Health Catalyst

5.0

22 Mar 2017

Anonymous employee

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

Health Catalyst has a soul. The company exists to be an enabler of massive outcomes improvement in healthcare. That is a mission worth contributing to every single day. The leadership team has focused on creating a best place to work for all team members, and consistently demonstrates this commitment through their actions. Two months ago after the leadership team reviewed our semi-annual Gallup team member engagement survey results (the company uses Gallup to survey team members, and every people manager's bonus is tied to maintaining industry-leading engagement--and the company consistently scores in the 98th or 99th percentile) they highlighted a pattern of feedback from team members about the remote team member experience. So they held a small-group discussion where they invited anyone at the company who would like to attend to come and talk about what's working and not working for remote team members. Within two weeks they introduced new policies addressing and improving a few of the more significant challenges. They have followed this same process dozens of times, making many changes that improved the team member experience.

Cons

The leadership team has chosen to follow a consensus-oriented decision making approach for company-wide, strategic decisions. The upside of this approach is that the leadership team rarely makes a bad decision. But the downside is that they take longer than some management teams to come to a decision. As the company scales, I believe the decision making approach will need to evolve towards more delegated decision making and trust towards the functional leads to make the right calls. Also, a strength at Health Catalyst is that we feel like a family--team members feel that the leadership genuinely cares about them, and there is a stated policy to give team members who have had a performance problem a second chance. This produces some incredible turnaround successes and deep loyalty and commitment. It's probably one of the reasons the voluntary turnover rate is so low (3-4% per year). However, there is downside to this approach--sometimes the performance issues don't get corrected, and it takes longer to resolve these performance problems. I think the company can evolve this approach to move through the second-chance process more rapidly and then rely on offering a generous severance package when the second chance didn't work, but move more quickly.

Health Catalyst Response

Thank you for your thoughtful review, and I agree with several of the common threads that exist within your post. Health Catalyst does indeed have a soul. It is the sum of our collective decisions, values, and behaviors that define our culture, and ultimately who we are. I also think that you are right about the evolutionary process that takes place within any organization. You touched on a couple specifically in your post-- consensus-oriented approach by the leadership team evolving to more distributed decision-making, requiring more trust be placed with functional leads, and evolution of our second-chance process. These, along with others, are great examples of what worked well in the past, but past success doesn't necessarily ensure the best approach for the future. I think that you will continue to see evidence of changes in several places within our organization, as we collectively work to evaluate processes against our growing and evolving organization, as we always attempt to suggest, discuss, and adopt change when necessary. Now, as we all know from our work with our own partner customers, change is hard. It takes time, and requires thought and care to ensure success. The truth is we are never done. We should always be willing to tweak and improve. Thanks again for your thoughtful comments!

Mission-Driven and Team-Member Focused - Anonymous employee Health Catalyst Employee Review

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