September | 2011

My organization is getting set to kick off the 4th year of our Employee Wellness Program, and I am excited. Overall, employee participation in the program is higher than we projected at this point, and it is growing in numbers and energy. We are just now beginning to see evidence of behavioral changes in our health plan population, which include higher compliance with preventative exams and procedures (e.g., mammography, prostate screenings, and annual exams), and better compliance with treatment for chronic disease management. This is what we designed the early stages of the program to accomplish.

As a benefit administrator, I am excited to see real numbers supporting the underlying theory behind these long-term strategies. As a human resources leader, I am excited for the engagement with our employees around helping them to improve their overall health and well-being. At a very personal level, we have been touched by some incredible stories from employees and family members who have credited the wellness program with the diagnosis of life-threatening diseases, and chronic health conditions. Lives have literally been saved.

The Real Reason Why Wellness Matters

I have literally written this post a dozen times over the last six months. I have been very reluctant to publish it, but I’ve decided that the learning is too important to ignore. My doubt, anger, frustration and fear are very real, but so is the value of a well-designed wellness program. As a result of my personal participation in the wellness program – I figured that I needed to set a solid example for everyone else in the organization – I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

Just so you are clear about how I feel about this disease: I f**king HATE it! It has changed my life in ways that I would never have anticipated. I really wish that I did not have to manage this condition on a daily basis. And, there is nothing I can do to change the reality – I simply have to deal with it.

What’s very interesting to me six months later – since I have calmed down just a bit from the shock of the diagnosis – is that I never even considered the possibility that the wellness program would hit so close to home. The experience has given me an entirely new perspective on designing health and wellness benefits, and the lesson is that there is more to plan design strategies than numbers.

Let’s Not Lose the Human in Human Resources

Over the past decade, our profession has worked very hard at becoming more strategic partners in our businesses. We are far better with numbers, projections, calculating ROI, and tracking metrics along the way. We are learning how to assess the correlations between HR metrics and the organization’s bottom line. These are all the right things to do.

But, let us not forget that the systems, processes and programs that we design are still aimed at meeting the needs of human beings. What we design in the context of our business strategies will affect the lives of the people who make our businesses successful. Be careful with what you design! It just may affect you in ways that you never imagined.

[The blue circle is a symbol of the International Diabetes Federation]

If you are a history buff, or just a hoarder, then you might be a fan of the Antiques Road Show on Public Television. While I’m sure that many of you are familiar with the program, the premise is as follows: the show brings together a variety of experts to a single location where locals can have anything they own appraised, from attic-junk to family heirlooms. Every once in awhile you see a person who made a five-dollar purchase at a garge sale years before with an item that appraises at tens-of-thousands of dollars. Of course, virtually every item that is brought to the Road Show has personal value to the owner; the question is whether that value translates to monetary value for others.

Healthcare Value Network

I spent a couple of days last week in Appleton, Wisconsin with 17 other healthcare HR leaders to learn and share how HR systems and processes can drive real change in a Lean organization. The only things we knew going into the session is that our organizations were part of the Healthcare Value Network, and through some pre-planning we surmised that we were all struggling with similar HR, organization development, and leadership challenges. Our brief time together confirmed these assumptions.

I left the land of the Green Bay Packers with a bag of cheese curds, and a number of key takeaways. However, there is one simple concept – although not a new concept – that has stuck with me more than others: The development of HR systems and processes in a Lean organization occurs in the Gemba, and not in an HR conference room. In non-Lean language, we need to develop our HR approaches with our clinical (operations) leaders and employees. In the end, our work must be redesigned to support what is really needed on the rapidly changing front lines of healthcare.

Get Out of the HR Attic

Our traditional approach to HR administration is that we have done the bulk of our process work and planning behind closed doors, or in the attic. We are the experts in regulatory and compliance matters, organization development constructs, and we have the unrivaled talent to create reams of forms. When we were feeling more “strategic,” we might have included, or sought real input from others outside of the HR kingdom.

When our new systems were defined, and the ink was dry on the new forms, we took the process/system on the business version of the Antiques Road Show. What we often discovered was that the heirloom-quality HR process that we had masterfully created was appraised by operational leaders (experts) to be of little or no value to them, or the work that they were doing. It was easy to become that person on camera at the end of the Antiques Road Show who whined about how unappreciated our process was – at least it was highly valued by us, and we are going to hang onto it.

Strategic HR: Solving Other People’s Real Problems

Strategic HR today, particularly in a Lean sense, means that we are solving our customers’ problems through the ongoing, real-time design of better HR processes and systems. By better I mean: they are intentionally designed to add value to clinical (operational) people and processes, as their needs evolve; they are not mired in meeting the strictest interpretations of government regulations; they are not derailed by an unreasonable aversion to business risk; and, they accomplish what is most needed by the people in the Gemba, and ultimately our customers.

It seems that the only way to accomplish the strategic work of HR in a Lean organization is to design it with the people in the Gemba. So while the “what” is settled in my mind, and the minds of many other Lean healthcare HR leaders, the “how” is an entirely different challenge.

What have you done to engage your operations leaders in redesigning HR systems to meet their needs?

[Photo Credit: anankkml via freedigitalphoto.net]