How to maintain an award-winning culture through extreme change

Employee experience may just be the biggest driver of revenue. Recently research by SalesForce in more than 1,000 companies shows that improvements in the employee experience can increase revenue by up to 50%.

One of the most important challenges a company can face is how to maintain high loyalty scores during times of change. To get a closer look at a company that has accomplished just that, I sat down with the Chief People Officer (CPO) of SCAN Group and SCAN Health Plan, Lindsay Crawley-Herbert.

Despite the times of change, SCAN has managed to continue to improve its loyalty scores and continue to reduce turnover. And along the way, the company has won awards for:

• Great place to work for three years in a row.
• Ranked the #1 Medicare Advantage provider for member satisfaction in California based on the results of the 2023 JD Power US Medicare Advantage Satisfaction Study.
• Leading Innovative Organizations of Modern Healthcare
• Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Women

SCAN was founded as the Senior Care Action Network 46 years ago by a culturally and racially diverse group of senior activists who were dissatisfied with the lack of access to care and services needed to stay healthy and independent. With just under 5 billion in revenue, SCAN now has approximately 1,700 employees.

SCAN maintains its culture with three key initiatives

There is no one-size-fits-all way to maintain corporate culture. Often, the best strategies for maintaining culture are those that are unique to a company. At SCAN, here are some key strategies used to strengthen the culture:

• Pursuing the Possible – This is a grassroots, frontline initiative involving all SCAN employees. “The front line is made up of some of our company’s most valuable employees. They see everything. They are the ones who know how our members experience our service. This initiative encourages employees to share their ideas and solutions to challenges that will enable us to improve what we do and how we do it,” said Crawley-Herbert.
• Open door policy from top to bottom – “We have an open door policy and our CEO puts his personal cell phone on emails,” Crawley-Herbert emphasized. “We want to hear from our employees. We have listening sessions at all different levels of the organization. We have what we call ‘Lattes with Leadership’, where there is no formal agenda. Instead, there’s an open dialogue where we can hear directly from employees about what they’re experiencing, what’s going well and what they want to see different.”
• Leadership Development for All People Leaders – SCAN also has a program called “Leading at SCAN”. “All the leaders of our people go through the same training,” Crawley-Herbert said. “That way, we all speak the same language and we all know the expectations.”

Digging deeper than engagement surveys

With engagement scores already so high, SCAN decided to dig deeper with qualitative feedback to try and explore even further below the surface in terms of engagement.

“We’ve expanded our engagement survey to include open-ended questions. And we consistently communicate to our employees that we want their honest feedback,” noted Crawley-Herbert. The idea is to uncover hotspots or comments that one might not feel comfortable bringing up during a listening session. “We also offer executive office hours, fifteen minutes one-on-one every two weeks with various executives, including our CEO and his direct reports,” he said. “We encourage our employees to submit reviews on Glassdoor and have a platform for employees to submit anonymous comments, questions and feedback.”

SCAN develops culture by developing front line leaders

Since research correlates 70% of employee engagement with an employee’s relationship with their manager, how a company develops its leaders can be incredibly indicative of its culture.

At SCAN, managers go through multiple development touch points:

1. “Top in SCAN”. All people leaders (including executives) go through “Leading at SCAN” to create a common vocabulary and approach to leadership.
2. “Gray Management”. “We do this very interactive, small group training for some of our frontline leaders to help them navigate ambiguous environments where each employee needs something different,” Crawley-Herbert explained.
3. Disc. All employees take the DiSC assessment and go through training on how to come across and how to best work with someone with a different style.
4. “Trading season.” All new employees who join SCAN go through this training. The program is designed to put employees in the shoes of SCAN members. “This program gives our employees the opportunity to experience common ailments as we age, such as hearing and vision loss,” noted Crawley-Herbert. “This helps build empathy and create a common language and experience around what our members are experiencing.”
5. “Program Together”. “Loneliness is an epidemic affecting the elderly. And it’s an issue with hybrid workspaces as well. So this is a program that benefits both our employees and our members. Employees are assigned a member they can build a relationship with,” said Crawley-Herbert. And surprisingly, what we’ve found with our engagement and retention scores is that our employees who participate in the Togetherness Program rate much higher than those who don’t, likely because of the connection to our mission.

Crawley-Herbert’s advice for CPOs: Stay in touch with the external environment

Crawley-Herbert’s advice for someone taking on the position of Chief People Officer was to recognize the impact the external environment has on your role. “I came into my first CPO job during COVID and had to solve and maintain a strong culture in a remote work environment and then evolve and transition to a hybrid work environment,” Crawley-Herbert shared as an example. “And more generally,” he continued, “it’s essential to stay on top of best practices, stay on top of the industry—not just the HR industry but the business industry. Ultimately, what I focus on is talent—bringing in the right talent, retaining the right talent, developing the right talent, and creating an employee experience and culture that helps us ultimately achieve our business goals. And external forces have a huge impact on talent.”

Kevin Kruse is its Founder + CEO LEADx, scaling and sustaining leadership behaviors with behavioral nudges, micro-learning and cohort-based live workshops. Kevin is also a New York Times bestselling author of Great leaders have no rules, 15 time management secrets that successful people know, and Employee Engagement 2.0.