Happy Thanksgiving to all of our friends in the U.S. I wanted to share a few great blog posts I’ve read in the last week or so with everyone.

Ryan Healy at Employee Evolution has a great post on how Finding Great People Should be a Top Priority, Especially in a Bad Economy. He talks about Jim Collins’ idea of how you need GREAT people if you are going to build a great company. His post is well worth a read and make some great points about how organizations become employers of choice and that GREAT people aren’t necessarily hanging out at Monster.com.

Sarah Welsted’s post over at the ERE Blog Network Millenials: Even Less Likely to Follow the Rules shares a study from Accenture. The study looks at how millennials (in this survey ranging from ages 14-27) “make their employment decisions based on how companies accommodate how they want to use their own mobile devices and other technology.” One of the biggest study findings was that “Millennials are either unaware of their company’s IT policy or not inclined to follow them.” What’s interesting is how this impacts HR and managers in terms of recruiting, hiring and communicating internal policies, and how it impacts managers. With so many generations in the workplace, expectations need to be clearly defined - and it gives a little bit of insight into how one generation thinks about technology.

And last, but not least - take a quick read of this post from Kris Dunn over at The HR Capitalist. He discusses Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers, which looks at people who are truly outside the realm of the ordinary. He includes a portion of an interview with Gladwell from Fortune. Definitely thought provoking stuff, and very relevant for HR. I’m sure there are people in your organization that defy logic when it comes to performance, and maybe this can give you a bit of extra insight.

In my last post, I introduced the six quality aims as set out by the Institute of Medicine and supported by the AHA. Today I’d like to chat about talent management’s impact on the first aim, patient safety.

Patient Safety - Care must take place in a safe environment or the chances of a good patient outcome are significantly reduced.

The American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration (ASHHRA) convened a Thought Leader Forum, “The Role of Health Care Human Resources in Quality and Patient Safety“, on July 24, 2008. The forum stated that the biggest challenge to safety is constant change. Healthcare facilities must keep up with nationally directed core measures while simultaneously changing work processes (to meet core measure goals) and training employees on ways to successfully meet them.

HR can help employees cope with the changes by providing training and insight into how measurements will be applied and reported. The ASHHRA forum concluded that HR should use multiple communication methods (ranging from a traditional newsletter to a podcast) when communicating with employees in order reach every generation of worker.

While this is a solid recommendation, HR can go further. These criteria could and should be captured and communicated to employees as part of the employee performance management process, even included on their employee evaluation forms. Where training is required, this too should be captured and tracked as part of the performance management process. Employee performance management really should be an ongoing process, facilitating dialogue and feedback on performance and standards between managers and employees, not just an “after the fact” evaluation session.

Soon Generation Y is going to outnumber the baby boomers in the healthcare workforce, which makes the need for an ongoing feedback process even more critical. This is a generation that demands constant feedback on their performance, clear career paths, ongoing development opportunities, and rewards for their contributions. Consequently, managing this process using a paper-based manual system quickly becomes untenable. Web-based talent management systems have the power to pull these information requirements together. The end result is that employees can constantly keep track of the requirements of their role and their level of performance, get regular feedback from their managers and others, chart their career path, satisfy any training requirements, and stay on top of changes to their role or work that impact patient safety.

The forum highlighted other short term patient safety awareness tools such as “Patient Safety Week Events”, “Recognition Programs”, and “Quality Month”. These tools work for short term awareness, but become much more powerful when backed up by comprehensive strategy which includes employee development policies, competency assessments, goal management, and constant employee feedback.

What methods have you found effective for communicating changes in roles/procedures to each generation of employee? Do you see your performance management process as one of your key communication tools?

A short post for everyone this Friday. I wanted to share something funny that I heard on CBC Radio (Canadian equivalent of NPR) on a show called The Point. They did a piece on meeting personalities that I found all too true!

They talked about two specific meeting personality types - the dominator and the distracter. The dominator comes in and you guessed it, dominates the discussion from start to finish. We’ve all worked with someone like this that you completely dread going into meetings with, their agenda item goes from number three to number one as soon as they walk in the room because they just can’t wait.

The other personality type is equally as annoying - the distracter. The person who shows up late with a long story about why they are late. And then they spend the entire meeting on their Blackberry or with their Blackberry vibrating all over the table. As much as I love my Blackberry, I have to tell you how much I do think Blackberries should be left at your desk, or at least be discrete about it.

If you want to take a listen to the piece to add a laugh to your Friday, you can check it out here. (It’s in part one starting at 15:55).

Laughs aside, I have to wonder why these two personalities continue to be alive and well. We’ve all worked with them at some point or have dealt with one in the past week. As a manager, shouldn’t you be coaching your employees so they aren’t the dominator or the distracter? And as a co-worker, if you have the opportunity to provide feedback in a multi-rater assessment, you should share these concerns in a constructive way.

After all, while meetings are a necessary part of office life, wouldn’t everyone be a bit happier about them if they didn’t have to deal with either of these two people?

What do you think? How do you deal with these two meeting personalities? Share your tips and tricks by commenting below.

It’s a common problem. Employees have several goals they know they must accomplish and competencies that need to be demonstrated. But faced with multiple demands for their time and energy, they struggle to prioritize their efforts - everything seems to need to be done at once.

As a manager, you can’t always be available to help sort through competing demands. So how do you set and communicate guiding priorities for your employees?

One effective way is by assigning weights to the various goals and competencies outlined on their employee evaluation forms.

Weighting is a simple tool that helps employees understand what’s important to the organization.  You should be able to assign weights at two levels:

• You can assign weights to the various sections of your form - for example, goals can be worth 60% and competencies 40%.
• You can assign weights to the items within a section - if for example an employee had five goals, the first could be worth 40% while each of the others could be worth 15%.

There are strengths and limitations to weighting that you’ll need to consider. You might want to read our reference article Using Weighting to Prioritize Competencies and Goals to get more insight.

Overall, weighting can be a highly effective talent management tool for communicating organizational or departmental priorities and rewarding those who focus their energies on accomplishing them.

Does your organization use weighting to communicate priorities as part of your performance management processes? How effective do you find it? Do you have any wisdom to share on the subject?

Recently, I was surfing the AHA website and noticed they have a great Quality Center to “help hospitals accelerate their quality and performance improvement processes.” It’s loaded with tools and articles to help hospitals achieve better overall service, patient outcomes and performance.

One of the tools that caught my eye was the section of the site that provides “Information resources targeted to each of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) ‘Six Quality Aims’ for improving the quality and safety of healthcare.” To achieve better patient safety and initiate change in the healthcare system, the IOM report suggests that health care systems focus on six quality aims: patient safety, patient-centeredness, effectiveness, efficiency, timeliness, and equity. The six quality aims are in a pyramid with patient safety at the base and equity at the top, which implies a layered approach. In other words, if patient safety is not in place, the other layers will be difficult to achieve.

In reading the Six Aims, it occurred to me that HR can play an important role in driving these initiatives. To achieve each one of these aims, hospitals rely on their staff. Staff must not only be qualified and skilled, they also need ongoing training. Just as importantly, they need to be committed and satisfied employees. A system that integrates an organization’s talent management processes (performance appraisals, succession planning, compensation, learning management, multi-rater feedback, etc.) provides the tools for HR departments to lead their facilities’ transformation toward the IOM aims. Broadly speaking, effective talent management systems help hospitals provide better quality patient care.

Over the next few weeks I’ll address each of the Six Aims, patient safety, patient-centeredness, effectiveness, efficiency, timeliness, and equitability, and their relationship to talent management.