Q&A . . . With Jeff Risinger

PUBLISHED MARCH 2024

Q: The health system has been one of the region’s fastest-growing in terms of hiring for several years—and one of those hires was you. What drew you there?
A: I’ve spent 10-12 years of my career in academic health care, and you cannot be in this industry and not know the story of this health system. It’s been very successful, from the time of the reorganization as public health authority. What happened here is a story that everyone knows and one that if you get the opportunity, you want to be a part of.

Q: We’ve had many conversations with CEO Bob Page and KC President Tammy Peterman about the culture there. Tell us about your introduction to it.
A: Whenever you’re in the interview process, every place talks about culture and values. That’s normal recruiting mode. It’s no different here. But this was the first time in my career I’d accepted the job—and what usually happens is, you start to see the cracks in the story—but here, as much as was said about culture, if anything, they undersold it.

Q: Is the experience the same for new hires?
A: When I got here, I sat in on the same orientation sessions everybody else starting here did—nurses, med techs, etc. I’ve seen this done before, but it was really polished here. They didn’t get up and say “this is the culture.” They told stories about patients, how employees went the extra mile, the extra 10 miles, to meet patient needs. Tammy is a master at storytelling, and she is there in every orientation, every single time, Bob and Tammy both. And Tammy would use the term “our place” all the time. That term has a connotation of family, we are a family and this is “our place!” I found it neat she’d say it that way, but how she says it and the stories she tells to support that concept, it tells me that it is authentic. … When it’s authentic, you know.

Q: What can you tell us about issues that other companies might confront in different business sectors or of other sizes?  
A: It’s across industries, it’s a very tight labor market, and certainly in health care. Finding the right people, for us, is essential. Everyone says: It can’t just be warm bodies; they’ve got to be the best you can hire. At the beginning of the process, just identifying and attracting the best people is a challenge. On the retention side, one of the things that has become more common is the remote work environment. That’s been very helpful because it has provided lots of flexibility.

Q: How are current best practices in that process evolving?
A: For a sizable number of positions that organizations fill, the process of changing jobs for an individual is essentially mailing a laptop to one company and getting another from the new one. It is very transactional and a lot is lost in terms of the feeling and concept of joining a new organization. So much happens, and in terms of feeling like you’re going to a new place and being accepted, that can get lost in that process. I’ve not seen the evidence, but my fear is that over time, that process becomes so standard that people don’t feel deeply connected to their place of work. We have to pay attention to this because that loss of connection happens very slowly and incrementally and once lost, it is hard to regain. We must be innovative in how we leverage the flexibility technology brings us while at the same time not losing this sense of connection and family.

Q: How does a sense of purpose in one’s work help overcome that?
A: In health care, we have an incredible mission! I go to a lot of orientations, and there’s always a sizable percent of people who come to work here because this place did something for a family member—grandpa was diagnosed with cancer, and this place saved his life. Even if you work remotely but still have that connection, it’s a special place to work. Not all industries can say that. Regardless of industry however, I believe people want to just feel valued and connected to the place where they earn their living. Feeling a sense of purpose is really a leadership issue. Great leaders will create this sense of purpose and belonging; poor leaders will lose talent to great leaders!

Q: What are some of the other recent developments with successful onboarding, such as preboarding?
A: Well, that’s the old onboarding now—a process that gives you more time to do more meaningful things during orientation. The thing you have to think about, particularly with younger people, is that showing up at a place this big is like going to foreign country. You don’t know where things are, parking, even finding the right building can be a challenge. So you have to understand that for them, it’s new and uncertain.

Q: What about tech advances; how are those affecting the process?
A: Things have evolved a lot. I’ve been in the business for 35 years, and orientation used to be showing up and filling out benefits paperwork and choosing a health plan. One system I worked at, there were 40 different pieces of paper handled six different times to get people on board. Tech completely changed that. Now, you can put in a name, address, and populate all that person’s data in every document you see. One time vs. 40. And all that can be done before day one now. We’ve got a concept called Day One Ready. It allows new employees to show up that first day with all that done so they begin the cultural part, meet their team and their leader and not focus on stacks of papers or benefit forms. It gives you the opportunity for a more meaningful contact.

