No Excuses HR: Social Media + Healthcare

By Bryan Wempen and William Tincup

Wempen and Tincup are hosts of DriveThruHR, a daily talk radio blog that focuses on HR.

Bryan Wempen: Jay, I know you are going a million miles an hour. It’s great to get your perspective, because All Children’s Hospital is really trying to break the mold open a little bit and not trying to take the status quo approach, and I always learn at least one thing when I talk to you. What’s keeping you up at night?

Jay Kuhns: I think what’s keeping me up at night lately is that I’m on different tracks. One is more of a macro scale, and that’s what is happening in Washington with healthcare reform. I’ve been in healthcare quite a long time, and the stakes don’t get higher than the Supreme Court talking about your industry for three days. That’s about as big as it gets, and deciding how people are going to get paid, who’s going to have access to your services and how that’s going to be structured—I mean it’s just a seismic shift in what’s happening in my world, again, on a large scale.

So that is plenty, but at a more local level, we are working very, very diligently within our HR team here on changing up in a fairly dramatic way, including how we go about recruiting and communicating with both candidates and our staff.

We have a lot of energy going into the redesign of our HR function, evaluating the actual tasks people perform and making adjustments, which has created a lot of space and time for our recruitment team to source and recruit candidates. We are in such a specialized subsector of the healthcare hospital space that we really have a constant national recruitment effort underway. So we’ve had to critically evaluate what we are doing on a variety of social platforms to connect with potential candidates, and so those kind of macro- and micro-level issues are pretty much dominating what I am thinking about.

William Tincup: Let’s talk about the social recruiting. So, in the back of my mind, I have this picture of coming up with a strategy. You hire some consultants. You bring a bunch of smart people around the table, and you cook up some strategy, and it sounds good. Then you get into implementation, and you start doing some of these things you planned. And then, at some later point, you go back and evaluate your activities to figure out what you did right: Did it actually pay off the way we thought it would? How does it pay off? Like, how did you cook with your team the social strategy, if you will?

Kuhns: Well, that’s a great question. We took a couple of different perspectives. One was we needed to get started. So a lot of folks will say, “You need a strategy before you dive in. You need to have this well-thought-out plan.” I disagree with that. I think you have to get started. You need to understand the tools yourself so that you can speak to it. So we slowly started in very safe, nonthreatening ways here with the team. I made sure everybody had a LinkedIn profile, and we all started dabbling around with some different groups so that we could have a comfort level with that.

Then we slowly moved to Twitter, and I made sure that we all had a Twitter account. We started using that tool, and some of us have embraced it more than others. But that’s okay because everyone on the team is involved in the space. As we talked about different options, one of the mantras that I have been starting to use is: “We’re going to try some things that work, and we’re going to try some things that don’t work, and I am not interested in blame.”

I just wanted to stop doing the things that don’t work. When we don’t worry about failing anymore, and all we’re worried about is trying new strategies and approaches, we can build on just the good parts. Now, we have simple things like a hashtag that we use for anything related to our posts or jobs or things like that. We are in very close collaboration with our marketing department, with which we’re completely integrated from a communication and strategy perspective, and we have been able to identify areas that need work, such as our jobs landing page.

As a result, we are working on a transformation of our careers website, which is very exciting, and integration into the talent community space. This is a huge opportunity for us, because I don’t think there are a lot of folks in healthcare getting very focused on talent communities. I may be wrong, but I just haven’t seen a whole lot. And how we leverage some of the tools like Foursquare and LinkedIn, some video use and Twitter, all of these pieces are coming together in a very seamless and coordinated way.

At the end of the day, we are targeting 18- to 54-year olds, not only to make healthcare decisions for their kids, but also because they believe in our brand. They also are overwhelmingly the primary group that we’ll be recruiting. Since we have 83 percent females in our employee population who are very active in social media, we’re really shifting much of our energy and resources into that arena.

