The Secrets to Building Elite Teams in Healthcare

CheeTung Leong: [: 00:00:00

Alex Hayman: I work at a very unique company down in the southeast. And it's an independent primary care medical group and with a very neat support network The best part about it is the people we'll talk about a little bit more about that as well But basically we serve multiple states and we focus on value based medicine so we've got a wide array of folks from real estate and support and infrastructure for it and Facilities to our clinicians and our clinics and we've got a ton of folks that join us throughout the year that's why this is so important of a conversation that They join us and we're [00:01:00] actually merging cultures together and how important engagement is to not only close gaps on those things, but let people know that we're just as invested in them.

We're very focused on our physicians and our providers here, which is really neat for me change where it's not necessarily about money or anything. We know that we take care of the people and that means the folks that support our leaders and our physicians so they can get better care for our patients.

Which is all by engagement. We absolutely know that, these folks will stay with us a long time. They'll be very productive and these are the folks that also give us some really cool engagement things moving forward as far as ideas for growth, innovation, and just to support a long term success.

But Southeast Primary Care Partners has about 60 clinics, primarily in Georgia and Alabama and headquarters out of Alpharetta, Georgia. And we've got little under a thousand employees.

CheeTung Leong: I want to pick up on the little phrase that you mentioned, value based medicine or value based healthcare. Could you expand a little bit on what that means?

One of the primary reasons I [: 00:02:00

And what that means is typically a lot of these places that kind of just done episodic, you're sick, get an acute condition, you're going to get seen that provider gets paid to go home. You might see him a long time and they don't feel that engagement or responsibility for health. We wanted to come here and change that.

We also wanted to change the dynamics of always go to urgent care, always go to ED, always go to other places of higher cost, not necessarily better quality. So we end up doing is we brought these folks together and we said, Hey, you know what we want you to do what you think you need to do to really take care of the health.

e care for our patients, not [: 00:03:00

We wanna make sure we avoid emergent care or emergent condition. And some people change medicine, some people have new conditions. Some things really can have comorbidities and lead to other issues. We see them as often as we possibly can, and it is a huge shift in the southeast because most people, they come in, they get paid, they leave.

ients or customers that come [: 00:04:00

It's a really neat model. And we get reimbursed very differently. That's the, on the, basically the money we save. So instead of using healthcare all the time, we're trying to avoid the higher costs of care, focus people on primary care. And that's really what ValueBase is about. doing the right quality evidence based for our patients.

Holistically,

CheeTung Leong: that'S very cool. And I, from what it sounds like, it, it seems that the values that the organization carries to, to your patients. Is this very consistent with the same level of care that you take for your people in the organization, working in the organization? I'm always excited to ask this question.

What for you, Alex, was the game changing realization that helped you to build elite teams within the context of Southeast?

biology of our workforce is [: 00:05:00

And our patients, our customers are motivated differently as well. They want good cost, good quality and results, and they want to have it at a time frame that they can do. So to build teams around our customers, it's really not difficult if you start off right. And what I mean by that is the screening process, the onboarding process.

Really getting them to understand not just our mission, vision and cultures, but why truly are we here to do that and how they fit in the bigger picture to support our patients. So when they understand that, and a lot of these patients are family members as well. So it's the just that we go in, would you take care of your mom, friends, family, the same way?

the neat part about primary [: 00:06:00

So we know them. We know probably family members. It's really neat. So it's not necessarily just an event. You came in, you did it and you left. And in health care, it's a little different. And this is part of when I meet with folks, I really want to figure out that they understand what health care is because we're service.

And we're really here to support other folks, but it is a life event when a patient comes into to a clinic and same as a hospital. But for our staff, it's another day of work and letting them know the differences there and how impactful that is. It goes a long way. And then we give them tools of how to stay engaged, how to find some of those really unique things.

And we ask those questions when we do the interviews, we bring them on. We want to know that these are going to be an engaged workforce. We do behavioral based questions. We make sure we have scenarios. And then we do some peer interviewings in our clinics as well. So we really want to make sure we connect folks and before we make that final offer, they get a chance to see where they'll work.

e what we do. And we're very [: 00:07:00

But we have a huge training and support network behind that. And everyone Every now and then needs some coaching, some polishing. So we were always there to do that. It allows our staff to know that they can go above and beyond, take some risk from time to time and know that we're going to be there to back them up.

to Train them and help them. But a lot of the times you and I, we're not making this great, wonderful finds. It's the people on the floor meeting the customers. We're going, Hey, you know what? Here's something we should do. I'd love to be able to do that. We empower them to do those types of things, make the difference.

