Norton Healthcare: Integrating Workforce Investments with Business Impact

6.9.17 • Profile • by Randy Wilson

I Championing Investment in Frontline Workers

Norton Healthcare is an integrated, faith-based system providing care at more than 250 locations throughout Greater Louisville and Southern Indiana. As the region’s leading healthcare provider, it has a been nationally recognized leader for delivering and measuring quality care. Driving this leadership is deep investment in the growth and development of their staff—a “culture of continual, lifelong learning”—and commitment to the Metro Louisville’s “cradle-to-career” education strategy.

Investing over $11 million a year in staff education and development, their transformational approach to workforce development integrates their strategic priorities with programs based on assessment and forecasts of staffing needs, data analysis, internal and external partnerships, and quantifiable measures of the impact their investments have on their business.

II Workforce Development Infrastructure

Norton Healthcare has an extensive and wide-ranging portfolio of programs for investing in employee education and advancement. These programs drive Norton’s success and support every employee in reaching their education and career goals.

1. Office of Workforce Development

Norton Healthcare’s Office of Workforce Development operates a career center and employees a staff of six coaches to help employees build their careers at Norton. The coaches assess workers’ skills and interests, provide career advice and financial education, inform staff on Norton’s education and training programs, and help identify career opportunities. It operates Norton Healthcare’s Scholar Program which invests $5 million annually to support acquisition of credentials by current and future Norton employees. Candidates are eligible for up to $24,000 per degree or certification.

2. Norton University

Norton University programs aim to give every employee the skills needed to do their work effectively. Its in-house educational programming ranges from training in medical interpretation to continuing medical education for physicians.

Frontline workers can participate in School at Work®, a blended learning, basic skills program and Elevating the Front Line Employee, a program designed to remove barriers to success and career advancement for entry-level workers.

3. Institute for Nursing

The Institute of Nursing at Norton Healthcare provides continuing education and career advancement for 4,500 nursing professionals at all levels of the system.

III ROI & Data-Driven Investments

Norton Healthcare is a data-driven organization and uses a comprehensive system that tracks staffing levels, retention and turnover rates, key competencies and employees’ educational plans in order to understand the organization’s current and future workforce needs. The tool informs all staffing and investment decisions and helps Norton target high-demand positions and encourage employees to pursue high-growth opportunities.

“Data from Workforce Analytics empowers Norton’s decision makers by proactively shedding light on potential critical talent needs.”

– Jackie Beard, System Director of Talent Acquisition and Workforce Development

This proactive data use has helped Norton Healthcare lengthen its average retention, lower its turnover rates and promote employees involved in development programs.

Average retention rate- Norton Healthcare

IV Best Practices

CareerSTAT has identified 25 organizational and programatic best practices in the CareerSTAT Guide to Investing in Frontline Healthcare Workers. As a 2014 Frontline Healthcare Workforce Worker Champion, Norton Healthcare utilizes the following industry-tested practices.

Align Workforce Investments with Organizational Priorities and Goals

Norton has sustained its investments because their integrated approach creates a “virtuous circle”: strategic investment in the workforce, guided by data analysis, creates better outcomes and deepens the case for analytic capacity to monitor workforce development needs and opportunities for investment, as well as the impacts of the investment. By aligning workforce metrics with key business metrics, Norton’s leaders are able to understand the impact and value of their talent investments.

Promote Workforce Development as a Business Strategy

Key to Norton Healthcare’s learning culture is the insistence, from the CEO on down, that all employees understand organizational goals and how their work contributes to meeting them. Talented and highly-skilled staff drive Norton’s mission by providing high-quality care to all patients.

Engage Senior Leadership.

Support from senior leaders has been critical to Norton Healthcare’s integrated approach, both in creating its comprehensive suite of workforce programs and in sustaining them. Findings from Analytics—forecasting needs, tracking openings, assessing program impacts—keep workforce issues paramount on leaders’ agendas and demonstrate the value of continued investment.

Invest in Infrastructure

Creating and staffing an Office of Workforce Development that reports to a Human Resource leader gave the health system the capacity to invest in the front line strategically. Dedicating a position to Workforce Analytics and designing the forecasting tool further expanded this capacity and accelerated the shift from a “transactional” to a “transformative” approach to workforce development and measurement.

Incremental Approach to Workforce Analytics

While analytics require investment, it can be developed incrementally by training internal staff and adapting templates already in use. In the five years since its advent, Norton’s Workforce Analytics group has expanded its capacity with new variables and reporting methods, adding staff and building closer connections with managers and staff in the system’s Human Resources, business units, and information technology units.

Co-Invest with Partners

Norton Healthcare, its community partners and other healthcare employers have invested the time and resources needed to give low-skilled individuals in Louisville access to training, education, entry- level jobs, and career pathways in the industry. The Kentucky Health Career Center’s investment in the community mirrors Norton’s workforce development strategy: offer people access to career coaching, assessment, training and education programs.

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