Piedmont CHRO Alison Smith outlines 10-year workforce plan, tech rollout
Piedmont health system's chief human resources officer, Alison Smith, PhD, is applying two decades of retail and real estate HR experience to a workforce of nearly 50,000 caregivers across 28 hospitals, 122 immediate care locations and 1,875 clinic practices, according to Becker's Hospital Review. Smith, who joined the Atlanta-based system in June 2024 after serving as CHRO of real estate company Cortland and spending more than 20 years in HR at Publix Super Markets, said CEO Kevin Brown sought an outside perspective with customer focus and large-scale implementation experience.
Smith told Becker's that nursing and clinical recruitment and retention are among Piedmont's biggest current workforce challenges. The system tracks first-year turnover and experience, operates career concierge and career pathways programs, has emphasized nurse leadership in its leadership development offerings over the past year, and is building career ladders for patient care technicians that pair technical training with leadership development.
Those efforts sit within a 10-year plan with annual plans mapped to it. Every leader works from a "plan on a page" that includes talent goals, and HR leaders at each entity are expected to know turnover, agency staffing levels and role-filling gaps. Smith said the alignment is reinforced consistently but is complex to execute.
On technology, Smith pointed to ambient listening and patient navigation tools, with change champions trained to support rollouts. She described reskilling as continuous and said Piedmont aims to make clear that the focus is not eliminating roles but shifting people to value-added work. Her priorities heading into 2027 are retention, using technology to improve productivity and experience, and employee health, with rising health plan costs prompting a more proactive approach.