leadership development has made the following impact since implementation:
- Leadership turnover has decreased 33 percent.
- Internal promotion rate for leaders has increased by 48 percent.
- Leader-to-employee ratio is now 4.82:1 (a 24 percent improvement).
The development of strong leaders, including those within Learning and Development, may come in handy in 2015, given the company’s goals. “In 2014, our CHG-wide Learning and Development teams began to introduce a culture of Continuous Development. In 2015, our focus will be rolling out new development plans to all employees—no more past-focused performance appraisals,” says Clarke. “Tied into this will be education courses for leaders on how to help their employees build an effective plan, and courses for employees on how to begin their career development.”