Obviously, it can't be immoral, unethical and safe type things, but. If it's going to help the customer and they feel more engaged, it's a win.

ou said around. The way that [: 00:08:00

Also, on the flip side if I'm a patient and I'm coming through to one of your facilities and I'm seeing a familiar face, that then who recognizes me, I feel like that would increase the level of engagement that I would have as a patient with the facility and with your brand how do you go about doing this?

Making sure that your employees, like every single employee across a thousand of them are engaged ?

d the importance of it. It's [: 00:09:00

And when you share with them that this is a life event, truly, these guys are coming in and it could be something, dramatic. It could be something very simple, but it's not just an experience for them to come in and they're buying a product and leaving. It's really going to touch them, potentially even their family members and so forth.

So we always try to drive that into our culture. And we really try to drive a transparent culture. The more productive people are typically means they're more engaged. They have better relationships. They foster better customer relations as well. But we start this off similar to what we talked about before.

We have a good screening criteria. So our recruiters. Really go above and beyond. So they meet with all our hiring managers and they really figure out that a job's not a job in one clinic and the exact same job in another clinic may be totally different folks they're looking for. Simple things like maybe one needs to be bilingual, one needs to be focused and more experienced in a certain area.

ne that applies to a job out [: 00:10:00

With expectations to our current staff and folks coming in, and that's why I do a lot of peer interviews as well. Some of the things that we do throughout the year and even the new folks is we do a pulse survey. So every quarter we send something out to our entire staff or physicians or staff or support corporate folks as well with similar questions.

One of them is an MPS questions. One of them is how do you feel you're part of the team? Really good, insightful Information that comes back to us to include these giant ability to write in free text as much as you want. We dig through those. We actually have a person dedicated to experience and really, we have probably four or five other people that do a whole bunch of other things with some platforms.

nd a lot of more Improvement [: 00:11:00

It's every industry six months definitely a year or less, but six months and less is That trend for turnover is so dramatically high, and if folks say it's all about money, it's not. For six months, most people don't think they're going to get a raise that quickly. It is about managing expectations, let them know what they're getting into, and really selling this is an honored profession.

At the end, we're serving customers. This is what we do. But we tell them transparent feedback to us. We do quarterly check ins with them. I'm not a big believer in doing annual performance reviews. Only I want them to do quarterly, 15 minute check ins and recontract every quarter because everyone that includes a 360 to really get a feedback of, this is how I believe you're doing.

ies are taken down. We still [: 00:12:00

So you might not do the things above and beyond that you'd love to do for your patients or your customers or another co worker. Early this year, we built a culture committee for our company. And that has a kind of representation of kind of all the demographics, all the geographies we have from, positions all the way to, IT HR has a mix of folks and they're responsible to ensure that our mission vision value is truly translated and understood with our teams.

We built extremely super outcome based recognition, reward and recognition programs that allow our managers, leaders to do on the spot recognition. Also do stories. We've got to focus on that. I will tell you engagement, it'll fly off the roof if you share your positive stories and they're happening in all organizations.

[: 00:13:00

And we've got folks, three decades here that are absolutely brilliant. But everyone brings something to the table, and it's an organization that if I come to, and this is what we try to strive to every day, is if I come to this organization, no matter which position I'm in, and I know I have a voice, and someone's going to listen to me, and I have a venue, and I have feedback loops, and clear communication, I understand expectation, mission division value is pretty clear, and I have a way to develop, man, I'm going to be engaged.

f things But our ceo will go [: 00:14:00

We'll put them on our sharepoint put them out on social And anything positive we want to keep pushing out some of the platforms that we use to get some of this information is because Do you remember a very good indicator of a high mps your net promoter score? And it really it's focused on your customers, you know what they recommend friends and family But it is a direct correlation that you know, your employees are really your first customer So your mps is heard and I can guarantee you even if you're not doing a pulse survey like we do It's an indication your employees probably aren't as happy as well and we get the feedback I actually get it straight to my phone every day anytime.

There's positive negative We push them out and we desensitize, you know sanitize things as well But we want to make sure there's positive and negative things go out there. So One other thing we started was called Care Award, and recognition ties to engagement, I will tell you what, tremendously.

off from care, that sort of [: 00:15:00

We don't have millions of billions of dollars to spend. We build programs around what we think our staff want. We do that by our culture committee. The culture committee is not, there's no leaders. I'm the only executive sponsor for it, but they bring from the field, what's really important to them. So we build these programs that really don't cost much, but these guys get a venue that they see that if I bring an idea to it.

