Health Fidelity is riding the Tsunami Turnover wave with a culture that not only survived but is thriving with a significantly lower turnover rate than the US averages.
What was in place at Health Fidelity that prepared us for the challenges brought about by the COVID pandemic?
1. Prior to the 2020 Pandemic, Health Fidelity was already working in a virtual and geographically dispersed team environment. The majority of our team (51%) was already remote and working from home. This helped us transfer to 100% remote without loss of productivity or distraction. We had previously addressed the challenge of the competitive job market in Silicon Valley and transformed it into a strategic opportunity by broadening our talent search outside the Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh PA office locations. This increased our talent pool, improved our quality of hire and increased our retention and tenure in Engineering.
2. Our culture was not an overnight project or a response to COVID. We have been dedicated to our team, values, and culture since our inception. We took this into high gear in 2018 where in addition to our annual employee survey, open door policy, and previous successful adoption of Reflektive recognition and performance management tool, we added monthly value nomination awards, leadership skip levels, and the Employee Forum. The Employee Forum was a 2 day off-site for non- management to discuss what was working and what wasn’t. It was held in 2018 in Boulder, CO followed in 2019 in Tempe, AZ. In 2018 we also added culture interviews to our hiring process and 90-day new hire reviews to our onboarding. Our success was also due to the Senior team, specifically Steve Whitehurst, CEO and Bill Zahn, COO making culture change not only a company priority but a personal goal.
3. The suggested actions to successfully transfer to a remote virtual environment and to combat the turnover tsunami were already key components of the way Health Fidelity operated prior to the pandemic and how we rose to the challenge in March 2020.
Adaptability
As a smaller, startup company focused on innovation, we have been historically nimble and responsive to the market, clients and our employees needs
Flexibility/Offering Accommodations
Flexibility has always come in #2 or #3 in the top reasons employees like to work at Health Fidelity in the annual employee surveys. (#1 is always the people we work with!) Flexibility meaning the ability for team members to work with their managers to blend their personal and professional lives.
Examples include when the team was in the office they could work from home, for all employees if they liked to work out at the gym on their lunch break, play softball on Thursday afternoon or help their kids with their homework from 3-5 each day- all things we possible
So when the pandemic happened – flexibility was already a part of how we work.
About 45% of our team have children who would have been in school or daycare during the last year and a half. The flexibility for them to be able to do both jobs, their Health Fidelity role, and their caregiver/home school roles- was already a part of our culture. It was not an issue that impacted the way we worked, our dedication to the client or our results. We supported the stress and pressure all our team members experienced during the pandemic.
Frequent Communication
We had a regular established cadence of communication which consisted of:
Weekly company stand-ups which we increased to three times a week at the start of the pandemic
Monthly more in-depth All Hands meetings
Accessibility and addressing employee concerns
Established regular two-way communication
Regular Manager 1:1s
Open door to Senior team and scheduled skip level meetings
HR Led Stay Interviews
Employee Roundtables
Virtual Events and Human Touch Points
In-person interviewing and onboarding which was already virtual for remote employees went 100% remote. We added additional touch points and onboarding morphed from a primary HR and manager task to the whole team welcoming, mentoring, sharing information with new hires. This feedback was from our 90 day new hire onboarding surveys.
We replaced our employee forums with virtual hackathon. The hackathon had 90% company wide participation. The benefits of the hackathon were team building, collaboration, and innovation. Employees that normally did not work together tackled projects proposed by fellow team members.
Virtual team building social events
Company and team initiated virtual happy hours
Virtual Camp Joy Olympics, trivia, and escape rooms
Weekly virtual coffee talk
Virtual Holiday Experience with employee performances!
We went old school sending out birthday cards and encouragement notes through the USPS.
Empathy
How we support each other is seen in the high adoption rate of the peer recognition program in Reflektive and our value nominations
While studies found that 46 percent of employees felt less connected to their company, and 42 percent said that company culture has diminished since the start of the pandemic, we heard the opposite from our employee roundtable conversations. According to the employees’ comments in the roundtable small group meetings, the connection strengthened because of our response to COVID. They felt our process was timely, transparent and that Health Fidelity cared, increasing their loyalty to the company.
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