Ryan Baum
Healthcare is facing a moral crisis, not just an operational one. To drive real change, organizations must reengage employees by aligning with their motivations, addressing core needs, and making bold, purpose-driven moves.
The healthcare system in the U.S. is in turmoil, and employees across the industry…particularly those in large insurance companies…are feeling the strain. While frontline workers have long been vocally dissatisfied about issues of pay, hours, and burnout—challenges that were exacerbated by the pandemic—another, deeper kind of dissatisfaction is creeping into the industry today.
The tragic killing of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, has brought long-simmering frustrations with the system to the forefront. Beyond the usual grievances about working conditions, a new kind of moral question seems to be emerging among many healthcare employees: Am I a part of the problem? This crisis of purpose is compounding the already pervasive disengagement and cynicism that exist within many healthcare organizations today.
As a patient in the healthcare system, I often get incredibly frustrated—whether it’s dealing with denials, navigating complex approval processes, or simply trying to understand arcane rules that seem designed to obstruct rather than help. It often leaves me wondering: Who makes these decisions?
And yet, most of the leaders I’ve met working in the industry are well-intentioned professionals who genuinely want to help patients and make the system work better. But they often feel as stuck as the rest of us… caught in a web of bureaucracy, inefficiency, and misaligned incentives. But some of that may be shifting. Many of the leaders I talk to these days think there’s a real opportunity to break through the bureaucracy and make change.
Here’s the issue: change requires motivation, and while leaders may be thinking about transformation, many employees are feeling more disillusioned than ever. And if employees don’t believe in their ability to be a part of the solution, meaningful change will never happen. The shift must start internally. Employees need to once again feel motivated and connected to the purpose of their work.
That’s no small task. And the large abstract visions that many organizations have today certainly aren’t going to help. Statements like “make healthcare better” are built for the purposes of not upsetting any stakeholder rather than inspiring anyone. They lack concrete, real-world commitments, so when employees are feeling jaded or disengaged, they come across as fluff.
Getting employees to feel reengaged with the work such that they have the motivation to drive the transformation the industry so deeply needs, is perhaps the defining leadership challenge of today.
It’s time to move forward with a different approach:
1. Employee Segmentation, not just Customer Segmentation
One of the reasons the visions and promises of healthcare organizations seem so big and abstract is that they’re trying to appeal to everyone, and therefore don’t really say much of anything. And every organization is saying basically the same thing, so for most employees, these statements just go in one ear and out the other. In reality, today’s healthcare organizations have grown so large that their why has fragmented into multiple motivations. Some employees are driven by a desire to care for individuals, others by an interest in risk management, and still others by a passion for complex mathematical problem-solving. Trying to articulate a single, one-size-fits-all motivation won’t work.
Leaders need to listen to what actually drives different folks within their companies today. Then they can begin to identify the different motivational segments within their population. Just as healthcare companies use customer segmentations to tailor their offerings and messaging externally, they need to apply the same rigor to their internal workforce. Prioritizing which groups to focus on first and crafting engagement strategies that resonate with their specific motivations is key to reigniting their drive and excitement about the work to be done.
2. Core Needs, not just Pain Points
People are certainly happy when a company fixes things that are broken. But merely addressing pain points in healthcare will make an incredibly frustrating system slightly less incredibly frustrating. And while “less frustrating” is desperately needed in healthcare, it’s not particularly inspiring or motivating to people.
The class I teach at Stanford is called Needfinding. It emphasizes the distinction between pain points and core needs. Addressing pain points results in iterative improvements, whereas focusing on core needs enables more transformational (and inspirational) change. For example, if you were Sony in the 80s and your consumer surveys showed that people had a lot of trouble quickly finding the beginning of each new track on cassette tapes in their Walkman, you might be lulled into devoting a significant amount of resources to fixing a small “now” pain point at the expense of the larger fundamental needs that are shifting around music consumption.
Healthcare leaders today need to be building two lists simultaneously. They can’t ignore all of the irritating pain points that patients and members experience on a day-to-day basis related to everything from billing codes to approval timelines. But that’s just list one. Overly focusing on those pain points cannot be an excuse for not focusing on a second list of core needs. Core needs help an organization identify more fundamental things missing from people’s experience in healthcare, and they are the start of defining more transformational, inspiring, solutions.
3. Iconic Moves not just Incremental Improvements
Healthcare is full of slow, incremental changes, and while those improvements are necessary, they’re not enough to restore trust in the system. Employees, patients, and even regulators have lost faith in the system’s ability to serve people effectively. What’s needed now are bold actions that clearly demonstrate a genuine commitment to change.
These iconic moves look different in different industries. Consider how, after inventing the three-point seatbelt, Volvo open-sourced the technology even though they could have made more money in the short term by patenting it and selling it as a differentiator in their cars. Decades later Volvo is still known as the most safety-conscious automaker in the world. Volvo’s move in the auto space is similar to the Disney Channel’s move in the entertainment space when it banned junk food advertising on air, or to REI’s move in the retail space when it shut its stores on Black Friday and encouraged people to enjoy the outdoors. These weren’t just promises; they were bold actions that signaled a deeper commitment to something beyond short-term profits.
In healthcare, as faith in the system flatlines, this kind of bold move is more needed than ever. These types of moves won’t silence all skeptics, but they can serve as a rallying cry, reigniting passion among employees and showing the world what the organization truly stands for.
The First Step to Change: Reengaging Your Own People
There’s no shortage of challenges in healthcare today, from government policy hurdles to outdated technologies to bureaucratic claims processes. But before any of those problems can be solved, healthcare organizations must first reenroll their own employees in the mission. The people who have dedicated their careers to this industry must believe in the possibility of change—because without their passion and commitment, meaningful transformation will continue to remain out of reach.
