Organisation: Seha (Abu Dhabi Health Services Company)
Sector: Healthcare
Track record:
• Seha is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi and is responsible for the emirate’s public hospitals and clinics
• Created on 29 December 2007 when its predecessor was split into two organisations. Its counterpart, the health authority, is responsible for governance and licensing
• Employs more than 16,000 staff from nearly 100 different nationalities
Business strategy
His Highness Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, has an ambitious aim: to provide the people of the UAE with the best healthcare facilities in the world. In the largest of the emirates, responsibility for achieving that target rests with the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, know as Seha or health in Arabic.
Created just over four years ago as part of government healthcare reforms that saw its predecessor split into two separate organisations, Seha has operational responsibility for 12 hospitals and around 40 healthcare clinics, some located in remote desert areas in the western region of Abu Dhabi.
With 16,000 plus staff, Seha is one of the largest employers in the Middle East. But a combination of factors, including skills shortages among the Emirati population, mean that around 80 per cent of employees are from overseas, with the largest groups of expatriate workers coming from India and the Philippines.
Redressing that balance, not just at Seha but throughout Abu Dhabi, is a key aim of the government and, as a result, the organisation is working towards a number of “Emiratisation” targets. These include upping the overall number of Emirati staff to 26 per cent over the next five years and boosting the proportion of female employees from 15 per cent to 27 per cent over the same period. In addition, the aim is for all senior roles to be filled by Emiratis and, where that’s not possible, for local nationals to receive the development necessary to enable them to step into those roles in future. As Paul Martin, chief HR officer at Corniche maternity hospital, says: “The expatriate community is here to help develop a sustainable workforce. One day we are going to have to take a step back, so we need to give UAE nationals the skills and ability to run hospitals.”
HR challenges
One of the ways Seha is attempting to realise Sheikh Khalifa’s vision is by using the experience of foreign management organisations. Five of the largest and most specialised hospitals are run in partnership with overseas institutions, including Johns Hopkins Medicine and Cleveland Clinic in the US and Vienna Medical University and Vamed from Austria.
Typically the senior management in each of these five facilities is made up of executives from both the overseas management companies and Seha, while the rest of the staff are employed by Seha, a situation that seems unusual from the outside but, according to Martin, works because “everybody is working towards the same objectives”.
Ultimately, however, transforming healthcare, and doing so with a growing Emirati workforce, is Seha’s responsibility – and to achieve those aims it needs a strategic HR function, something it didn’t have until recently.
Go back two years or so, says Mohamed Al Hameli, corporate head of support services, and Seha’s HR departments were perceived by many “as the police or policy keepers of the organisation”. “HR processes were outdated and labour intensive and there was a lack of consistency,” he says. “We quickly realised we needed to change our focus and adopt good HR practice in areas such as recruitment, pay, performance management, productivity and customer service.”
Key initiatives
The catalyst for change proved to be the creation of a monthly HR forum, set up in June 2009 by Al Hameli. With each of the hospitals operating a different HR model, he saw the opportunity to tap into the collective experience of the senior HR staff, a group of individuals from the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East and the UAE. “The idea for the forum was a result of my previous experience as an HR director at one of our facilities,” he explains. “There was little or no connection with the other hospitals and when I was promoted to my current corporate role I saw an opportunity to bring together the expertise from across the facilities.”
Once the forum was in place, individual members took on responsibility for implementing group-wide initiatives, including a new time and attendance system, based on clocking in and out using fingerprint recognition technology. This will provide data on key metrics such as sickness absence, productivity and training and, it is anticipated, will improve workforce planning.
In 2010 a new Oracle system was also phased in to replace an antiquated HR database and, according to Sultan Al Nuaimi, HR director at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, who led on the project, Seha is using the system to its full potential. The old paper-based appraisals, for instance, have now been replaced and linked to the organisation’s key performance indicators and staff can access the system for a variety of purposes, including booking leave and ordering supplies.
HR framework reviewed
Alongside these technological developments, one of the UAE government’s largest HR projects kicked off in 2010. Known as the Hewitt Project, after the HR consulting firm Aon Hewitt brought in to help, the initiative was overseen by the HR forum and saw all HR policies and procedures reviewed. This resulted in the introduction of new compensation and benefits policies, including increased maternity pay (from 45 to 60 days) and flexible working, a new concept in the UAE where part-time working legislation has only been in place since last year.
The biggest challenge, however, was the introduction of a new pay and grade structure for all staff, which came into effect in January of this year and reduced the number of job descriptions from around 3,000 to a much more manageable 600. “Previously we didn’t have a job evaluation process and salaries and grades were inconsistent,” says Martin. “We could have been paying one salary somewhere and a higher salary somewhere else for exactly the same job. It was very difficult to operate in that environment.”
