Healthcare Facilities Network

How to Build the Next Generation of Healthcare Facilities Leaders

• Peter

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How do healthcare organizations attract, develop, and retain the next generation of facilities professionals?

In this episode of the Healthcare Facilities Network Podcast, Mike shares a practical blueprint for building a stronger healthcare facilities workforce, drawing on years of leadership experience and lessons learned throughout his career.

The conversation explores how facilities leaders can work more effectively with Human Resources, where to find new talent, the qualities that matter most in today's facilities professionals, and why creating a healthy work-life balance is essential to long-term recruitment and retention.

Mike also reflects on how his perspective on hiring has evolved over the years and shares his outlook on the future of healthcare facilities management, offering actionable insights that leaders can apply regardless of the size or location of their organization.

Whether you're facing workforce shortages today or planning for tomorrow's leadership needs, this episode provides practical strategies for building stronger teams and preparing the next generation of healthcare facilities leaders.

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Today's Guest:
👥 Connect with Michael Neely: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-neely-a301a14a/

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People Skills Over Pure Skills

SPEAKER_01

You know, when I got into this business, it was all about skills. Mm-hmm. You wanted that person with the skills. You have to have the skills to come in. I've changed all the over the years because I I'd taken the philosophy, I can teach someone how to turn a wrench. I can send them to school to become the best HBAC mechanic, but there's certain things I can't teach, and that's the people skills of it. So I want the guy that has good customer service skills, who can talk and and feels comfortable talking and with customers and and and setting expectations but also being fair and being able to communicate well. So to me, I I look at that first. If you have someone that can deliver great customer service skills, and I'm not for sure that's a taught talent. Right. I think some people have, and some people just don't. Yeah. You can teach them everything else, and I don't think you can do it the other way around.

Aging Workforce And Aging Buildings

SPEAKER_02

There's a major crisis facing healthcare facilities management. We have aging employees, aging buildings, and aging infrastructure. We've created the healthcare facilities network, a content network designed specifically to help solve for these three pressing issues in healthcare facilities management. We bring on thought leaders and experts from across healthcare facilities management, all the way from the C-suite to the technician level, because at the end of the day, we're all invested in solving the aging issue. Thanks for tuning in. Look at our videos, you will find that is a theme across our content. This is the Healthcare Facilities Network. I'm your host, Peter Martin. So hello and welcome to the Healthcare Facilities Network, live here from the Florida Healthcare Engineers Association down in Orlando, Florida, and happy to be joined today by Mike Neely. Mike is the system director for Baycare Health. Correct. Donomio Landware. Mike, how many hospitals do you have oversight for?

SPEAKER_01

Currently we have 15, the 16th just being built right now. Wow. So it's a busy time. Busy year.

SPEAKER_02

Busy year, busy time. So Mike was kind enough to join me. You know, Mike and I spoke last year at the FIA conference, and we were talking about workforce issues. And I said to Mike, I'd love to have you on. And coming back this year, I said, uh Mike, let's let's talk workforce. So I'm I'm happy that Mike is joining me today. Mike, just for the listeners, from the big picture perspective, 15 hospitals building the 16th. How would you describe your workforce situation within FF?

Why Techs Are Leaving Florida

SPEAKER_01

We're really struggling right now. Uh in the Tampa market, it's a very competitive market. We're competing with the construction industry, we're competing with the commercial industry. We're seeing less techs in the field. Uh after the last hurricane, we lost a lot of our techs just because the area has become so hard to live in with the rise of costs. So we're seeing a lot of our techs choose to move more north to states where maybe car insurance is cheaper, housing is cheaper, uh insurance for housing is cheaper. Uh so we've we've struggled on all frauds. We're losing them to competitors, and then we're losing them just for the economic reasons as well.

SPEAKER_02

It's a really interesting answer, Mike. I never really thought of you know, because I'm from the Boston area, from the north. We have a high cost of living, everybody knows that. And um, but you guys are losing it to the so Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee.