It actually gets implemented and we give credit for it and all that fun things, but I will tell you it's contagious So we get a lot of more innovation We've got a lot of more we still have turnover and we still got to work through those things But we've got a lot more engaged folks and they're not just engaging what they're doing They're looking into the counterparts left and right and see how they can help them because they know it's an organizational success It's not just theirs.

latform and this platform is [: 00:16:00

You can always email me and I'll give you some recommendations. But what it does is it goes out to you that social product out there. So if it's Google, Facebook, Better Business Bureau and it consolidates not just star ratings, but comments. Facebook too. And it allows us to really aggregate data so we can track trends and we can do it in real time.

We can also reply to them very quickly. So it doesn't require us to get more and more FTEs and we can stay engaged with those folks. At the same time, we stay engaged with our staff because we're sharing with them. It's that feedback loop that we push back out there that I think a lot of companies have an opportunity for improvement, the engagement part and all those things are not at the forefront.

For me, being an HR guy and operations, it's so critical to keep and retain your folks, but I think it's even more critical. They have to be part of driving an organization successfully forward, meaning they have a voice that they can give information. It's just not show up on time and do the right things.

ave to be engaged. We always [: 00:17:00

And then the last one is a special personal bring in. Maybe it's a financial, something where we're giving them the development and our intent is they should be able to walk away from that and directly actually practice that with the customers, with their staff. It's not something you're going to school for 12 years for every one of our sessions we do.

You have a takeaway where you can apply it same day and it makes them feel empowered. And it really translates to great customer service. We have a lot of other cool things we do with customer service, but I will tell you purposeful rounding. If you ever looked at Quint Studer and some other things, all these cool ideas that are out there are really about trying to figure out, and really being humble about it.

someone and what they think [: 00:18:00

CheeTung Leong: Thanks for sharing all of that, Alex. I think that's a really comprehensive program that you have going on. Could quickly share a little bit about who makes up the culture committee, because it sounds like this committee drives so much of this kind of activity with quite a shoestring budget, but at the same time high impact.

Alex Hayman: You call it whatever you want

but I will tell you what,

if it comes from the top down, it's not often recieved in the manner

that's expected

and a lot of times what I might think is I want I think they wanna do this and they should do this and they'll be excited to get this.

It might not be the case. So we were very careful about how we put it together. We went out and we talked to a lot of our employees and asked 'em, do you know what our mission vision values are? How do you tie into it? How do you impact? And it was very disappointing and I take that on myself, but a lot of 'em didn't know how they tied what they did each and every day.

tion, but most of 'em didn't [: 00:19:00

But it's not going to be leaders. And we really don't want to have it top driven. So really, we went out and we opened it up. We limit it to 10 people, but they can rotate every six months. They can stay on it as well, too. And then we do have quarterly forums that the entire organization's part of.

I'm an executive sponsor. I just facilitate, but it's built by the rank and file employees. We do have a couple of providers, healthcare providers, too. So you have a mix of not just experience and diversity, But yeah, but you have some leadership, no senior leadership at all, except just my guidance out there to do things and me fighting for them to get a little bit of money so we can do some reward and recognitions and some things like that.

mission, vision, values. We [: 00:20:00

And some of the stuff, obviously we've got to stay in a certain narrow trajectory, but we brought a ton of stuff in. So what that did is open the floodgates. So these guys now we're like, every time we meet, which is, a couple of times a month, very informal, typically lunch or after hours, just for about a half hour.

Definitely a lot on email, but things have been brought to us. Hey, we've got a lot of employees that came on hard times. They didn't know how to do this, that, and the other. It'd be great to have an emergency fund. Within a week, we built an emergency fund, put it together. I pitched it to our senior team, got it approved.

And now we have an emergency fund for it as well. All these other recognition programs are great. Everyone in all our geographies, cause we are geographically dispersed, pretty, sometimes eight, up to eight hours away from one another. They wanted to do things outside of work, and we wanted to figure out how do we do this?

They came up with the [: 00:21:00

Really cheap, and huge outcomes. So we do holiday parties and those sorts of things. There wasn't as much engagement. These organizational days really just took everything down. They're on the same sheet, and it's amazing. The engagement that we have. Our CEO also has put out, everything's driven from the top as far as modeling behavior and knowing that you're engaged.