For each grade in the new structure, employees from across the group were tasked with writing their own job descriptions. Over a period of 12 months over 500 staff, divided into working groups, spent time with Aon Hewitt discussing the experience and qualifications needed for their role.
“We wanted the people who do the jobs to write the job descriptions. It was a great way of saying to staff ‘we want you to get involved’,” says Martin, although he admits that “having a large number of employees in a room trying to write a generic job description was quite a challenge”.
Emiratisation targets
In keeping with the organisation’s goals, another area of focus for HR has been Emiratisation. According to Madiha Al Marzouqi, head of recruitment and workforce planning, Seha is “very proud” of accommodating the different cultures and backgrounds of the nearly 100 different nationalities it employs.
But, with UAE nationals making up just 7 per cent of clinical staff, a number that drops to around 1 per cent for nurses, there aren’t enough Emirati staff in clinical roles to run even one hospital. Some of the reasons for this are cultural – family is extremely important to Emiratis and some do not want to work shifts, says Al Marzouqi, one of a growing number of women in managerial positions. But other factors are also at play. Although nearly 60 per cent of UAE nationals working for Seha have a bachelor’s degree – often gained overseas – many lack the experience or training of their expatriate counterparts.
One key way that HR can make a difference to the number of Emirati employees is by targeting young people, says Al Marzouqi. So last year Seha embarked on a project aimed at attracting UAE nationals while they are still in high school, college or university through a variety of promotional events, careers days and recruitment fairs.
In addition, all students attending Fatima College of Health Sciences in Abu Dhabi who major in a health discipline are being guaranteed a job after graduation, while a work-shadowing scheme starting this month will see around 200 young people visiting Seha hospitals for a day to learn about specific clinical careers. “We want to give them a one-day career as a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist,” says Al Marzouqi. “We will provide them with all the tools and guidance they need. It’s about building the brand.”
Tailored CIPD programmes
Developing UAE nationals within HR itself is equally important and the HR forum has led on a programme to equip staff with CIPD qualifications. Institute staff spent time in Abu Dhabi and, as a result, developed two bespoke programmes: the Diploma in HR Practice for senior team members and the Certificate in HR Practice for their direct reports, both tailored to the UAE context.
So far more than 50 employees have embarked on this training, which is run over an academic year and includes a mix of classroom and action-centred learning. “You usually find that more junior UAE nationals are highly educated and where the development lies is in practical HR skills,” Martin says. “The institute has done a really nice job of taking the core elements of CIPD but making it relevant to the Middle East. It’s become a foundation for the development of all our UAE nationals who are coming through to be developed as future HR leaders.”
While some of the Emiratisation work will take years to bear fruit, the effectiveness of the other projects will become clear a lot sooner, says group HR director Mohamed Al Qemzi, as next month Seha will be carrying out its first organisation-wide employee engagement survey. This will give the organisation the opportunity both to compare engagement levels across its own facilities and, as the survey is being run with Aon Hewitt, to benchmark itself on a global basis.
“Previously each hospital collected different data,” says Al Qemzi. “We need to be able to measure what difference we have made with all the new initiatives across the facilities.”
The survey may be a first for the organisation, but Al Qemzi stresses that employee engagement generally is an important element of Seha’s five-year strategic plan. Involving employees in the Hewitt Project was part of this, but staff are also invited to regular “town hall” meetings, and individual facilities are encouraged to hold annual employee appreciation days.
There is also an online employee suggestion scheme, known as Musharaka, the Arabic for participation, with an annual prize of about 50,000 dirhams (around £8,600), for the best idea that is implemented. For a nurse, that is equivalent to more than six months’ base salary.
All employees can access the intranet-based scheme and everyone who participates receives recognition in the form of a letter of thanks from HR and small prizes, such as pens and mugs. “A lot of our employees come from countries where it is quite an alien concept to be asked what they think. If you give them the opportunity to get involved they love it,” says Martin.
Learning points
Over the past two years, Seha’s HR function has, says Martin, “made the leap away from the bureaucracy of a personnel office”, but he admits that implementing so many new initiatives in such a short space of time has been challenging, especially for an organisation that is barely four years old.
“It’s a young organisation, it’s growing, it’s developing. We’ve made mistakes and we’ve learned from those,” he says, adding that one of the key challenges has been communicating with 16,000 employees many of whom do not have English as a first language.
“We couldn’t have done what we have in the past two years unless we’d engaged with employees,” he says. “You have to invest a lot of time and energy in getting the message out to people.”
The challenge now, adds Al Hameli, is to continue to work towards Sheikh Khalifa’s vision of worldclass healthcare. “One of our strategic objectives is to establish Seha as an employer of choice in the UAE and contribute to the development of a healthcare system that encourages and develops talented individuals,” he says. “We want Seha HR to be a role model for other HR departments in the government of Abu Dhabi.”