The Role of Talent Management in Healthcare Organizations: An Essay

This essay analyzes the critical role of talent management within healthcare organizations. It begins by defining talent management and its various components, including staffing, pay structure, performance management, and staff development. The essay then explores the application process, emphasizing the importance of aligning talent management with strategic and operational planning to enhance service user satisfaction, reduce nurse turnover, and improve productivity. It delves into performance appraisal, highlighting its significance in assessing employee performance and providing training for organizational development and patient satisfaction. The essay also examines the role of learning and teaching in continuously improving the quality of care, stressing the importance of empowering education and innovative training models. Finally, it discusses the link between strategic and operational planning and the talent management process, underscoring the need for alignment in application, performance appraisal, and learning and teaching to achieve organizational goals and adapt to the evolving healthcare landscape. The essay emphasizes the importance of integrating talent management strategies with overall organizational objectives to create a high-performing, responsive, and sustainable healthcare environment.

Running head: Health workforce
HEALTH WORKFORCE
Topic: 2

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Introduction
The essay aims at analysing the importance of talent management in healthcare organisations.
Talent management is considered as an essential area of interest due to its contribution to
organisational health. However, not an extensive amount of researches is conducted on the
role of talent management in various types of companies. Although health service
professionals accept the significance of talent management in improving organisational,
efficiency, they often fail to consider it as an effective method of strategic implementation.
The requirement for excessively qualified staff that can be considered as talents are focused
and evident in healthcare entities.
Hence, the study seeks to analyse the talent management process, its implementation method,
performance appraisal, reaching and learning of healthcare employees. Further, it focuses on
evaluating the relation of operational and strategic planning with performance appraisal,
application process and teaching and learning. Thus, it can shed light on the impact of
applying talent management, specifically on healthcare organisations.
Talent management overview
Talent management includes several aspects, including staffing, pay structure, performance
management, and succession and staff development. According to Ingram & Glod (2016),
talent management is linked to developing a talent pool from internal and external sources,
positioning the resources adequately in central positions and working further on
organisational commitment, work motivation and extra-role attitude, which improve
corporate performance. Such a concept of talent management focuses on departing and
differentiating from the traditional approach of human resource management. It means that
the company intends to engage employees actively in organisational life for exploiting on
capabilities and developing strategies, structures and climate for encouraging people on

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central positions to promote corporate success. As stated by Turner (2017), staffing refers to
the managerial activity of hiring, selection, monitoring, training, compensation and
promotions of employees. It is the system of recruiting and selecting the needed employees to
fill different vacant positions in the company. The aim of staff development is enhancing the
effectiveness of personnel and the organisation. The process validates the commonness of
objective of all employees and the critical nature of particular skills and knowledge to fulfil
allocated responsibilities related to the attainment of the corporate goals.
Performance management involved ensuring that the organisational resources are being
appropriately used for pursuing company objectives. It is usually applied to staff
development. The cycle of performance management, include activities, which persist within
any social system, and it is concerned about enhancing itself and the way it interrelates with
the external environment (Martin, 2015). In the words of Sibbald, Wathen & Kothari (2016),
the pay structure is another element of talent management that includes different ways using
which organisations decide their pay activities. They offer guidelines for compensation,
which helps companies identifying the pay scale is in limits. Lastly, succession is the method
by which a company makes sure that staff are hired and developed to fill every role in the
company. It ensures that workers are continuously hired to fill all the vacant positions.
Application process
For applying talent management correctly, an organisation requires formulating a clear
definition of talent for engaging a wide range of stakeholders during the process. Appropriate
talent management within healthcare organisation helps in improving service user
satisfaction, reduces the rate of nurse turnover and improves productivity. Therefore, any
organisation must ensure that its talent management method is facilitating the business
creating engaged employees in offering the highest quality care to the patients (McCracken,

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Currie & Harrison, 2016). As per the viewpoint of Thunnissen (2016), a significant element
of talent management maturity is dependent on the extent to which different systems are
related, and data sharing is carried out. This relation takes place within two levels in a
healthcare organisation, which practices talent management. Job profiles and employees
profile or capability models need to be positioned in the database grid that can be accessed by
every TM system. The purpose is making them standard components influenced by different
processes including employee performance evaluation, succession planning, career
development, leadership development and candidate evaluation. Further, the data gathered
from every process need to be stored in core repository besides pivotal HR data, so that data
integration can be carried out and pulled for the purpose of analytics process and multiple
reporting.
As stated by Collini, Guidroz & Perez (2015), for proper talent management, it is necessary
to develop content-specific and generic measures of talent, so that talent can be managed
accurately considering situational needs. A business manager needs to understand the
context-specific standard, as multiple types of functions are there in a healthcare organisation.
For obtaining in-depth knowledge regarding performances, capabilities and employee
competence, a healthcare entity must apply a process for identifying talent. Such a process
must offer information about education, personal characteristics, skills and required
behaviour. Thus, the management can decide what competencies the employee needs to
develop for performing his/her role effectively.
Performance appraisal
A performance appraisal refers to a consistent examination of a worker's performance and
overall influence on an organisation. It is also called an annual review or employee appraisal
that evaluates skills, growth and achievement of employees. It is designed to analyse

