MMHA 6220 Week 1 HR Roles Diagnosis Example

Two Hundred Forty Hours and Almost None of Them Strategic: Diagnosing the Three-Person HR Office at Bellwood Valley Home Health With Ulrich's Four Roles and the SHRM Competency Model

Student Name

Walden University

MMHA 6220: Human Resource Management in Healthcare

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Two Hundred Forty Hours and Almost None of Them Strategic: Diagnosing the Three-Person HR Office at Bellwood Valley Home Health With Ulrich's Four Roles and the SHRM Competency Model

The Office and the Question

Bellwood Valley Home Health is a composite Medicare-certified home health agency serving three rural counties, invented for this course. It employs about 110 people: 52 home health aides, 28 nurses, 14 therapists, 12 office and billing staff and a small leadership team. Human resources is a three-person office: an HR manager, a generalist and a payroll and benefits coordinator. The administrator has asked a simple question: is the office spending its time on what the agency most needs? This paper answers it with a reconstructed time log, a competency profile of the three staff members and an analysis of one problem the office does not own.

Where the Time Goes

Two weeks of work were reconstructed from the office's shared calendar, its email-based ticket queue and payroll records, and sorted into the four roles described by Ulrich (1997). The administrative expert role covers efficient processes for hiring, pay and records. The employee champion role covers listening to employees and representing their concerns. The change agent role covers helping the organization adapt. The strategic partner role covers aligning people practices with the organization's goals.

Table 1

Reconstructed Hours by Ulrich Role, Two Weeks, Three Staff

Hours are reconstructed and approximate; they total 240 of about 240 logged working hours.

The pattern is plain. Three-quarters of the office's time goes to administrative work, much of it repetitive: 31 hours went to reminding clinicians about expiring licenses and certifications, tracked in a spreadsheet, and 22 hours to correcting payroll errors, most of them caused by aides' paper mileage logs. Strategic work barely registers.

The log has limits. It was reconstructed after the fact, so short interruptions, such as a hallway question from a nurse, are probably undercounted, and those would add to the employee champion column. Some tasks also span roles: the revised on-call policy is change work, but drafting it involved many conversations with aides that could be counted as employee champion work. Even allowing for these limits, no plausible correction would move strategic work from 2 percent to a meaningful share.

The People

The SHRM competency model pairs technical HR expertise with behavioral competencies such as relationship management, consultation, critical evaluation, communication and business acumen (Society for Human Resource Management [SHRM], 2012). Profiling the three staff members against it shows real strengths. The HR manager has strong HR expertise, especially in employment law, and is trusted by clinical managers, a strength in relationship management. The generalist is an effective communicator who handles most employee questions and is well regarded by aides. The payroll and benefits coordinator is precise and has deep knowledge of the payroll system.

The gaps are in critical evaluation and business acumen. No one in the office routinely analyzes data on hiring, turnover or pay, and no one has been asked to. The manager could do so, given time; she has the background but spends her days on approvals and escalations.

The Unowned Problem

The agency's most expensive people problem is aide turnover, which ran 58 percent last year in the agency's own figures. Every departure means recruiting, onboarding, training, and shifts covered by overtime or turned away, while patients lose the continuity of a familiar aide. Taking the agency's composite figure of roughly $4,000 per departing aide, spent on recruiting, orientation and overtime, last year's 30 departures cost roughly $120,000, before counting visits that could not be staffed. No one owns the problem. Clinical managers see it as HR's job because HR hires. HR sees it as a scheduling and pay problem owned by operations. The administrator sees it in the budget but has no analysis to act on.

The time log explains why HR has not studied it. With three-quarters of its hours on administration, the office has no time for the critical evaluation the problem needs: exit data, pay comparisons, schedule density and patterns by supervisor. Ulrich's argument was that HR adds value through what it delivers to the organization, not only through what it does, and that administrative efficiency is the foundation that frees time for the other roles (Ulrich & Brockbank, 2005). At Bellwood Valley, the foundation is consuming the building.

Recommendations

Automate or outsource: move license and certification tracking to an automated credential system that sends reminders directly to clinicians and managers; replace paper mileage logs with the electronic visit verification app the agency already uses; consider outsourcing benefits administration to the payroll vendor.

Share with clinical managers: give clinical managers responsibility for first-level employee questions about schedules and assignments, with HR as the second level; have managers lead onboarding for clinical skills while HR handles forms.

Start: assign the HR manager four protected hours a week to study aide turnover, beginning with exit interviews and pay comparisons; report findings to the administrator quarterly.

Measure the change: repeat the two-week time log six months after the automation is in place, and report whether administrative hours fell below 60 percent and strategic and change work rose above 15 percent combined. Without a second log, the office will not know whether the recovered hours went to turnover or simply filled with other administration.

The Administrator's Decision

The administrator must decide whether to fund the credential system and mileage automation, an estimated $14,000 a year in the composite budget, in exchange for recovering about 50 hours of HR time every two weeks. If the time recovered goes to studying aide turnover, a reduction of even a few departures a year would likely exceed the cost. If the administrator does not fund the change, the office will remain an administrative unit, and aide turnover will remain no one's problem.

References

Society for Human Resource Management. (2012). SHRM competency model.

Ulrich, D. (1997). Human resource champions: The next agenda for adding value and delivering results. Harvard Business School Press.

Ulrich, D., & Brockbank, W. (2005). The HR value proposition. Harvard Business School Press.