Penn State Health ‘Playbook’ offers plan for diversity

Penn State Health has a strategic plan in place to guide diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives throughout the organization. Workforce members and external community leaders contributed to the “Diversity Playbook,” which provides the game plan for organizational success, including identifying actionable outcomes and defining responsibilities for accountability.

Diversity — the representation of different backgrounds in a workforce — is a strategic driver of innovation, productivity, economic success and institutional excellence. Inclusion, or how our workforce and patient population are treated, is a tool for attracting underrepresented employees and providing culturally responsive care for patients, as well as creating an environment in which all members of the Penn State Health community can thrive.

The Diversity Playbook features the following priorities:

• Accountability
• A respectful work environment
• Diverse leadership
• Regular communication about our steadfast commitment to diversity
• Increasing diverse patient care competencies
• Embracing difficult dialogues about respect and inclusion

‘Breakthrough’ strategies identified

The Diversity Playbook contributors also identified the following six “breakthrough” strategies to advance the commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion:

• Track the current population of Penn State Health employees who speak languages other than English, and increase those with these skills by 5% year over year.
• Progressively pursue a path of coaching and accountability to transition those who have difficulty absorbing a culture of diversity and inclusion.
• Develop executive leadership representation to build diverse populations that effectively lead change and impact.
• Embrace community action steps to advance Penn State Health as the community thought leader on diversity, equity and inclusion.
• Establish and manage expectations for Penn State Health to recruit and employ a diverse population of employees.
• Establish onboarding criteria to prioritize the visibility of diversity, equity and inclusion matters.

Initiatives and efforts to enhance diversity

The Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion continues to advance these priorities and strategies through numerous initiatives and efforts, including:

Accountability, Competencies and Leadership: The health system Diversity Office has assigned an educational program on unconscious bias to all leaders and managers, with the goal of leading a dialogue with their teams about addressing unconscious bias in the workplace. The Diversity Office also continues to offer the “Inclusion Academy Culturally Responsive Health Care” series to increase accountability for inclusion. In addition, Human Resources is introducing a “Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue” educational program to teach managers skills for working through disagreement to achieve better results.

Communications: Marketing and Communications has established a dedicated section on diversity, equity and inclusion, called “Tapestry,” in The RITE Stuff and has updated the external-facing and Infonet diversity pages to include diversity-related events, like the “Celebrate Diversity” series.

Dialogue: The entity town hall meetings have incorporated a “diversity dialogue” on different topics related to diversity, and there are plans to incorporate this into the health system’s town hall meetings as well. Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and Penn State Health West Shore medical centers recently incorporated a brief virtual dialogue on generational diversity and international cultures into their town hall meetings. The next series of dialogues will be on disability inclusion.

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