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workforce performance objectively and then plan measure to be considered for development
and essential for a company to move forward. These systems are specific to every
organisation, including healthcare organisations. However, the managers in the healthcare
sector have faced dissatisfaction often with the performance appraisal system of their
organisations (Chandra & Frank, 2004). According to Ramadevi et al. (2016), in the
healthcare sector, patients are the most important and all the healthcare staff must perform
well for gaining patient satisfaction. Besides using modern drugs and technologies for curing
patients; the way they are dealt with is also essential. Therefore, measuring the effectiveness
of employee performance regularly is beneficial for the management to understand the
current performance level of employees and to provide them training for betterment that
eventually resulted in organisational development and satisfaction of service users. As opined
by Thunnissen & Buttiens (2017), performance appraisal is a systematic and formal
assessment of how well workers are performing their duties about the established standards.
Through performance appraisal, employee efficiency I hospitals can be improved that leads
to patent satisfaction. Therefore, in hospitals, performance appraisal method develops a vital
part of the staff development system. An ethical and fair performance appraisal system is
essential for the wellbeing of a company, and it contributes toward revealing the best in staff.
Salary review considering a performance appraisal is an extremely motivational force, and a
flexible performance appraisal system goes a long way toward decreasing abrasion rates.
Learning and Teaching
Teaching and learning continuously are essential for nurses to offer an improved quality of
care to the patients. For improving the effectiveness of in-service training, nurses have an
indispensable role. Empowering education is considered as a contemporary model for
providing on-the-job training. It matches training programs to the requirements and intention
of learning within healthcare staff. Due to its specific nature, empowering education can

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encourage occupational activities and help in obtaining mastery of expert. Learning and
teaching have an active role in attaining corporate goals through the integration of workforce
and organisational interest. At present, training is an important activity influencing higher
efficiency of the employees and healthcare entities.
Moreover, it is a significant investment, which will result in internal promotion, successful
implementation of organisational plans and staff development. Training is an essential
function for increasing corporate productivity and reining workers by offering them
opportunities for career development and job satisfaction in the long-term. Teaching and
learning are vital for the viability and survival of the organisation in the arena of competition.
Chaghari et al. (2017) stated that not all the training or teaching methods show efficiency in
enhancing the quality of care to the service users. For expanding the ability and increasing
educational result, it is essential developing and implementing new models of clinical aching
for nurses. Besides theoretical knowledge, professional training must improve the technical
proficiency and service quality resulting in innovation. Therefore, training programs need to
be arranged in such a manner that they increase the beneficial capabilities of healthcare staff.
In-service teaching contains a group of measures for promoting competence and
empowerment among employees for helping them performing their tasks better and
facilitating the institution attaining its goals.
Overview of strategic and operational planning
At present day, healthcare organisations are experiencing a range of issues because of two
significant factors including rising difficulty in contenting increasingly more demanding and
aware users and the requirement to modify the internal entity for keeping pace with the
highly fast changes occurring in approach and technology. A rapid rise in capacity and
complexity of physicians do not ensure the basic need of any organisation, to offer what the

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customers want. Therefore, the time has come for an innovative strategy emphasised on
increasing value for service users by attaining the ultimate result at the lowest cost and
shifting from a physician-centred entity to a company-driven care system. However, the
complicated methods are usually conservative and instead of resistance to change, including
the healthcare industry (Hoff et al. 2016). According to Groves (2019), the difficulty is that
the healthcare professionals have to be the key players in the revolution of healthcare strategy
as if they do not embrace an approach, it will fail eventually. Inevitably, an incomplete
approach will not work. Therefore, appropriate operational and strategic plans need involving
doctors for changing the system needs emphasising on mutual goals, by applying
motivational techniques including peer pressure, shared purpose, improving a patient-centred
strategy and assessing performance.
In this context, Vanderbroeck & Wasserfallen (2017) stated that the first stage of any
strategic change is to explain the organisational goals, vision and mission. The mission
declares the unique organisational aim or logic for being. The image shows what the
corporate leader wants the company to attain when it is achieving the mission. Strategic
objectives are those overarching end outcomes, which the firm pursue to obtain its aim.
Describe how strategic and operational planning link with:
Application process
For making the application of talent management within healthcare organisations successful,
it is crucial to aligning the talent management process with operational and strategic
planning. Here, considering the mission and vision of the organisation is significant, as the
aim of a TM program is formulating a high-performance, responsive and sustainable
company, which exceeds or meets its corporate targets. The most fundamental component is
the combination of TM functions, which were conventionally run as a different, but

