Reference no: EM131138184

HEALTH RESOURCES MANAGEMENT AND LABOR RELATIONS IN HEALTH SERVICES

1. REQUIRED READING 1: IMPACT OF NEGATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

a. What is an organizational culture of incivility? What are 2 characteristics that you can name, and give examples for?

b. What are at least 2 ways that a boss can behave with respect to employees that can seriously demoralize them over time?

c. What are 2 negative impacts of prolonged exposure to an organizational culture of incivility on the quantity or quality of the products or output of an organization?

d. What are 2 major reasons for the growth and spread of a culture of incivility in many U.S. organizations?

e. Why is it important for people in an organization to learn to be fully attentive, and to improve their listening skills, as a way of creating a positive organizational culture?

f. What is 1 benefit of developing a CIVIL organizational culture in terms of organizational productivity or effectiveness?

2. REQUIRED READING 2: NATURE AND CHALLENGES OF HEALTH CARE MANAGEMENT:

a. Be familiar with the main types of health care jobs, and where they fit in the Healthcare Position Hierarchy. (pages 5-7).

b. With respect to HR challenges in Healthcare:

- What are some of the key challenges for recruiting and retaining health care workers? See pages 11-12.

- Be familiar with the five (5) major change elements that Human Resources professionals are going to have to manage in the near future (pages 12 - 13).

- Focus on 2 of these 5 changes: Compliance with Quality Standards, and Managing Diversity - why are these challenges? What kinds of actions will HR professionals have to take to address these challenges?

c. With respect to HR Functions in HealthCare: Pages 15-17.

- Be able to briefly describe the 7 major activities that comprise the major focus of HR activities in health care organizations.

- Be especially familiarwith HR Planning and Analysis; EEO Compliance; HR Development; and Employee and Labor-Management Relations.

3. REQUIRED READING 2A: MODELS AND DEFINITIONS OF WHAT HUMAN RESOURCES DEPARTMENTS DO: Pages 20-26

a. Perceived Models of What HR Departments do:

- Be familiar with the Clerical, Counseling, and Industrial models of the function, role, and purpose of HR departments.

- Why does the Clerical model represent a stereotyped and negative view of HR department functions?

- Where is the Counseling model most prevalent? What kinds of activities doe an HR department following this model focus on?

- What is the focus of HR department activities in the Industrial Relations model? How much power does the HR department tend to have in organizations which use this model?

b. Alternative Models of What HR Departments do:

- What is the focus of HR personnel working under a Managerial Model?

- To what extent does this model of HR activity decentralize HR functions?

- How does this affect the use of HR staff and resources for long-range planning and strategic thinking about HR?

- On what kinds of HR activities does a Humanistic Model focus?

c. Types of HR Personnel:

-  What is the difference between a generalist and a specialist in HR?
- To what extent do large health care organizations tend to use generalists as opposed to specialists?
- What are some of the HR specialties you are most likely to encounter in a large health care organization?

d. The CEO and Human Resources:

- How can the CEO's attitude toward HR (set the tone for the rest of the organization in terms of how HR is resourced, treated, respected (or not), and given more or less central responsibility within the organization?

- Be able to give 3 examples of functions a Chief Executive Officer is likely to expect from an HR department and its staff with respect to CEO and organizational needs.

e. Health Care Supervisors and Managers - Human Resources Functions and the Human Resources Department: READING 2.B.
BULLET POINTS TO BE PROVIDED JULY 11, 2016.

4. REQUIRED READING 3: HUMAN RESOURCES COMPETENCIES, STRUCTURES, AND QUALITY STANDARDS:

a. Leadership Competencies and Emotional Intelligence: Pages 22-24.

- Be familiar with these 2 concepts - they focus on developing and using skills in understanding and flexibly dealing with and managing your own behavior, and that of others with whom you work.

- Leadership Competencies: Warren Bennis - Be able to summarize in one sentence, for each competency, what is the nature of that competency.

- Emotional Intelligence: Daniel Goleman - Understand the basic idea, and the difference between Personal Competence and Social Competence.

b. Measuring the effectiveness of Human Resources activities:Chapter 2, Pages 26- 33; Reading 3A, Slides 1-20.

- What are some of the main ways it is possible to measure the quantitative and qualitative impact of HR practices in a health care organization?

- Related to that, what are some of the metrics (specific, often quantitative, measures of the extent and impact of HR activities)?

- What areas of activity do those metrics cover or address?

- HR analytics: When an organization is developing HR metrics for regular management reporting (to enable reasonable evaluation of the effectiveness of HR activities in major areas), what are some of the criteria to be used when CHOOSING WHICH METRICS TO USE AND ANALYZE?

- What is Benchmarking, and what is its role in choosing and using HR metrics?

- What is a Balanced Scorecard approach to collecting and routinely reporting and monitoring HR performance? (It can be used for a number of organizational functions other than HR - in this instance we are thinking about it in reference to Human Resources activities within the organization).

- Does this approach to measuring the effectiveness of particular organizational HR strategies focus on a narrow range of performance measures, or a comprehensive (broad) range of such measures?

