5 minutes with the Sutter Health CHRO

After years working in finance and even working as a controller at a staffing agency, Deborah Yount felt it was time for a career change.

This would prove intimidating at a time when individual development programs were not even “a thing,” in his words. But Yount took an innovative approach by directly asking the company’s CEO what she could do to bring value to the company in a different capacity. The answer: Formalize the company’s HR and training and development function.

“To be honest, I didn’t know what that meant,” Yount said. “But I was up for the challenge.”

She began this change by returning to school to obtain a master’s degree in human resources and organizational development. This helped Yount chart her path to her first role as CHRO and, ultimately, her current role as senior vice president and CHRO at California health system Sutter Health.

You are a relative newcomer to Sutterhaving been appointed to its management team last January. She told HR Dive in an interview that she has spent the last few months focused on preventing burnout among the organization’s healthcare workforce while increasing retention and building management support.

HR DIVE: Burnout is a common concern among healthcare professionals. How did you and Sutter Health think about this question?

DEBORAH YOUNT: Many factors contribute to burnout, from staff shortages to low employee engagement to employee turnover.

We strive to make Sutter Heath a place where employees feel like they have purpose and, more importantly, a place where they feel valued and can make a difference every day. When we ground our work in mission – which is about patients first and always about people – we can rally the workforce around that.

One of the things we’ve focused on is reducing employee turnover. We currently have an attrition rate of approximately 9%, lower than the industry standard of between 15 and 16%. Having consistency in who you work with helps reduce burnout when employees have to absorb the work of others.

There has also been a constant focus on developing the workforce of tomorrow. This year alone, 16,000 employees accessed our virtual learning programs. We have created this “development for all” strategy where every employee has the opportunity to continue to develop and add to their skills. We find that this increases their engagement and reduces burnout.

We are approaching the end of 2025. In your opinion, how are the HR trends of the year shaping up? Did anything surprise you?

From an internal perspective, when we look at our employee experience survey this year, we see that there is an opportunity for simplification. There is an opportunity to ensure employees have access to appropriate resources and technologies, including artificial intelligence. Improving ease of work in this way can also help reduce burnout.

This wasn’t particularly surprising, but we also realized that we needed to invest in our people managers. We are creating a new certification program to train top leaders by allowing them to hone their capabilities in this area.

We also ensure that our employees feel safe. We want to create psychological safety for employees, but we also want to make sure they are physically safe in the environments where they work.

People managers feel pressured by the demands of leaders and their employees, as well as the state of the talent market. How do you support them?

When I joined Sutter, one of the areas I thought we needed to focus on was ensuring we had a very intentional development program. It is an eight-module program that helps managers understand things like finances, operations, performance management and have crucial conversations. Sometimes I think we under-index on creating these learning opportunities.

What I’ve also appreciated about Sutter since I got here is the creation of the “power of one.” This looks like creating a platform where your leaders can consistently hear the same information, which promotes organizational alignment and clarifies our goals and objectives.