John R. Petrov, Chief Human Resources Officer at UAB Medicine

Show Notes

Caring for the Caregivers: UAB Medicine’s CHRO on High‑Stakes HR, Recognition at Scale, and AI‑Powered Hiring

Summary

When your organization is the primary destination for critical care, how do you support the people who support patients—without breaking under pressure?

John Petrov, Chief Human Resources Officer at UAB Medicine, leads HR for a 1,300+ bed academic medical center and a statewide health system employing 37,000 people.

He shares what HR looks like in the second-most regulated industry in the U.S., from building rock-solid frontline leader relationships to removing roadblocks that delay care.

John reframes “housekeeping” as infection prevention, breaks down why volume and environment shape patient experience, and details how UAB equips caregivers through rigorous onboarding, ongoing competencies, wellness incentives, and 24/7 support.

He also unveils “Applause,” a system-wide recognition platform, and the feedback engine behind 83% engagement survey participation.

Finally, John explains how UAB is using Phenom’s AI to automate recruiting workflows, accelerate candidate connections, and free teams to focus on the human moments that matter closing with two simple leadership principles that travel across industries.

Timestamps

[00:45] – UAB Medicine’s footprint: academic medical center, statewide hospitals, and CHRO scope

[03:00] – High-stakes reality: healthcare as the #2 most regulated industry and why it matters

[05:02] – Supporting caregivers: frontline leader relationships, clearing barriers, and EVS as infection prevention

[08:01] – Collaboration challenges: personalities, ER volume, and the ripple effects on patient experience

[11:15] – Nurturing the workforce: onboarding, annual competencies, EAP, and wellness incentives

[13:20] – Recognition that sticks: launching “Applause” for peer-to-peer points and milestones

[15:40] – Real feedback loops: 83% engagement, action plans, town halls, and transparent “not now”

[19:25] – AI in talent acquisition: Phenom to source, schedule, and speed up candidate connection

[21:55] – What AI changes: less transactional work, more time to sell mission, values, and culture

[23:53] – Parting advice: do all you can for your people; make a positive difference

Takeaways

- Strengthen frontline leader-caregiver relationships and remove barriers that delay care.

- Treat environmental services as critical infection prevention, not just “housekeeping.”

- Close the feedback loop: drive high engagement, publish action plans, and explain the “why” behind decisions.

- Incentivize preventive health to boost wellbeing and contain benefit costs.

- Recognize often and publicly—use a scalable, peer-to-peer platform tied to values and milestones.

- Automate recruiting workflows with AI to accelerate candidate engagement and redirect recruiter time to high-impact conversations.

AllVoices brings all your employee relations work together in one place. No more jumping between spreadsheets, emails, and legacy systems just one place to document and manage reports, cases, investigations, and performance

conversations. It helps you run a more consistent process, takes busywork off your plate with AI, and makes it easier to spot trends early, so you can work proactively, not just put out fires.

See a demo at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.allvoices.co/

What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Emily Fenech (00:35)
Welcome to HR Voices, I'm your host, Emily Fenech and today I get to chat with John Petrov. He is the Chief Human Resources Officer at UAB Medicine. Welcome, John.

John Petrov (00:47)
Thank you, Emily. I'm so delighted to be here with you today.

Emily Fenech (00:50)
Yes, thanks for making it. So John, UAB Medicine is an academic medical center and health system. It's affiliated with University of Alabama and it is one of the nation's leading hospitals and medical schools. ⁓ For those of us who maybe haven't heard of UAB, don't live in the South, I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about it, about how it's set up, the people that work there and your role as CHRO.

John Petrov (01:00)
Yes.

Yes.