SPEAKER_02

Wow. And you know, I should have asked you this, and you mentioned it. So you guys are located in the Tampa area, and so you're on the wet more on the west coast of Florida. Correct. Right, central part of the city, West Coast. Okay. So when you um when you try to keep your folks, you know, when they tell you you're leaving, are you able to be you get in the same ballpark, or is it just is it non-competitive at this point?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it it's really not competitive. Um our wage scales are not competitive with construction industry or the commercial. Um, we do rebound though. We do get some of them back because some of the guys who leave for the commercial industries, uh, take HVAC, for example, they're in a truck all day long, in hours driving. They have a route they have to do. So some of them are leaving at 5 a.m., not getting home to 8, 9, 10 o'clock at night, and then starting all over. So after a couple months of that, we get some of them back saying, you know what, working in a hospital where it's Monday through Friday. Yep. And I know my schedule, I know when I may be there. Yeah, once in a while I get called to um it's very uh appealing, especially to those with younger kids. So we lose them and then they some come back. But um most of the time we can't, if someone really wants to be, we can't compete.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. How do you guys try to counter counter the the workforce loss?

Shifting From In-House To Contractors

SPEAKER_01

So um, you know, we're you know, you you look at your stacking ratios. So we've always tried to do the majority of work in-house. Okay. I'd say probably 80, 20, 80 percent in-house, 20%. Now it's just we're changing those ratios around. Now maybe it's 30%, contractor 70% in-house, and then uh we try to go out there and look at new ways of getting people into our industry, yeah, getting them in the door, which is um also a struggle, but uh come up with some different creative ways of doing that.

SPEAKER_02

So when you do that, Mike, do you work with human resources to try to help you in those lines?

SPEAKER_01

We we do a little bit. Um, our struggle with human resources is that um they don't know how to recruit the non-professionals or the non-clinical people. And so their mind of recruiting is throwing it up on the Baycare website and saying, well, we posted the job, but we're just not getting a lot of people interested in it. So we've actually gone with our HR people and tried to get them to come and shadow our staff a little bit or learn what our staff do. So when they're talking with them, they they know what we're looking for and they can say, Oh yeah, I saw that when I was out there, and then they can put it together. That's helped us to get a little bit more people from them, um, and also pushing them to go back to some of the the old and true tried math methods of posting the job, the monsters and uh the the entry-level places, because that's where the trade people go and look. Yeah, they're not going to just jump on a hospital's website and look for uh electrician's job or a plumber's job.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right. And so you've had a you've had some success in bringing HR out into the field with your guys so they can see?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, we've had really good success. Uh our biggest issue now is that uh in at least in our hospital, we're the bottom of the pole of recruiting for HR. So we get the newer recruiters, and then once they start showing that they're doing something, they quickly move up the ranks. And so we're constantly turning over over recruiters.

SPEAKER_02

Wow. So that's that's that's interesting. You know, in so many ways, facilities, which is the kind of the heart of the hospital, right? But so often down that totem pole, whether it's money or human resources, and I used to find the same thing when I was doing the recruiting. Try to work with HR, and this isn't really a criticism, they just don't know the role, and if you think about it, they really shouldn't, right? It's not a priority for them, right? And so I used to try to find creative ways to work, but it just wasn't a lease. For whatever reason, it didn't always happen.

Staffing Agencies And Trial Hiring

SPEAKER_01

Our our biggest uh recruiting tool right now has been utilizing the the uh employment agencies in town because they they're out there and they're dealing with this on a day-to-day basis, they know where to go look for uh general construction type people or the electricians and the plumbers, and the other added benefit is that we can bring them in with the recruitment agency and set it for a six-month or 90-day trial, and then at the 90-day we make the decision if we want to hire them and go through the hiring process. If not, we just end it at that point in time. So it gives us a little bit better idea of being able to try someone out, yeah. Um, and we've had some really good success with that. Um, not all. Well, just like anything, you have those guys who work out really good in that 90 days and then 91 days is like Jeffrey in person. You're like, is this the same person we just hired?

SPEAKER_02

Exactly. Yeah, isn't it crazy the way that works? It's once sometimes people gain that longevity, it's just I you would hope that the work ethic just carries through no matter where you are. But that's a really interesting approach. I had not heard that before, where an organization brings them on for 90 days and then you can cut them loose, or that's a that's a nice way. Are there other kind of innovative strategies that you guys try to use, especially in the competitive market?

Veterans, High Schools, And Internships

SPEAKER_01

So um we've been trying to uh actually reach out to some of the larger groups in the area, for example, the Veterans Administration, and trying to get into their job fairs or have them know what we do so that as they have um military people coming back from the services, going back into civilian life, you know, maybe this is an option for them, especially with the mechanics and all that. And so we've had a couple come through that and that's been successful. That seems to be hit or miss. It's like you while you get tatsum, and then you go up here and you don't get any. And then it keeps uh kind of going that cycle. The other thing that we've been really been trying to do is uh hit the high school and the job stairs of the high school and try to capture some of those kids who maybe don't know what you want to do and let them know about uh what we have to offer or why why is facilities mainly so great and what what's good about it. Um and and that we've had some good success with. We've done a couple of internships as well with high school students where they come in over the summer, and that's been really uh getting that recognition out there. So I think that's kind of our avenues is looking at well, can we go to those trade schools, high schools, those groups of people coming back that are actively looking to get in the job market, but maybe not know where to go and say, hey, let's hit them before the commercial industries hit them and uh the truck uh industry gets no.