Q: Do changing labor demographics change the process? That is, are different approaches required to effectively bring different age cohorts up to speed?
A: At minimum, if you can’t onboard on your on all devices including mobile devices, you are already behind. This gets back to tech; email came into being early in my career: You expected to go in to a new job, read email and start your day. Today, for younger generations, everything is in that phone. If you don’t have the apps and they can’t do it all on their screen, they perceive you as lagging in the market in terms of being a cutting edge organization. They may not take it personally, but they will not view you in the same light as an organization that does do that. With the system we have, in a matter of five seconds, I can have an employee submit a request for vacation and have it approved. That applies to onboarding. And that’s the price of admission today.

Q: We’ve heard a lot about how Millennials, first, and now Gen Z workers crave more meaning in their work, going beyond a paycheck. Does that impact the processes for bringing people in?
A: For sure. And it goes a lot further than the onboarding. But No. 1, just totally my opinion, I don’t think fundamentally that there are that many differences between the generations in this regard—everyone wants to be respected and valued. What’s changed is, while older generations might have wanted that, younger generations demand that. You’ve got to make the workplace better because they will, too. People who have gone ahead, like me, will benefit from that, too. Gen Z will make the workplace better because they expect leaders to be leaders. Previous generations have tolerated environments not filled with good leaders. This new generation expects what we should have all expected all along.

Q: Back to that issue of first-day success; what do you want that to be for new hires across the board?
A: We want it to be high-energy. We want it to be fun. We want people who do different jobs to interact with each other, like a big family, even though we’re all doing different things. We don’t want it to be a mundane experience, like “here’s your paperwork.” You meet the CEO, the president of the Kansas City division, you hear a personal welcome. We want it to be high-touch and a very positive, memorable day. The day after they do this, they start customer-service training—everyone goes through the same training for that, and we’re building up to that: ‘Tomorrow you get to do that, but this is important to us today.’

Q: The ability to pull that off has to impact retention, doesn’t it?
A: We want people who go home on day one thinking that they made the right decision to work at this place. That’s the goal. The phrase we hear a lot is that there are no jobs to fill here—only careers to fill. We don’t want them to feel like they simply accepted a job. We want them to feel like this opportunity is big enough, that with things like tuition reimbursement and personal development here, they can grow almost any career they want. We want to leave them with that kind of excitement, thinking that in the short term this is a great job at a great place, but also somewhere that I can grow into what I want to become.

Q: After all the emphasis on culture during orientation, are there ways to measure the level of reception to it?
A: Intuitively, you know it from the feel of energy in a room. There will be days when we didn’t feel the same energy as last week, that gut feel. Then we have it in metrics like first-year turnover or employee engagement surveys. We look for indicators in those kinds of tools that build those kinds of connections. Every place I’ve been, if you get an engagement score in the 70-75 range, people are pretty happy with that, because in a lot of places, people are not engaged. We have expectations in the top decile. We’re not there, but we’re better than a lot of places. As Bob says, proud but never satisfied, and that applies to everything. We’re constantly looking for different metrics that tell us people are happy, they are engaged, they are fulfilled and they are growing.

Q: What about at companies that might not have the level of resources to bring to the process? What are the main mistakes they’re making with onboarding?
A: First, if people go and feel like that process was an afterthought, that it wasn’t planned for and that the organization is not thrilled that they are there, a lot of early commitment is lost. It should be a very significant event. People who plan these days here have been part of the organization for a while. It needs to be treated with seriousness of a very important event, not for those giving, but for those on the receiving end. Imagine a donor with a big check—there’s a party and balloons. You need to create onboarding just like that. The most precious thing people have to give you is their time, and you need to treat that as though it’s as significant as anything else we’d celebrate. We go through a long process to find, recruit, interview and do background checks on people. But we also understand, they have options. We’ve got to be proud they picked us, too. If you think about them making that decision, instead of this as an administrative process, you will treat them very differently.