Safe & Reliable Healthcare

What I Was Hired to Do

Safe and Reliable brought me on to help them turn chaos into process. They are a company that deeply believes in High Reliability and, with their rapid growth, they needed help adopting their own teachings.

What really attracted me to this role was that I was hired with the understanding that there was little to no limit on my job description. As the COO would describe it, I was like ‘play-doh’, where I could spread out to fill any gaps in processes, in talent or in anything else I could find.

Accomplishments

• Created and rolled out many well-received and quickly adopted policies and initiatives. (Culture Code, Communication Standards, Learnsday Thursday, Huddle 3.0, COVID Travel Policy, Accounting Policies, PMMR, Onboarding, Diversity & Inclusion education series)

• Brought some structure and strategic thinking around our products (SCORE Roadmap and Client Checklist)

• Coded interim technical solutions from scratch (VA timesheets, Operation dashboards)

• Singlehandedly produced 17 episodes of the S&R Podcast from scratch.

• Received positive feedback from team members that I have made their lives easier, improved company culture, sense of community - saying I am “the glue of S&R”, or that I am the reason they are so structured and organized.

Additional Thoughts/Learnings

I am so appreciative of how many opportunities I was given for interesting work at this company. I was able to learn a lot about what makes an organization a High Reliable Organization (HRO): Leadership engagement, everyone having a voice, psychological safety, just culture, continuous learning and improvement, robust processes that do not rely on human perfection etc.

When I joined S&R in April of 2019, there were under 20 employees, improvised contracts and workplans for each client, and a leadership team that was not communicating with each other. When I left in December of 2020, there were over 50 employees, dedicated groups working on refining and standardizing product offerings and the leadership is meeting as a group 4 times a week.

The frontline team was always receptive, agile and adaptable to anything I brought forth. The leadership was also supportive and always had positive feedback. However the biggest challenge I found was that they were ruled by the tyranny of the urgent, which prevented them from meaningfully committing to the changes that they expected from their team. Naturally, this leads to the work being frequently, unintentionally, undermined. Upon my departure, it is my understanding that they started to engage in the hard conversations and work it takes to scale and fulfill their long term strategy.