SPEAKER_02

So you guys certainly are not passive at all in dealing with this. You guys are you're doing quite a bit.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we're we're trying to because we're we're just seeing that turnover keep going and keep

Stop Poaching And Reset Expectations

SPEAKER_01

going. Our biggest hurdle was stealing from each other. Yeah. So, you know, you would have one bake care hospital hiring someone from another baycare hospital. You kind of had to say, okay, if it's right for the person, great, let's do it. But let's just don't take from ourselves to tell ourselves because we're just creating the holds. But we also see that with other fellow hospitals, you know, we all want five to ten year experienced healthcare people. So where are you going to find them?

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Someone else's hospitals. Right, right. We trade uh we trade employees. I I always laugh because we always joked about train and Johnson controls. Someone, uh children, mechanic coming from Johnson Controls one day, three weeks later, he's now coming to you from train. No, and it's it's they jump back and forth, and we're starting to see that in our industry is that uh workers are going and leaving and going to your uh competitor or another hospital in the area. Um, and and I don't blame them, and I think it's they have uh if it's right for them, it's it's good. I've always been a proponent of any any employees that work for us. If you're bedding yourself or you're bettering in your work life balance, 100% support that and we'll do everything to help you get to where you need to be. Uh but when we just start seeing the guys jump at like one dollar, two others here and there, uh, we're we're not solving the problem. We're just moving it around.

Hiring For Customer Service First

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. What do you look for, Mike? Um like what do you look for in an employee these days? And let's assume it's somebody who doesn't have the five to ten years of experience. Because you you probably either know they can do it or you know somebody who knows it. But assume it's somebody who comes to you, kinda they might be green, but there's something that you see. So what do you look for? What are indicators?

SPEAKER_01

You know, you know, when I got into this business, it was all about skills. You wanted that person with the skills. You have to have the skills to come. Yeah. I've changed a little over the years because I I've taken the philosophy, I can teach someone how to turn a wrench. I can send them to school to become the best HBAC mechanic, but there's certain things I can't teach, and that's the the people skills of it. So I want the guy that has good customer service skills, who can talk and and feels comfortable talking and with customers and and and setting expectations but also being fair and and being able to communicate well. So to me, I I look at that first. If you have someone that can deliver great customer service skills, and I'm not for sure that's a taught talent. Right. I think some people have, and some people just don't.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Um you can teach them everything else, and I don't think you can do it the other way around. Taking that guy who's been an electrician for 30 years and now saying I'm gonna teach you how to be uh relate to the end customer because you've always worked for the construction field where you didn't have to intervene with people, it gets hard to when did that's an interesting uh answer on your part.

SPEAKER_02

When did that change start to occur in you where you you started to see the soft just as important if not more so than the technical?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I I think a lot of that to me came about as the whole migration of healthcare. Um you know, in in the old days, call them the old days. Pre-COVID maybe? Pre-COVID, yeah. Uh, you know, as a facilities guy, you could get away with doing something saying it's my gut deal. Why do you need that new generator? Well, this one's already 20 years old, I just feel like it's not being a last. And then we had the big data here where everything was data driven. And we saw the C-suite change from not really fully understanding what facilities are doing, but say, no, I don't need to know what facility is doing, but they're being probably saying process clinical files. And so they're gonna have to be able to show us with data how we do things, and they're gonna have to be able to uh sell that uh service to us, and and I think that started to change how we looked at business. Um but around that same time we started to see our shop sizes get smaller. Uh so that I think played into it a little bit. Uh we started to see um a lot of the uh the first wave I would call it is the the the non-traditional shifts, the second and third shifts. You know, when I started back in 1989 in healthcare, we could always find someone to work third shift. There was that boiler tech that just loved a nighttime shift and he would do it. There was that uh uh mechanic whose wife was a nurse in the VD and she works third shifts, I won't work it. And then we hit that bowl is where now no one wants to work third shift.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And then you're like, well, what do you do? You know, you're trying to recruit younger people and they're just like, I'd want first shift, right? I'm not gonna work a third shift. The older people are aging out and then retiring, and you know, and they're not around anymore. So it's just starting to magnify there, and it got to a point where if we hadn't started to look at other ways into the organization, you wouldn't have any more.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And so that's where we started to look and say, you know, how do we how do we get the younger generation to energize about healthcare? And we're not there. Uh as a as an organization, as an industry, um, we have to get out over that thought process of that everyone has to have five to ten years of experience. And I talk to my managers all the time when they come back and they say, Well, I can't hire, I'm looking for electrician three and I can't find any in the market. And I'm just like, why not take it out as electrician one? Do you need electrician three? Can we bring in electrician one and roll though? Uh and it's just looking at it a little bit differently. Uh, and I get it. If I'm if I'm in the hospital and I'm running it, I want people there who can do things from day one. Yeah. But they're just not there. So now what do I do?

