CareerBuilder’s recent interview with Matthew Van Vranken, executive vice president of Spectrum Health, a not-for-profit health system in West Michigan, and president of Spectrum Health Hospital Group, revealed Van Vranken’s thoughts on how to foster and measure “engagement” in the health care industry, why he refers to staff members as “partners,” combating the loss of skilled talent in a competitive industry, and more.

How do you describe your leadership philosophy as it relates to people?

My biggest focus is engagement. In health care, where nearly 50 percent of expenses is human capital, I see Spectrum Health as the quintessential service provider with a very high-tech component. Fostering engagement begins by connecting each of our employees to a purpose. Whether they work directly at the bedside or indirectly support patient care, we must cultivate highly engaged staff. Each member of our team is responsible and accountable for providing an exceptional experience to our patients and their families.

How do you define engagement in your industry?

An engaged organization intentionally links to the hearts and minds of its staff.  We need to understand how to inspire people in order to build and sustain strong business performance. Our business metrics include patient satisfaction, staff perception, efficiency and superior quality care. In many cases, I can identify engaged leaders and staff as a result of the metrics and business outcomes they drive.

Fully engaged staff members need to know our direction, vision and action, and how we intend to achieve our plan. They need to understand how their contributions connect to our mission and vision.  These ideas are pretty fundamental. They convey the behaviors required to maximize our staff’s contributions to our success.

In our organization, if we can help people understand their purpose, and reinforce and reward their contributions based on that purpose, we can continue to recruit and retain the best and the brightest staff. It also helps us focus on our goal of caring for patients and families in a trusted, efficient and timely manner.

How do you engage your executive leadership team?

We focus on our mission to improve the health of the communities we serve. One third of our strategic plan is focused on our staff. The process of engagement is multifaceted and requires reinforcement. My executive leadership team and I have commitments that drive our daily interactions. We also demonstrate behaviors that we believe are vital to our success and to improving our key performance indicators. These behaviors are driving change, creating a safe environment, freely sharing information, holding people accountable, accepting responsibility and taking time daily to praise people.

These six behaviors create a culture that allows our leaders and staff to discuss important issues. We model these ideals in hopes that they funnel down to each person in our organization.

How else do you foster and measure engagement in your organization?

In addition to our leadership commitments and vital behaviors, we are dedicated to executive rounding. I conduct regular meetings every month with roughly 15 employees where we spend an hour discussing the strategic direction of Spectrum Health. My executive team and I have a goal to meet with 2,000 employees in a relaxed setting during the next year. These meetings foster engagement and give leadership an opportunity to meet with the people who support our large, complex organization. In addition to this, it is an organizational expectation that all leaders regularly meet with their staff.

We monitor business outcomes quarterly to get a snapshot measurement of engagement and conduct biannual employee perception surveys. Over the last three surveys, our overall score improved by nine points, a shift that’s statistically significant and often unseen in this type of survey.

It demonstrates that our improvement was not by pure happenstance. It occurred as a result of listening to our staff and making changes accordingly.

One of the major challenges for health care is losing skilled talent to competitors. How do you actively target high-potential talent in critical positions to retain them in your business?

We have a deliberate approach to recruiting, developing, managing and rewarding talented individuals. The right people help an organization achieve business results and maintain a competitive edge. Our talent management goal is to connect our organizational strategy with the quantity and quality of people required to execute it.

We look for individuals with drive and potential to participate in a mentoring program with members of our executive team. This program helps to grow the next generation of leaders in our organization. We also have a relationship with the University of Michigan. Once every other year, about 20 of our leadership members spend their time in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and return to Spectrum Health with experience in project-based work.

For our nurses, we try to support the intellectual and emotional aspects of their work. Our Relationship-Based Care Model teaches how to support and enhance relationships with patients and families, colleagues and ourselves. Our EXCEL Professional Development Model is a program that recognizes and provides monetary awards for nursing staff for academic and professional accomplishments, as well as community service.

At Spectrum Health, we try to preserve the fundamental, emotional connection that our staff members have with the great work we do. Whether it is an anesthesiologist in the operating room or someone restocking medications, each person plays a critical role in the care of our patients.

You are directly involved in identifying and retaining high-potential contributors. How else do you contribute to the overall talent strategy?

I am fortunate to have an incredibly talented vice president of human resources, Tanja Oquendo, who is a strategic collaborator and someone who understands employee engagement strategies. Her approach aligns the organization with national benchmarking to ensure we deliver high quality care. She works directly with the executive team to create models that allow us to recruit, retain and identify high performers, as well as ways to engage them even further.

We’ve begun referring to our staff as partners because we believe that partnership conveys share responsibility. Partners have common goals and work together toward a common purpose. A high performing culture, like the one we are creating at Spectrum Health, supports the overall objectives of our mission and vision. We are committed to cultivating the current and future leaders of Spectrum Health. We want to ensure the right people are in the right place at the right time, both today and tomorrow.