In this issue:

• Across the Centuries - Putting Employees First

This is our regular e-message to people who are interested in leading their lives with passion. We will send you a short note with information, stories, examples, and practical things you can do to lead your life, work, and organizations with passion. Leading With Passion We like the term 'leading with passion,’ because it has two very significant, but related meanings. The first suggests leading off with passion. That is, making the very first priority in your life to live, work, and play passionately, and to fully embrace every possible moment. Second, it means that we can lead our organizations, teams, and projects with passion - creating passionate work environments by transferring our own enthusiasm for the organization to all others who come into contact with it.

Across the Centuries - Putting Employees First

Tim Hatcher, a professor at North Carolina State University, has studied Owen’s life extensively. According to Hatcher, the New Lanark textile mill in Scotland was Owen’s great workplace social experiment. From 1800, when he became its manager, to 1814 when he became one of its owners, until 1827 when he sold the firm and moved his labor reform efforts to the United States, New Lanark became a unique type of business dedicated to worker reforms and social betterment through a new view of work and community. At the same time, Hatcher says, Owen’s approach enhanced productivity, efficiency and financial success.

Nearly two centuries ago Owen was proving that creating employee-supportive work environments can go hand-in-hand with business success, even in the midst of other inhumane organizations and organizational practices.

Poudre Valley Health System
Fast forward to 2005. A lot has changed but one thing hasn’t. Employees in many organizations are still treated like chattel. Labor is often regarded as simply a production factor, or is objectified as resources to be moved hither and yon. While more and more leaders have found the benefit of making their organizations ‘worker-friendly,’ many still have not.

One that has is the Poudre Valley Health System (PVHS). Over the last eight years PVHS has reduced overall employee turnover from over 20% to 9.2%. That includes high demand/low supply occupations like nurses. At the same time, key indicators like mortality rate, patient satisfaction, turnover rate, net revenue, net assets, and employee satisfaction have improved dramatically. PVHS has received prestigious awards including being named one of the nation’s 100 top hospitals for superior clinical, operational and financial performance; and received a Magnet Hospital designation in 2000, the 18th hospital in the nation and the first in the Rocky Mountain Region to gain that status.

How did PVHS do it? Ironically, quality and financial results were the last priorities when PVHS began their strategy eight years ago. Instead, they put employees first on their list, then physicians, then quality, and finally finances. In a presentation at the 2005 Academy of Human Resource Development Conference, PVHS CEO Rulon Stacey explained that it took doctors awhile to understand that putting employees first would improve everything, including physician support, quality, and eventually financial health. Today, physicians’ confidence and trust in the administration has risen dramatically.

Margo Karsten, PVH CEO & President, told us that the first several years of transformation were easy. “The culture was open and ready to embrace a change of focus, one in which was more informal. Rulon’s expectation was that all senior leaders should be out of their offices talking with staff and making changes to improve the work environment, and that is exactly what we all did. ” After those early wins PVHS leadership began to make improvements systematically. They rearranged their 6 strategic objectives and made continually improving PVHS’ culture number one. Now, in board meetings, unlike many organizations where employee concerns are discussed last, if at all, corporate culture is the first item on the agenda.

Karsten lists numerous examples of how culture change meant putting employees first, including increasing the number of employee forums, changing the reward & recognition program, changing the employee culture survey to capture what would make employees ‘jump out of bed in the morning’ wanting to come to work, and then focusing on improving the lowest dimension of the survey results.

Last year the lowest rating was listening. “So now,’ Karsten says, ‘we have formulated classes around listening and we recognize people who listen well. At the last leadership quarterly we highlighted departments that do well at listening to each other so we could learn from them.” Actually doing something about employee survey results made the survey credible to employees and made real, tangible workplace improvements.

The hospital does not tolerate any hint of a hostile work environment and, conversely, leaders like Margo spend a lot of time out with employees. “I will just put my scrubs on and go work along with various departments. I’ve been in telecom, respiratory therapy, food service – all areas impact patients so I try to work in a variety of areas.”

Putting Employees First
Putting employees first doesn’t mean just being nice. PVHS has high standards of performance and is continually raising the bar. They are shooting for world class status. It does mean being respectful, making the workplace a healthy place to work both emotionally and physically, and helping employees to be successful.

Those principles apply across the decades and centuries – whether it is in Robert Owen’s textile mill in the early 1800’s or in a healthcare system in 2005. Sustainable business and organization success comes from making employees number one in your strategy.

Are you putting employees first? Or are they just an afterthought? What will you do?

Leading with Passion is a regular communication from Michael Kroth and Patricia Boverie. Michael and Patricia have been researching passionate work since 1999, and their book, Transforming Work: The Five Keys to Achieving Trust, Commitment, and Passion in the Workplace, is about the indispensable necessity of passion for personal and organizational success in the workplace.

© Copyright 2005, All Rights Reserved Patricia Boverie and Michael Kroth