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As Legacy Community Health’s first-ever chief human resources officer (CHRO), Vince Goodwine had his work cut out for him when joining the organization in March of 2021.
“I spent last year assessing the organization and establishing an HR strategy for meeting the present and future needs of our fast-growing healthcare system,” Goodwine says. “The growth is happening so fast that we’ve averaged a monthly 3 percent growth in staff over the past twelve months. Every month, we measure and evaluate the percentage of new clinics and new headcount, and every month these ratios are higher than the prior month. This is a great experience to have, as this means we are successful in positioning Legacy to continue to meet the ever-growing patient need in our communities.”
To match the Texas-based, federally qualified health center’s impressive trajectory, Goodwine scaled the HR team, drove talent acquisition and development across functions, and affirmed Legacy’s culture pillar of “caring” for patients and employees alike.
“We’re currently at sixty locations, and within the end of year will be more than sixty-five locations, including a state-of-the art central pharmacy that will double our current prescription capacity for all patients across our healthcare system. When you go from having a few hundred employees during our formative years to our current sixteen hundred employees, the old model no longer works.”
Vince Goodwine
After developing an HR strategy with the CEO, Vince Goodwine stood up an HR Shared Services model. The streamlined model proved even more necessary in light of the company’s ongoing growth, amounting to a 33 percent increase in physical location size, a 23 percent increase in staff, and a 28 percent increase in revenue during Goodwine’s time at the organization alone.
“We’re currently at sixty clinic locations, and we’re going to be at or near sixty-five locations by end of year,” he says. “When you go from having a few hundred employees during our formative years to our current sixteen hundred employees, the old model no longer works. That’s why we stood up our HR Shared Services team, called myHR Concierge: to help meet our employees’ present-day needs, as well as their growing, expanding needs.”
The CHRO also met those expanding needs by nearly doubling the size of the HR department and onboarding new leaders to complement the team. “I try to hire talent not just for the role that’s open, but for one or two roles up the road,” he adds. “I pride myself on developing HR talent for bigger roles than what they’re doing today.”
Placing particular emphasis on growing his recruiting team, he reframed expectations around the team’s targets and workflow and cultivated a more intentional recruiting strategy leveraging social media. “We’ve got a whole host of video testimonials from some of our most successful employees and create a new set of video testimonials every quarter. They each tell their story through their own lens, and we then populate their testimonials out across hundreds of social media platforms,” he explains.
Additionally, Goodwine shifted compensation bands to keep Legacy competitive in Houston’s hot healthcare market. “We’ve been really thoughtful around our compensation strategy,” he says. “We’ve focused foremost on positions with the highest number of incumbents and largest rate of turnover.”
“At Legacy Community Health, we are a mission-driven organization. Everyone here is committed to providing the best patient care to our patients, which includes many who otherwise wouldn’t have care. Or stated differently, at Legacy our clinical teams are passionate about delivering quality care to our patients regardless of our patient’s ability to pay.”
Vince Goodwine
Vince Goodwine focused in on certified medical assistant, front desk, medical providers (i.e., child and adolescent psychiatry, behavioral health therapist, OBGYN, pediatrician, and infectious disease), and contact center roles as areas where Legacy needed to make a strong economic investment up front. Hiring at higher pay ranges and adjusting pay for existing employees also created a more equitable compensation landscape. Between those changes and enriched benefits offerings, turnover and vacancy rates decreased in the majority of the targeted positions.
“We’ve done some things that have been effective, but we have to continue to build on that momentum,” Goodwine says. “We just launched an employee recognition platform, which serves the intentional purpose of complementing our employee engagement initiatives. That’s the other piece of it: you must get people in, but once you get them in, you have to keep them happy and engaged.”
In October, Legacy will launch a benefit that allows its employees to take potentially forfeited PTO time and repurpose it into one of four different areas: student loan payoff, donation to charity, contribution to employee’s 403(b), or donation to distressed employee-in-need PTO pool. This helps mitigate the negative experience of losing one’s PTO time, which affected many team members.
The CHRO hopes that the employee recognition platform and the PTO Exchange benefit will foster Legacy’s kindness-centered “organizational feel,” which ties closely to the organizational culture of caring. Goodwine says, “At Legacy Community Health, we are a mission-driven organization. Everyone here is committed to providing the best patient care to our patients, which includes many who otherwise wouldn’t have care. Or stated differently, at Legacy our clinical teams are passionate about delivering quality care to our patients regardless of our patient’s ability to pay.”
Inspired by Legacy’s culture—purpose-driven, caring, results-oriented, and committed to people development––Goodwin aims to lead with these characteristics in mind. He strives to build up the confidence of his HR team while embracing authenticity and transparency in his communications. “I try to let my team see the whole me,” he says. “We want everyone in our organization to feel comfortable in expressing who they are.”
Like Legacy itself, Vince Goodwine remains mission-driven. “Our HR mission statement is to deliver a great employment experience that enables our people to deliver a great patient experience,” he says. “I want my HR team to understand the nexus between how well we care for our employees directly correlates to how well our employees ultimately care for our patients.”