SPEAKER_02

When I did the recruiting, like I'd have some organizations, and and I really respect what you said relative to, okay, we need, we want five to ten years, but if they're not there, what do you do? And and you know, like you can't create them. And I would tell organizations like that, they'd be like, well, I'm looking for a mechanic, I'm looking for somebody who's a mechanical engineer or an electrical engineer or a PE. And I was like, okay, that's great, but I can't create those folks. And they're not, you know, but I always found, and I'm not asking you to talk about day care, but especially in healthcare, organizations were kind of stuck in the past and they didn't do as you're talking about here, kind of redefining what we can accept and how we can go about creating that workforce for the future.

SPEAKER_01

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02

If you like this video, please like and subscribe to the network. And more importantly, share it with your colleagues in the healthcare industry. Together, we can solve the aging crisis that's impacting all of us.

AI, Remote Work, And New Shifts

SPEAKER_02

What do you see, Mike, as you look to the future? What is what's your outlook?

SPEAKER_01

You know, we're in some interesting times. Um, I think the industry is trying to figure out how AI pass us as an organization. Um, we're trying to figure out how the whole uh, you know, if you asked me two years ago, I was gonna say, I don't know what we're gonna do because every young person wants to go into the technology field so that they can work from home and live wherever they want to be. And hospitals can't do that. We haven't figured a way to take do the boiler maintenance remote. Right, right. It just hasn't happened yet. Uh, and you know, and it was like, what are we going to do? Well, then the tech kind of busted with the AI, and there's thousands of people who have been laid off. We're starting to see some people try to migrate into the technical, the tech fields. So it it's an interesting time. It's just how do we attract those people that maybe wanted to work from home and they're just aren't those jobs anymore? Yeah. And what are they willing to try to do something? And as healthcare, are we willing to allow something different? The new generations, they don't want to work the traditional ships. You know, can we come up with creative shifting to get these dice or or females into it? Can we figure out ways to engage their electronics and their technology skills to do a kind of an integrated, more higher level approach than just a mechanic? And when you think about it, if we get to the the space age, you know, and yeah, maintenance robots, and yeah, you just have people kind of controlling the robots, you're going to need that person that kind of understands the electronic side, but also the maintenance side. Yeah, you can organize that. So I think we have to start as an organization, as an industry, looking at how do we attract the younger generation, how can we change how we do businesses to them a little bit, and how can they fill those roles for us moving forward.

SPEAKER_02

So you talked about creative shifting, which is very interesting to me. There's we did a um we did a podcast with David Emery. David is the he's a um facility manager, really, he's a facility director. We were talking about titles before Tadeus don't mean I am so he's he's a facility manager, but he's a director for Income Mountain Health in Provo, Utah. And we did a podcast talking about ways that he is creatively trying to get his guys into shifts because like I can't match on money, right? They're gonna go other, but what I can do is create a work-life balance for us. And so he's done some creative shifting, four days on, three days off, get your work done. It's very it's interesting. So if you want to listen to that podcast, go ahead and I'll link to it. But have you found like along the creative shifting, Mike, have you guys implemented anything along those lines? Or what are you thinking for create, you know, different ways to do that?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so we've we've dabbled in it. I don't know if we've really gone full bore into it, but we've tried to with certain SAV member. And one that comes to mind is we had a gentleman that just had a child, and the family was looking at a way to save on daycare. And so he worked first shift, and he wanted me to move to uh second shift. So his wife would work first shift, he would work to second shift, and they get covered with everything in the home. The immediate reaction of the manager was no, this is first shift position, I can't be the first shift. And it was just like, well, let's walk through this a little bit, let's talk it through. Are there PM's we can move to second shift? That makes more sense to do when there's less traffic in the hospital that you could have this person do. So we're we're we we ended it up and and I don't know if we'll stick it full time, but it was like, let's try it, yeah, and see what happens. And before we just say, No, we can't accommodate it. Just give it a try and take it from there. I looked at a bat when I was uh probably about 10 years ago where I was in move in uh Wisconsin at a hospital system there. They hadn't made an arrangement, they had time struggling to get nurses. So they didn't made a partnership with the hospital down south, and they didn't a nurse exchange uh program. So snowbirds, the the nurse who wants to live in Wisconsin during the summer but not in the winter, she could work in the summer up in Wisconsin and then transit transition down to uh Florida or wherever that uh that southern location is, and then work the winter months down in Florida. And vice versa, they had some families that you know they wanted to do the opposite. Yeah. They wanted to get away from the heat in the summer, or they had kids, they wanted to go someplace where there's more adventure and outdoor lifestyle, and so they would swap. So they would find people and swap them on based upon the seasons uh the of the snowbird

