Sometimes, even the best ideas don’t get off the ground right away.
There are a variety of reasons why that might happen, but in the end, the solution is the same — try it again with a different approach.
That’s how it was for Texas Health Resources when they turned to Fuel50 to help them with a technology solution “that would allow each employee to be accountable and drive their own career,” as Candy Baptist, the Director of Career Transformation at Texas Health, described it in a presentation she made at the FuelX Talent Mobility Conference by Fuel50.
Texas Health’s headquarters, and Texas Health Resources University’s career transformation center, sit right in the middle of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex overlooking Cowboys Stadium. They have 23,000 employees scattered over 15 hospitals and 280 clinics and urgent care centers in 16 Texas counties. Their staff includes about 10,000 nurses and allied health professionals, as well as 3,600 physicians.
Their goal is this: whenever they provide a service or product to the Texas Health family (the employees, who company management considers “our consumer”) that service or product MUST be accessible to all Texas Health employees wherever they’re located and however they choose to connect.
With 23,000 employees/consumers, this is NOT an easy task.
The big challenge facing Texas Health
Candy Baptist described how Texas Health approached this challenge:
“In the past five years, we put a lot of energy into making consumer-centric thinking the core of our business plan and our operation. For THR University, the consumers are our employees, (and the) results impact our clinical and financial outcomes. Once each service line identifies its consumers, we develop products and programs with our Texas Health promise principles in mind.
And this is pretty unique for organizations. We provide THR University services to our whole organization and our joint-owned entity. Our service lines are critical learning; onboarding and orientation; the career transformation center; position lead and support services, which include our LMS operations and management.
Our employees are our consumers, and they want the same level of consideration as we give our public consumers — especially when it comes to making career choices, enhancing their skills for their current position or aspirational roles, or receiving feedback from their peers, mentors, and managers.
How do we know this? These are the elements that come from our employee engagement survey. And since we don’t have the resources to provide one-to-one advisement for each employee, we decided to work with the Fuel50 team on a refresh that would allow each employee to be accountable and drive their own career.”
It seemed to be a smart approach, especially since Texas Health wanted to make sure that the program was not dependent on manager support. They felt the better approach was a technological approach that was employee-driven, although the organization “always encourages employees to share their interests, their talents and their aspirations with their managers.” In short, the Fuel50 solution seemed to be a thoughtful, hybrid approach.
Why “My Career Journey” really struck a chord
Employees needed to be the real driving force since the technological solution was not dependent on managerial support, and for some reason, that wasn’t happening. As Candy Baptist put it,
“Initially, Fuel50 has a career development plan that each employee was required to complete for tuition reimbursement. But we found that employees never went back to it to review, take action or make any of their career decisions. And most likely they didn’t even share it with their managers … (and) managers could not access it for those important conversations they needed to have to keep their employees interested and engaged.”
Sometimes, it takes some smart analysis, a little tweaking, and a slightly different approach to make the new solution really take hold. And that’s what Texas Health Resources decided to do, as Candy Baptist explained:
“We decided that Fuel50 needed to be used more intentionally. We also renamed it “My Career Journey” in alignment with our other products and services we provide. … Along with the consumer experience we also have a major initiative for change management. At THR University, our business is people, people readiness. Using Fuel50 differently caused us to look at how can we prepare our consumers for change? Change management and tolerance for ambiguity are some of the key competencies that were added to job role competency, and employees will find as they chart their career path.
We chose Fuel50 because we want to ensure that the career planning tools our employees use are easy to find, easy to use, and add value to their personal and professional lives. We made the Fuel50 My Career Journey tab available on multiple sites on our internet. We have people who work in offices, work from home, or want to work on their career during downtime on a patient unit. … 50% of our workforce is Millennial, so they are very used to searching sites and clicking through assessment.”
One of Fortune’s Top 10 Best Companies to Work For
Texas Health Resources was recognized last year as No. 7 on Fortune’s annual 100 Best Companies To Work For list. The business magazine described Texas Health’s Top 10 ranking like this:
“As one of the nation’s largest nonprofit, faith-based health systems, Texas Health Resources has proved vital to a state ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic — by providing much-needed support to both its employees as well as the communities it serves, which include more than 2 million patients annually. … And in a testament to its commitment to public service and focus on representation, 34% of its board of trustees are minorities. Texas Health Resources says it donates more than $60 million annually to philanthropic and nonprofit efforts as well. … These and other initiatives have helped boost the health system up eight spots on this year’s list.”
That’s pretty good validation that Texas Health is doing a lot of things right, and Candy Baptist underlined all that when she closed her FuelX presentation:
“Just like our consumers, THR employees want a work experience that is safe, reliable, proactive, efficient, caring, and seamless … (and our) partnership with Fuel50 to develop “My Career Journey” … (helped) our team create a framework aligned with Texas Health behavior tenets – Mission, Vision, Promise Behaviors, and Leader Behaviors—to advance our current workforce in a way that meets both the needs of the individual and the needs of the organization .”
Texas Health Resources has a lot to be proud of as they continue to do amazing work, with a little help from Fuel50, that helps both their patients and other consumers by investing in the growth and development of their large regional workforce.