We just can't just say this. We've got to walk the talk. We've actually started all our executives meet Sometimes twice, but typically once a month after hours in a just basically neutral area might go rent a boat for a weekend, hang out the beach, whatever. It's something where we can actually let our hair down.

it was amazing. We actually [: 00:22:00

So I think we should go do this and and we're doing some of those things. This is, it's amazing. If you let people share what they have, bring them together, give them the opportunity to share. And again, economy's crazy. So we're trying to figure out ways we can do it. But going back to your question again, the culture committee is really built from the people by the people sort of thing.

We're here to support them. Our leaders, myself, everyone, we work for them anyway. This is a demonstration. Clearly it says, Hey, we want your engagement. We want you to tell us how we can make things better. We want to share the responsibility for the overall success of our company. We also tie a whole bunch of other things in financially.

on. This ultimately leads to [: 00:23:00

So instead of an expensive 10, 000 visit at the ER, 40 bucks, they came in here and they didn't even pay that. They paid 10 bucks, co pay or whatever the case is. We're changing the cost of care and patients like that, we like it. And we can put more money into other areas like. Sleep studies, telemetry, outsourcing, remote patient monitoring, things that really benefit.

patients and we get all that from our own staff and really opening the door to that is, is huge. The consistent feedback is absolutely important for you, but being a leader that is not only engaged and walks around, definitely knows birthdays, anniversaries, that sort of thing, but ask some what's important to them.

Let them point out things to you and then follow through with it, which typically most people don't do. They do all the first part and they don't follow through. That's where we establish mentorship. And you don't pick a mentor. You end up saying after you work with them, he does really great on here. You may have six mentors.

We have a lot of [: 00:24:00

I know this whole thing's about engagement and I will tell you that just the HR part to me that having this big problem over the last two and a half years is retention. I will tell you the more you put in here, it's not a one for one. It's probably like you put two in for engagement, probably get 20 out on the retention.

So there's a huge ROI.

CheeTung Leong: That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for sharing Alex. So if I quickly summarize what you've mentioned, essentially, to be able to deliver on this, they're almost like four or five main points. I think the first one is around that onboarding piece. Before onboarding, there's screening and selection, which.

n the market who align. With [: 00:25:00

And then finally, you guys have baked in to your daily operations, almost lunch and learns and different. Engagement touch points that you're able to execute on daily. So those five different areas, five different areas on hiring, onboarding people representation care or awards.

thing that I missed out with [: 00:26:00

Alex Hayman: I would say that you touched on it on the peripheral, but it's really important to make sure that you make every opportunity. This is a lifelong learning journey. It doesn't just end there. It's imperative, onboarding stops. You've got to still continue. Not only finding the right people to bring in, but you've always got to make sure they understand not just skills required, the culture fit, but how do they fit in the organization strategically?

So if I'm at the front desk, by answering the phone and helping a patient make an appointment, it leads to this. They've got to know where they fit and how they add value. And we have a workforce now that really, truly wants to know that, hey, I have a purpose and I'm making, an impact. Helping them, not just mentorship, set clear expectations, equip your managers, and you will not be successful.

You've got to commit, equip them, understand your people. Every day is a new opportunity to foster engagement. If you miss those opportunities you'll actually have a retention problem. And I will tell you right now, just last thing I'd say is, if you do have a retention problem, you have an engagement problem.

sly. Alex, if people want to [: 00:27:00

Alex Hayman: I'm a Bad guy. I actually get my cell and my email out. Easiest way though, really is to sit me up on my LinkedIn and I monitor, I'm tied to it. I recruit a lot from it as well. So yeah, email me questions. I don't know all the answers, but I guarantee you that I could find somebody, or I might take a piece from what you have, piece from why I haven't create something better, but.

The community that you're creating here, the podcast that you're creating, this isn't for one time shop. You've got to continue. We've got to stay engaged as well, because I think this environment, you've, you continue to make better. And I'm glad you brought me into this. It gives me an opportunity to see outside of just healthcare as well.

Get some feedback on, you know what, there's a really cool idea that Disney's doing or this company's doing. I can engage and put that kind of into our protocol. So really appreciate that I mean if you found this chat of any value whatsoever you know reach out to me. I'd love to start a conversation we can vlog whatever you need to but yeah Linkedin alex heyman Otherwise if you want to email me I'll give it out there.

It's a h a y m [: 00:28:00

CheeTung Leong: thank you very much for hanging with us today. Like you, I hope all of you listeners have enjoyed the show and make sure you drop us a review and tune in next time on the HR impact show. Thanks for joining us today.

My name is Chee Tong. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.