Excellent. So we actually have two CHROs, one on the traditional campus side. So I have a colleague of mine, wonderful colleague, Janet May. So she leads ⁓ human resources, you know, for like all the different schools, the school of...

arts and nursing and school medicine so on and so forth. I have responsibility for the health system which comprises our flagship academic medical center UAB University Hospital. It's over 1300 beds, over 20,000 employees. I mean it's a big operation and in addition to that we have 14 other hospitals throughout the state of Alabama and recently ⁓ actually this past November we celebrated our one year anniversary of acquiring

a local health system from Ascension called St. Vincent's. So it's now UAB St. Vincent's and there's five more hospitals that we've added to the portfolio locally. In total, University of Alabama at Birmingham, the medical health system and all that employs over 37,000 employees. So I lead and have responsibility to retain and attract the very best talent to provide the best possible care to our patients and communities at

We are oftentimes the primary or only place for care, especially critical care within the state of Alabama. So the communities and the people that we serve really come to depend on us, oftentimes in life or death situations. So the work that we do is extremely meaningful, lots of purpose, and I'm very proud to be part of the team and the organization.

Emily Fenech (02:54)
What great overview, thank you. I actually got to interview someone with a similar role, Chief People Officer at Stony Brook, and she sort of summarized it very similarly about just what an honor it is to provide such meaningful work to your local community. But that also comes with challenges, right? I think healthcare is one of the, it's a high stakes.

John Petrov (03:14)
That's right.

Emily Fenech (03:18)
I can't think of a more high stakes environment to work in, right? Because as you mentioned, it can literally be life or death when you're working in healthcare, right? And so, ⁓ okay, great.

John Petrov (03:25)
Yeah, I got a question for you real quick.

What industry in the United States is the most regulated?

What do you think? Close, healthcare is number two. So we're only second to the nuclear industry. So.

Emily Fenech (03:35)
Health care?

I was gonna say aviation,

nuclear. Okay.

John Petrov (03:46)
that aviation is third.

yep, yep. the nuclear power plants in our country are the most regulated, followed by healthcare. Just to give you perspective, mean, healthcare, aviation, nuclear, the work that we do, it's extremely important. But yes, there are ample risks and challenges associated with our work. I mean, you know, we don't want any patient harm whatsoever. People come to us, they entrust us to care for them, to protect them, to, you know, keep them

safe and provide the best possible care. But with that is a myriad of responsibilities. mean a lot of our professionals have a great degree of responsibility, their scope of practice is very complex, so on and so forth.

Emily Fenech (04:31)
Yeah, so wanted to talk a little bit with you. mean, one thing that I love talking to people leaders within healthcare because, you know, people are people regardless of where they work. But I think what happens in a healthcare context is as you're talking about, like, it's regulated, the stakes are high, it's 24-7, a lot of that human emotion really gets put under a pressure cooker, right? And when you're dealing with that much responsibility. And so when you think about sort of traditional, when you think of HR and you think of people strategies, right?

John Petrov (04:52)
does.

Emily Fenech (05:00)
I think that there's so many lessons we can learn from people who work in healthcare because of the context in which they're working. You know, it's, I don't know, it's like more like condensed or, yeah, talk to me about that. Yeah, pressure cooker is the only word I could think of to describe it, right? Because ⁓ not all of us work in an environment like that. what is it, can you just put into context some of the challenges as a people leader that you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis?

John Petrov (05:13)
Absolutely. It can be a pressure cooker at times.

First and foremost, I think it's extremely important that our frontline leaders, so supervisors, managers, and directors, ⁓

have a very important and a solid relationship with our frontline caregivers and vice versa. Our teams need to feel supported. They need to feel heard. As leaders, we need to ensure that we provide them with the tools and resources that they need to be successful, as well as eliminate their roadblocks and barriers or the things that stand in way. For example, if they have a piece of equipment that is not working at its full potential or has an

issue that can impede on that caregiver providing timely care to a patient, right? And there's a downstream effect. If I'm providing care to patient and I'm late to in a clinic setting to an appointment, well, it's a dominant effect. It's not just that patient. It potentially is every patient to follow unless I'm able to catch up what I'm doing. So we have to have a very collaborative and supportive environment in order to provide the

that we provide and again the complexity and the diversity of care you think about diagnostics whether it's radiology and lab or surgery right and interventional or life-saving if you think about just the operations of a hospital or health system we have to serve food, food to our patients, food to our workforce, ⁓ we have to provide clean facilities you know oftentimes people think that's a housekeeper no that housekeeper

environmental service worker is much more than just being a housekeeper. They're actually the first line of defense for infection prevention, right? So having a clean, a sterile environment is critical to mitigating the risk of a patient acquiring a hospital infection, right? Or hospital acquired infection based on their stay with us or their care during a surgery. So you're absolutely right. It's very complex. So we have to be

Emily Fenech (07:15)
Yeah.