- Human Capital Effectiveness Measures - This activity involves finding measures of the extent to which money spent on specific HR activities and initiatives results in positive, and if possible quantifiable benefits to the organization. These are hard to do, though one standard Human Capital Effectiveness measure is revenues per employee, with increasing revenues per employee reflecting greater employee productivity.

c. The Joint Commission and Health Care Management: Pages 33-35.

- Have some basic familiarity with what the Joint Commission is, and what evidence it uses when it is surveying Human Resources and other hospital functions.

- What are the four (4) Joint Commission requirements that a hospital needs to meet to prove that it is exercising its Human Resources function in an effective and responsible way? What is the meaning (in brief) of each requirement?

- What is a Sentinel Event from the point of view of hospital quality of care? How does the Joint Commission see effective Human Resources management as reducing the incidence of such events?

5. REQUIRED READING 4: STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT:

a. READ THE ATTACHED POWERPOINT SUMMARY OF THIS CHAPTER, THEN READ THE CHAPTER, THEN GO BACK AND REVIEW THE SUMMARY.

b. A strategic view of Human Resources Management sees HR Management as a critical part of an overall strategy whereby organizations gain and/or keep a competitive advantage over their competitors.

In other words, HR is not just a set of routine functions which keep the organization well staffed, effective in managing its relations with employees, compliant with legal and accreditation standards, and successful in working with organized groups such as unions. HR has a strategy for making the organization successful in all these areas, WITH THE PURPOSE OF HELPING THE ORGANIZATION AS A WHOLE TO ACHIEVE THE ORGANIZATION'S STRATEGIC GOALS.

c. HR as a Core Competency and Organizational Culture: Pages 40 - 42.

- Generally -What is a Core Competency for an organization?

- How can HR serve the organization as a Core Competency? Be able to give one (1) example.

- What is Organizational Culture? (Refer to Required Reading 1, and to the deteriorating organizational culture of Santorini Hospital as described in Case Study 1.)

Why is it critical for the success of HR initiatives that HR personnel understand an organization's key culture and subcultures? How can the lack of such an understanding undermine HR success and effectiveness?

d. HR Management Roles - Looking to the Future: Pages 42 - 45.

- What are the 3 critical roles of HR within an organization?

- How is the relative importance of the Administrative Role and the Strategic Role of Human Resources changing?

- How has Technology and Outsourcing contributed to the likelihood that HR spends more time on it Strategic Role and its Operational/Employee Advocate?

- Page 45 - Be familiar with the 4 examples of HR's Strategic Role in health care institutions.

e. Strategic Human Resource Management: Pages 45 - 47.

- What are some of the critical activities by which HR practices Strategic Management: meaning, by which HR (in its area of expertise) helps the organization as a whole achieve a competitive advantage.

f. Human Resource Planning: General - Pages 48 - 49.

- What are the key steps in the HR planning process?

- What is Environmental Scanning? What is its purpose?

- How does a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) approach guide the Environmental Scanning and Analysis process?

g. Human Resource Planning: External Workforce Availability - Pages 50 - 52.

- In this aspect of HR planning, the HR department looks at trends and patterns outside the organization in terms of: the composition of the health care services workforce; patterns of how work is done (importance of part-time workers, telecommuting, forms of supervision of employees); government influences; economic conditions; competitive position of different types of health care service workers; larger geographic changes.

- What is one (1) critical change in employee working conditions or work patterns nationally that has affected health care service organizations, and that needs to be considered in evaluating external workforce availability?

h. Human Resource Planning: Assessment of Internal Workforce Availability - Pages 52 - 54.

- What is an Internal Workforce Availability Assessment? What is being studied in such an assessment for a health care services organization?

- This assessment involves doing an audit of current and future jobs to determine the kinds of jobs that will need to be done in the future to ensure organizational effectiveness and success.

- This assessment also involves an Inventory of Employee and Organizational Capabilities to determine the skills of people currently available to do the jobs that will need to be done in the future.

- How do Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) facilitate both administrative and strategic planning functions of HR departments in health care services organizations?

i. Human Resource Planning: Forecasting Based on External Scanning and Internal Assessments- Pages 54 - 55.

- What is the relationship of Forecasting to the External Scanning and Internal Assessments discussed above?

- What is the purpose of Forecasting in terms of short range, intermediate, and long-term human resources needs of a health care services organization?

- Be familiar with the Delphi Technique as one kind of Forecasting method (See the Power Point summary, page 12).

j. Human Resource Planning: Successful HR Planning - Pages 55 - 58.

- What are the three (3) main characteristics of successful HR planning?

- What are two (2) key inputs to the HR Strategic Plan that come from other parts (non-HR parts) of the organization?

k. Challenge for Human Resources Management in Health Care Services Organizations: Pages 58 - 60 and Power Point Summary, pages 17-23.

- Be able to identify and briefly describe three (3) challenges for HR Management relating to:

- Workforce Availability and Quality

- Work place Diversity

- Organizational Restructuring