Monday April 20, 2026
Frontline Leadership Report
Frontline managers play a critical role in employee experience and engagement, converting system strategy into daily actions on the frontline. However, they face rising strain as their roles expand in scope and complexity and health systems navigate financial pressures and workforce shortages. This new report provides insights into how HR leaders can best support today’s managers and enable consistent leadership practices that enhance human connection and culture.
Reconnecting HR to the Frontline: How Leader Standard Work Translates People Strategy into Results
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As the leading authority in this area, ASHHRA delivers essential guidance through research, education, knowledge sharing, professional development, specialized tools, and opportunities for networking and collaboration.
As part of this effort, ASHHRA has partnered with Laudio, a purpose-built software and analytics company whose mission is to inspire and amplify the people who deliver great healthcare. Frontline leaders and executives use Laudio to streamline managerial work and drive large-scale change through small, everyday human actions.
The report provides new insights into how innovative CHROs, HR leaders, and other people leaders partner with both their executive colleagues and frontline managers to meet organizational goals.
The Executive Summary of the inaugural report, Reconnecting HR to the Frontline: How Leader Standard Work Translates People Strategy into Results, is available for download. ASHHRA members have exclusive access to the full report.
Become an ASHHRA member to access the complete report, along with many other resources. Use the promo code “Laudio” to get 25% off the first year of membership if you are new to ASHHRA.
INTRODUCTION
The need for HR to lead the way in a new era of relational leadership
Healthcare systems today face intense financial pressure, rising operational costs, and increasing complexity in patient care. At the same time, workforce shortages continue to challenge organizations across the country. Early tenure turnover remains elevated, and nursing gaps are projected to worsen.
These challenges are pushing organizations to rapidly reorganize and seek innovative ways to improve system efficiency, but such efforts can unintentionally weaken the critical connections between executive teams and frontline leaders.
Executive interviews conducted for this report consistently underscored that frontline managers are the most powerful amplifiers of the organization’s people strategy. And executives clearly understand the critical connection between people strategy and overall organization performance. Leaders also agreed that the solution is not adding complexity or extra asks to managers’ already full plates, but rather that it is time to get back to the basics of human connections, with a renewed focus on foundational relational leadership behaviors: strengthening trust, communication, authentic presence, and support in leaders’ daily work. Direct managers’ frequent, meaningful interactions with team members are the primary way culture, expectations, and organizational values are demonstrated in daily work.
HR teams have an essential role to play in partnering with frontline managers to help them prioritize these meaningful activities to support relationship leadership or streamline distracting practices. In this environment, advancing a people strategy means empowering managers, strengthening alignment, reducing complexity, eliminating non-valued tasks, and focusing on the critical behaviors that shape culture and performance every day.
To do this, HR leaders first need to partner with their executive colleagues to create organization-wide alignment on the behaviors, tasks, responsibilities, and processes that are core to a frontline manager’s daily work. The Leader Standard Work framework provided in this report, which evolved from conversations with over a hundred healthcare leaders, can be a starting point for establishing that clarity.
The leaders interviewed for this report reflected that, despite the innovations emerging across HR functions to better support frontline tasks, sustainable workforce stability still depends on the strength of human connections. They emphasized that real progress has resulted from closer collaboration between HR, nursing, operations, and executive teams, all anchored in a shared understanding of frontline managers’ standard work. People strategies depend on leadership, culture, systems, and trust, all of which are built on human connection.
About Laudio
Laudio, an Ascend Learning brand, empowers healthcare leaders to drive large-scale change through everyday human actions. Our AI-enhanced platform streamlines workflows for frontline leaders, strengthens interpersonal connections, and aligns C-suite objectives with frontline efforts, boosting operational efficiency, employee engagement, and patient experience. Laudio makes it possible for patients, frontline workers, and health system leaders to thrive together. Discover how at www.laudio.com.
About Ascend Learning
Ascend Learning is a leading healthcare and learning technology company. With products that span the learning continuum, Ascend focuses on high-growth careers in a range of industries, with a special focus on healthcare and other licensure-driven occupations. Ascend Learning products, from testing to certification, are used by physicians, emergency medical professionals, nurses, allied health professionals, certified personal trainers, financial advisors, skilled trades professionals and insurance brokers. Learn more at www.ascendlearning.com.