John Petrov (07:35)
supportive. We have to collaborate and we have to listen to our workforce. Our workforce oftentimes are the best equipped to provide us with recommendations for solutions or for improvements because they live and they do the work each and every day. So like as a senior leader within the organization, I have to depend on people at all levels to keep me informed so that I can keep our executive team informed and we can continue to make the right decisions.

in support thereof.

Emily Fenech (08:07)
Yeah, I want to unpack two of the things you just said, right, about how important that collaboration is, particularly with the management. What interferes usually with that collaboration? Like what challenges do you see pop up that create difficulty in maintaining a collaborative environment?

John Petrov (08:25)
Yeah, sometimes it could be a personality difference amongst coworkers or between an employee and supervisor or vice versa. So HR helps to navigate that through our employee relations team. Sometimes we have to mitigate or mediate a relationship between two employees or an employee and their supervisor. Other challenges can be attributed to volume, right? Just the sheer mass of patients that come to us for care. For example, not just UAB,

but across our country, a lot of our emergency rooms, especially in an urban setting, you know, we have more patients to care for than we have beds to admit them to, at least in the ED. And then there's a period of time if they're admitted into the hospital that they have to wait. And in some of those settings, you know, you might not have a room and you might be in an open environment ⁓ waiting, you know, to be admitted to a room. And a myriad of cases that

that can sometimes happen. Well, that does not lend itself to the best possible patient experience, right? And if you're dealing with a patient that not only has an injury or an illness, but they're dissatisfied with the environment that they're in, that can spill over to the caregiver and it could make the care that that individual is providing not just clinically, but emotionally, right? Behaviorally challenging because that patient could

be

upset or, know, and rightfully so. So navigating people and personalities, you know, we are still a people-intense business and operation. We care for those that need us. And then like my responsibility, my team's responsibility in HR, we don't provide direct patient care, but we certainly care for those that do. So we have to make sure that we're nurturing and supporting our employees.

Other challenges, aside from volumes and whatnot, regulatory. Because we are a highly regulated industry, we have specific standards that we should and we're required to meet to maintain quality and safety and patient satisfaction. And those regulations oftentimes require more work, right? For the employee has to perform additional tasks

We can't cut corners in healthcare, right? You can't do that. You have to have a systematic way of delivering care to ensure that it's of the highest quality, it's safe, so on and so forth.

Emily Fenech (11:06)
Yeah, that's a lot. how, I mean, not to unpack all of them, but when you think of, how do you nurture people? You mentioned you're not, you're not the frontline worker, but you're caring for people that care for people. And especially when it comes to those environments, like what sort of training or systems or, you know, values, like, mean, lots of training, but what, like, you know, is there a through line there in terms of how you prepare people or how you take care of people?

John Petrov (11:26)
to train.

Emily Fenech (11:35)
after dealing with something like that.

John Petrov (11:35)
Yep.

So

folks, when we hire somebody new, they go through a very thorough onboarding and training process. Oftentimes a new nurse, it could be their first six months of employment. And then throughout the year and each year thereafter, we continue to train and ensure that our teams are up to speed on any type of changes in the care model. If it's a policy procedural change, things of that nature.

clinician, you could be a rad tech, a phlebotomist, a nurse, right, a physician. ⁓ We evaluate their competencies at least annually, sometimes more frequently than that, to make sure that they're meeting the respective standards for their profession. Most of our folks are in the clinical setting are licensed or they're a registered professional or they have a certification of some sort and that comes with a body of knowledge and a body of expectation.

from a training development perspective. Two other resources, you know, we provide employee assistance. So if an employee has a personal issue that they're dealing with, a divorce, death of a loved one, right, things of that nature, grievance services, et cetera, we have a benefit through our employee assistance program that can help them navigate that or behavioral health challenge for themselves or their family. We also have wellness ⁓ benefits.