Hobbies And Referrals As Recruiting Tools

SPEAKER_01

seasons.

SPEAKER_02

That's really interesting. Have you found other industries that produce people who are good for health care?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's a it's a great question. Um you know, I think historically we've looked at like the uh aerospace programs and um the some of the the industrial base programs where you have that guy who's maybe an electrician for uh a factory and coming into the in the healthcare. Uh but it it's hard because number one, we're not competitive scale logs.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So you know, you look at the aerospace, you look at the safety requirements and the processes and the double checks and the and the safety of passengers. For us, it's a safety application, they correlate really well. Yep. Except for the airline industry makes so much more money that those guys just don't want to. Um we we've recruited a couple that were more on the the retirement, they're getting ready for retirement, they want a little change and they're looking for one or two years and they'll come and do that. I think it's more interesting what I try to look at, and and then when we've had some more success, is looking at a candidate and what their hobbies are.

SPEAKER_02

Huh.

SPEAKER_01

And finding the guy who's the uh garage mechanic who likes to tinker on cars or likes to take electronics and put them back together. They transition very well into the healthcare field because they're curious they're curious, they like to run into troubleshooting and doing different types of of uh creative things to get it done. And it just has that mindset of what you need for a mechanic. Yep. Um, so we've we've always looked at I always ask when I'm interviewing uh the lower the entry-level positions or the tech positions, what do you do on your spare time? And and those guys that work on Ricardo Arms, I'm stuck on a 69 Chevelle and I've been working on it for 25 years. One of these days I'm not gonna finish it. That's a guy bomb. Yeah, you know, he just he has that drive to try to get something done. You sound very heavily involved in all of this process, are you? Not as much as I used to be, but I I I'm involved by mentoring my manager and working with my managers, and when they're coming to me and saying, Hey Mike, we've done 18 months and we haven't had single after this position, but it's just bouncing the ideas off and talking it through as a group and saying, hey, if we tried this, have we tried that, what type of person are you looking for? Um it's going to shop meetings at the hospitals and trying to get across the other techs. Hey, when you're out and about, promote our open positions. If you have an HVAC tech coming to your house to work on your furnace and he's a does a great job and he's personal, talk at the job and and recommend that he comes on my for rent. Um I think that's where we're seeing some of our success too, is using our front light staff to do recruiting. They're out there and they're in their scene of buttons I've done it. I sat there and uh I had a really good guy come to my house who was working on uh the heat exchanger for my pool. And you know, I'm like, hey, you really like working out in the hot all day? You know, you can thought about this. What did he say? Uh he turned me out. He's a bus part. Yeah, you try, you know, it's going to Home Depot. You run into that contractor Home Depot.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Doesn't hurt topping up a bit.

SPEAKER_02

No. Wow. Well, Mike Neely, System Director for Bay Care Health, and actually just a tremendous advocate for trying to get people into healthcare facilities management. I appreciate your time this afternoon. Thank you for uh speaking. Well, thank you. And you know, Mike, now, like you said, you're trying to mentor your managers or tell your managers, just pop on this video and say, here, watch this and do that. Exactly. Perfect. Mike Neely, thank you very much. Thank you.

Final Thoughts And Guest Invitation

SPEAKER_02

If you want to be a guest on a future episode of the Healthcare Facilities Network, go to healthcarefacilities network.com and let us know who you are and what you want to talk about. Because together, we can solve this critical aging issue.