By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN
Is it just our health system, or is HR also missing in action in others? I have repeatedly been asked this question over the past year. The beginnings of the problem in most health systems can be traced back to the seismic shifts that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, HR and other ‘nonessential’ functions went remote, sometimes gave up office space, and were often centralized in health systems.
Fast forward to today, and HR remains remote in many but not all health systems. Consider the following comments that leaders have shared with me regarding the impact of these changes:
- Our facility’s staffing is at a crisis point. I recently read about the success other organizations achieved with an employee resource command center, and I tried to lobby for this within our organization. Our HR director does not see the role of his staff as supporting the leaders so they can care for patients. He was so blatant about this that I found it shocking. Whatever happened to the concept of a support service?
- Our HR staff now call themselves “consultants,” not partners but consultants who decide whether or not their services are needed when we contact them.
- Recruitment is a nightmare in our health system – I can get an excellent RN referral from an employee, talk with the person, and then get told by HR that they need to be a better cultural fit and are not placed in our hiring portal. This HR person has yet to speak with the candidate and ignores my opinion.
- Managers in our health system now spend hours each day in the HR portal doing work previously done by our onsite HR staff—this has added considerable work to the scope of the manager’s practice. We get told that they are “short-staffed,” like we have all the time in the world to do this work.
- We recently asked to bring the HR specialists back onsite to our facility because of the significant HR issues we have. We were told that HR specialists now want to work remotely and can do this because they are in high demand. What if nurse managers made the same demands – I’m pretty sure they would not be honored.
- Relationships with our union partners are a nightmare in our hospital right now. When I do counseling as a manager, it is always with the employee and their union representative. When I ask to have HR present because these situations are sometimes very volatile, I get told that it is not possible.
- Our HR department now has one of those crazy BOT answering answers that you get when you call customer no service companies. Essentially, it is almost impossible to get a live person on the phone and I am a nurse manager. I can only imagine what this is like for nurses that we try to recruit.
- I needed some real-time consultation from HR on how to manage a performance issue. I was told that their first available appointment was in three days. What the heck is going on here – this never happened in the past.
- I am a CNO with so many new managers. I am lobbying for more HR support to no avail. I worry that these young inexperienced leaders will make HR mistakes that could later prove very costly to the institution.
An overriding theme in all of these conversations is a failure to identify HR as a “support service” to clinical services that care for patients. It is a cultural shift in thinking in many organizations that is making the work of nursing leaders (and other clinical disciplines) so much harder.
Although this topic has come up in focus groups conducted by AONL as part of their workforce compendium work, the problem seems to be growing and I believe warrants study. The lack of HR support probably has so many additional unintended consequences other than what was identified above. Yet without strong evidence, it will be hard to make a business case to demand the additional support that nurse leaders clearly need.
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