that are part of our employee value proposition and the total rewards that we offer that help to ensure that I as an employee have access to routine healthcare checkups. If I go through those motions, I earn points. Those points then can be redeemed for financial incentives and things of that nature, which twofold help us as an employer save money to contain our benefit costs. Because if you seek out preventative care, you can mitigate something

bad happening down the ro and if you catch something a higher likelihood that t be proactively if it is in a later sta reactive type of treatmen and could be extra compl associated with that. And one more final point. year, uh, an online reward

We call it applause. We use a third party company outside and that allows us to recognize our employees when they're exceeding expectations, providing exceptional patient care or aligning with the organization's mission or values and we can recognize them peer to peer. A leader can recognize them with points that can be redeemed for gift cards, for a whole host of things that we leverage an Amazon platform. So you get to go shop on Amazon and you could get an Apple phone, you know, or

or iWatch or whatever, it may be movie tickets, but we're very excited that we launched them. We're seeing high levels of utilization of the applause platform. We're also now going to be launching recognition for service year milestones each year, anniversaries, birthdays for those folks that want to opt in, etc. And it's like an internal social networking platform where we can recognize and celebrate one another for various successes and milestones. So those are

just some high-level examples.

Emily Fenech (15:03)
Yeah,

I don't know why I always imagine those programs being like a corporate thing, but they could work really well on a hospital context. I know I bought my, this is silly, but I bought my kitchen table with a points, like an executive, I completed a big project and I just had really been wanting a new kitchen table. I got it with the points and now every time I swear, like at least once a week, I think about that, right? And I don't, those extras that you're not expecting, especially when they help you, you know.

John Petrov (15:10)
Yeah.

love it.

Emily Fenech (15:31)
you know, do something special for yourself, right? I think that can go a long way with employees and feeling seen. So I love that. And valued, yes. We all just want to be valued for the work we're doing. The second thing I wanted to dig in that you said that I really liked was about feedback loops, right? Like the best ideas are coming from the people doing the work. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you're structuring those feedback. Like what does a good feedback system look like?

John Petrov (15:42)
That's right.

Yes.

So one is our annual employee engagement survey. That's a great opportunity where we get to touch everybody.

And this year, this past year, we had actually 83 % participation, which is far above the industry average, which is around 63%. So I'm very proud. And that was an improvement over last year at 70%. So more of our people are participating in the survey and communicating to us what they like, what's working well. So if it's not broke, we don't need to fix it. And they're also letting us know where we have room for improvement. And we actually task our leaders, frontline leaders,

way up to the CEO of our system and executive leadership to develop action plans to prioritize the top two or three areas needing to be improved and celebrating the one or two successes, something that's going really well. And we work on that throughout the year and we communicate the results and the changes that we have made throughout the year through our quarterly town halls. We also do various other activities where we go out into our facilities, into our clinics.

to meet with our employees to socialize with them. These are, we call them leadership forums and our leaders, hospital leaders, executive leaders go out and we meet with staff and we talk to them and we gain their feedback. What's working well, what needs to be improved. And then we come back and collaborate to identify any opportunities. We also, and it's very important to be transparent. If there's something that's asked of us and we can't do it, we need to explain the why. I'll tell you personally, I'm not a no

guy, I don't like no, I don't like to be told no. So I've learned to adapt and that no means not now eventually yes, perhaps we it's not the right time. It's not the right person or audience. And we need to re approach this and really work hard together as a group to get to a yes. And sometimes that yes might not be exactly what was initially asked of us. But maybe it's a compromise and it's something in between. So those are some of the leadership ways in which we collect information.

and we garner that feedback and also the direct relationship between an employee and their supervisor. It's important for them to be in continuous and constant communication with one another individually and then collectively as a team, right? Having regular huddles in the department, having team meetings, things of that nature where you can engage with your staff and physicians can engage and faculty and whatnot to better understand, you know,

again, what's going well, what do we continue, what do we need to change, ⁓ adjust or modify, and what do we need? What might be new and improved, and what does that look like? And we have...

processes in place if it's we need equipment or capital, maybe we need a new robot for the OR, we go through a process by which that is requested through the procurement process and reviewed by finance, reviewed by executive administration, because some of these things they can cost thousands and millions of dollars, right? So we have to go through a budget process to ensure that

can afford it and we can invest in it and you know a lot of times we do and that's the wonderful thing about being part of a big academic health system.