Tincup: How do you have the discussion around ROI? Because it’s simply very similar to some of the marketing discussions. You get a lot of people that are non-marketers who ask, “Okay, what’s the return on this?” In some things, there is a clear return. An email campaign, for example, is very easy to measure; redoing a logo is not so easy to measure. So how do you have those types of discussions throughout your organization around ROI, but also around the concept of fear of failure, if you will?

Kuhns: One of the things that helped from an ROI perspective is that our marketing team has been recognized for many of their accomplishments and work product. We already have, as an organization, established the fact that these tools can be effective and that we have the internal expertise to manage them appropriately, and that helped pave the way for HR. As the HR group started forging our own path, we didn’t have to go completely blindly down the trail. We could almost piggyback on the good works that our marketing group had done. I mean, I’m literally in a weekly marketing meeting with them talking about HR projects, and they have a director from that team who is in my recruitment meetings. We are totally and completely integrated, and that’s helped us a lot on the ROI side.

Another area that’s helped us from an experiential perspective is that traditional kind of boring old print advertising has less and less of a return, particularly because we’re frequently looking for such specialized staff. That’s helped us be free to try new things, so when all the social media opportunities kicked in, we started pushing real hard right along with that. The fear part, I think, has a lot to do with many HR practitioners not having the guts to bring it up. Since we don’t have any of those fears, we’ve just been blazing a trail. A lot of times people are nervous and risk-averse and they’re worried that the compliance person is going to swoop out of a tree and whack them on the head. I just don’t care or waste time worrying about that.

Wempen: I was thinking about culture in engagement and how it applies, and what I hear and see, especially from your organization, is that it seems that everybody as an individual takes a back seat to the overall mission. I mean you’re singular of mission, and that’s to take care of the children.

Kuhns: Yes! Everyone is totally focused on our mission.

Wempen: I think that’s interesting. For example, for the first four months in any of the military branches, they strip away the individualism and thoughts about “What’s in it for me?” and they really instill that there is a bigger mission. There is something bigger than you, and you have to basically balance out. It’s not about you; it’s about everything around you and the overall goal or objective. And that bigger mission helps take away the, “What’s in it for me?” thoughts. That’s what I equated to the children’s hospital, and I would love to see other companies be able to establish a culture of having a mission bigger than themselves.

I see that from some technology companies where they’re so immersed in culture that you know they’re part of that; they feel a part of it. Then I start to see that you don’t even talk about engagement after that. It’s really about, “How can we make things better? How can we have honest conversations? How do we forge ahead?”

Kuhns: I agree. That mission piece for us is maybe more unique than, say, heavy manufacturing or something like that. I can’t speak for those industries, because I’ve been a healthcare guy forever, but one of the things that I think has helped us with these strategies is that we have not simply said, “Oh, you should be thankful to be working in this amazing place where we do heart transplants on neonates and save lives every day.” That’s incredible, but that can’t be enough. One of the things that we took a long, hard look at when we were developing our social media guidelines was that we did not want another policy, because healthcare is full of policies. Plus they’re usually boring and dull and get in the way.

So we put a team together to develop social media guidelines that encourage our employees to use it. It encourages them to be individuals, not just trapped in this giant homogenous team, but recognizes a level of difference within our workforce and encourages them to use the tools. We tell them how to use them properly, how to get in touch with the marketing department, how they can use them if they want to set up outside of the hospital. We make all of this available to them because we want to encourage them, and because part of our foundation around the strategy was this concept of employee voice.

Tincup: Let me tell everyone the social media policy dilemma. It’s three words: Use common sense. There you go. Take the policy. Have a nice day. So, Jay, I want to segue into your merger with Johns Hopkins. What have you learned as an HR leader, as an HR pro and as a person that’s really on point? What was the unintended learning through this merger process thing? What have you learned about yourself and on your team?

Kuhns: Well, we’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of our organization joining Johns Hopkins Medicine, and we are the first full member of the healthcare system that is so far away from the rest of the group. All of the other hospitals are in the Baltimore – D.C. metro area. And so, part of the buildup for us and excitement about it didn’t have a big bang right after it happened, because there was no dramatic change to the life of the employees.