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connected, HR activities under a sole canopy organisation. Central to this combined approach
is a single leader accountable for making sure that talent process shares a combine strategy
and results, governance structure, shared resources, integrated analytics, reporting and shared
data source (Swensen et al. 2016). According to Sibbald, Wathen & Kothari (2017), while
deciding the definition of talent, the HR manager must consider the organisational staffing
needs and operational needs. It is a strategic approach for developing a better workforce and
reflects a company's commitment to draw, create, encourage and retain engaged and
productive staff. The strategy of talent management must be connected with the
organisational strategy, as TM aims at improving organisational productivity ultimately.
Hiring, training, developing, encouraging and rewarding staff for superior performance
considering corporate goals are essential sides of talent management and need to be entirely
combined into all employee-related system comprising job description, metrics, performance
reviews, training and development.
Performance appraisal
The alignment of performance appraisal to functional and operational activities starts with a
careful evaluation of the executive and strategic objectives and aims. Considering the
management team and analytics in association with HR can recognise and understand the
inferences of talent planning and strategy. Once the team understands the way the
organisational objectives affecting the talent of the organisation, the management can specify
the talent initiatives and goals and create their talent commitments and strategy (McConnell
et al. 2016). In the words of Donner et al. (2017), for improving the performance of
healthcare staff, it requires engaging them in developing an organisational strategy and
communicating the corporate objectives with them.

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Further, implementing a program of leadership development for high potentials and creating
a strategy for succession planning can be useful. Based on the organisational goals, reviewing
the existing and needed skills is required. Therefore, assessing all corporate levels for
identifying skill gaps can be an effective way of linking strategic planning with performance
appraisal. Different types of performance appraisal techniques can be used here such as 360-
degree appraisal, behaviorally anchored rating scale, psychological appraisal, assessment
centre method, and so forth. Hoff & Scott (2016) stated that after identifying the skill gaps
that may hamper the achievement of organisational goals, required training programs could
be arranged. The next step is matching performance objectives to corporate strategy and
providing rewards to the workers for meeting their objectives.
Learning and Teaching
Once the strategic and operational planning of a healthcare organisation is done, it is time to
offering adequate training regarding the new technology and medication to all the medical
staff for making them competent of providing utmost quality care to the patients. Van den
Broek, Boselie & Paauwe (2018) stated that therefore, aligning teaching and learning of
healthcare workers with operational planning is necessary. New functional techniques in
healthcare demand adequate handling, which increases the need for employee training and
development. Organisations can make succession planning and offering career-development
opportunities to the nurses that can make them feel valued. It increases employee retention in
the healthcare organisation and thus, reduces the cost and need for recruiting new staff. Falk
et al. (2015) supported the though and said that it is must connect organisational strategic
planning with staff training so that they can be trained as per corporate needs. Apart from
that, for today’s healthcare staff and nurses, strategic thinking and planning skills are
essential. A well-developed strategy can inspire intellectual development at all levels of

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employees. Discussion forum under the online teaching offers an excellent chance for
effective interaction among staff en way to developed of well-cognisant strategic plans.
Conclusion
It is inferred that talent management remains at the core of healthcare organisations and their
growth. As healthcare organisations come under the hospitality industry, patient satisfaction
must be the focus of the control that cannot be earned just by offering them proper
medication. It demands more such as providing patient-centred service and empathetic care.
It is the responsibility of the management of the healthcare organisations taking care of their
staff by identifying their learning gap through performance appraisal, offering them training,
rewarding their achievement and offering them career development chances. Thus,
considering the various aspects of talent management and aligning them with the operational
and strategic planning is necessary, so that staffing needs can be met adequately. Healthcare
staff require teaching for learning how to use the modern technologies of treating patients and
using them efficiently. Improving their knowledge leads to an improved team and patient
satisfaction.

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