Emily Fenech (19:19)
Yeah, speaking of tools and technologies, my last question to you is just going to be, with AI coming in to sort of help us automate manual work, it's been sort of a part of all of these conversations. So I'll just ask outright, how have you ⁓ experimented, leveraged? there anything that got you excited or something that you tried that went well that you could share with our audience?

John Petrov (19:39)
So Emily, that's a great question and very timely because this past week we launched a product called Phenom. And Phenom is an interactive ⁓ tool, social online tool that helps us with applicant sourcing and on the front end with the recruiters, the talent acquisition team, being able to proactively communicate with candidates and also just people who aren't necessarily looking for a job with us, but we want

to introduce them to UAB Medicine and we want to help to educate them on the exciting opportunities so if and when they choose to pursue a new job they choose us. And there is AI that's built into the process, i.e. initial contact with us. So instead of having ⁓ manual data entry and whatnot, we have various automations built into the system and platform to help to elevate and escalate

in a more timely fashion, the connectivity that we have with candidates and kind of sharing information with them on the front end, helping, you know, with ⁓ providing information about us, about the benefits that we have to offer. Things of that nature goes through the automated process. And just like you and I and our audience has the opportunity, they may not realize it, but if you call the bank or let's say you have ⁓ you have a appliance repair person coming to the house to

to fix the refrigerator. And if you call the company, oftentimes now you're not speaking to human, you're speaking with artificial intelligence that is helping to navigate, you know, your phone call and what is it, if you need to confirm your appointment, guess what, you don't need a human to do that anymore. You've got the system that will navigate that. The same thing with this Phenom technology. We don't need a human to schedule the interview, the system will schedule it between the candidate and

the recruiter. So that's saving us time. It's getting us to connect with talent in a more timely and efficient way. And our folks have choices, right? In healthcare, there's lots of different if you're a nurse, you could pick up and go somewhere else tomorrow, right? You have choice. So our ability to ⁓ speed up the conversation and the connection with talent to make sure that there's a match. It's critical because we're in a highly competitive

space. So artificial intelligence, which is built into this phenom technology, is enabling us to do that. I envision we're going to do a lot more. Now, the big question that people ask is, my gosh, is this going to replace your human beings and the people that provide work? My thoughts are it's going to free them up to do things that are more critical for the organization versus transactional, to be more strategic, right? To be that point of contact to

to have that social interaction with talent at the appropriate stages of the process versus taking up my time to schedule an interview, send emails back and forth, when are you available? That's not really productive time at the end of the day. It's very important, it's essential to the process, but if I can automate that, heck yeah. And then let me spend as much quality time interviewing the candidate, orienting them and selling them on our mission, our vision.

our values, our culture, our team, our leaders, our people. That's what makes a difference.

Emily Fenech (23:17)
Yes,

I can't wait to talk to my kids when they're looking for a job and me being like, back when I was interviewing, people used to send you an email and say, here's 14 times, do any of these work? And then you'd write back, No, and I mean, I also laugh because people talk about replacing work and it's like, well, nothing makes me feel more human than wasting an afternoon in a spreadsheet. Like, no, I mean, it's mostly the work that, you know, robs you of your...

John Petrov (23:30)
That's all auto.

Emily Fenech (23:46)
your time and your soul and your motivation. The more of that we can automate, the better. So I love that. I really enjoyed speaking with you today, John. I wanted to ask if there's any sort of, not everyone who's listening works in the healthcare space, but from your experience, from the work you do, any sort of parting words of advice you have for people leaders.

John Petrov (23:49)
step.

Two things, one is we can never do enough for our people, therefore we must do all that we can. Knowing that we have budget challenges and regulatory changes and the world is constantly evolving and changing, I get that, but at the end of the day, we have to find a way.

And the second piece of advice or recommendation I have is me personally, my purpose in life and philosophy is to make a positive difference in the lives of others. Make what you do meaningful and make it count. Thank you.

Emily Fenech (24:39)
I love that. That's a great

way to wrap things up, John. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and we're just so glad you chatted with us today. Take care.

John Petrov (24:48)
Thank you, Emily. Much appreciated.