Some of the hospital’s executives have a much greater degree of interaction with the corporate staff in Baltimore, but by and large there had not been a lot of changes until recently, with our long-term CEO retiring and a member of the Hopkins team, who happens to be a physician, in an interim role now. He’s super enthusiastic, so it’s a great start.

There weren’t a lot of fireworks and hoopla, so what developed for some employees was a sense of, “When is the other shoe going to drop?” Obviously that’s not the case, but it’s been a good exercise on making sure we don’t take our eye off the communication target and making sure we keep people informed. We may communicate more than we think we need to, but it’s better to over-communicate.

A lesson learned for me has been to make sure I’m very open and don’t get nervous about hard questions. I tell employees all the time, “I don’t want easy questions; I want hard ones. It’s on everybody’s mind, so just ask it, and let’s talk about it.” That was an interesting twist that I wasn’t necessarily expecting.

Tincup: No excuses. That’s what I heard: No excuses. You’ve got a blog, and you’re very active in social media, but now you’re doing a little bit more speaking. Tell us, first of all, do you have any anxiety about that? What have you learned about yourself in the speaking process?

Kuhns: Well, I have not had to duck yet because any sort of glassware was being thrown my way. I love public speaking and have been doing it awhile on a variety of topics, but this topic [social media] seems to be so threatening to people for some reason.

I sense the anxiety about the topic because of that. Particularly with the groups I have been speaking to recently, which had been more of a higher-level decision makers. I get a little nervous that I might push too hard, because my whole angle on this is to be very aggressive and challenging and have some fun with it, and so far it’s gone pretty well. I’m not sure that people are going to be any more inclined to dip their toe in the water, but it’s been a really good experience, and it’s been a way to, perhaps, help people look at the world a little differently. Many organizations are so involved in this controlling leadership style, and that really doesn’t apply anymore at all in any way. And it is horribly ineffective, if you ask me. So for folks who struggle with that, maybe the message is to at least give it a little thought.

Wempen: So here’s a nugget that we can kind of identify. So, the first step is admit that you got a problem with the excuses in the organization as the HR team. So, what would be your second step on creating a “no excuses”-type culture in HR?

Kuhns: I think the way that I get a “no excuses” culture in HR is by challenging over and over and over why would we do that. “Well, somebody told me four years ago we should do that.” Well, I don’t care. We’re not doing that anymore, is my answer. Let’s move past that, and the more we push and push and push, the more progress we make. For PuckHead Nation and all hockey fans out there, the Tampa Bay Lightning used to have a sign in the locker room that said “Safe is death.” That speaks to hockey games, and it speaks to careers, if you ask me. So, I’m not really interested in playing it safe, and I don’t mean that I’m a tough guy; I just mean that’s reality.

Wempen: Well, then just keep going with that from like a mentoring angle because you do that a lot. How do you react when somebody on your team comes and says, “Jay, that’s great, I hear you, but I just really struggle with being uncomfortable with this. I want to push, but I’m wrapped in traditional HR, and I don’t want to make waves. I’m thinking it, but I can’t get it out of my mouth.” What do you tell them?

Kuhns: That’s a fair question, and I’ve handled it two ways. One is, I help them. If they’re worried about something, I will run some interference with other leaders in the organization. That helps maybe break things up a little bit for them, and it helps clear the path for them to take a couple of steps forward. The other way I’ve done that is, when I have had vacancies on my team. I don’t hire people who aren’t willing to take risks and try new things; they’re just not going to be here because I only want people around me who are willing to take risks and go for it.

Wempen: Good job of it. Get the right people on the bus, so you don’t turn too much anymore. Where can people connect with you on Twitter? Give them your blog name.

Kuhns: Thank you, the Twitter is @jrkuhns. The blog is www.noexcuseshr.com, and I’m on LinkedIn and Foursquare.