Reflections on Respect E-Newsletter

January 2008

Nurse Next Door Nabs Top Spot

How a values based culture propelled Nurse Next Door to #1 as BC's Top Employer for 2009

By Erica Pinsky

In November 2008, my book Road to Respect: Path to Profit was in the final design stages.  I had chosen five Employers of Choice to illustrate the main theme of the book – that a strategically built values based culture with respect as a core value was simply a business imperative for success in today’s marketplace.  

It never occurred to me, as Dorothy said in the Wizard of Oz, to start looking for my heart’s desire, in this case those Employers of Choice, in my own backyard.  When I heard about the 2008 BC Business Best Companies survey, I thought I would attend the awards banquet to learn how local companies compared to those I had chosen to feature in Road to Respect.   Not surprisingly, much of what I heard that evening from the winning companies reflected what I know to be true – treat your employees with respect, let them know they are valued, support them to be successful and they will produce the superior business results you are after.

I was fortunate that evening to be seated at a table with the team from Nurse Next Door, one of the Best Companies nominees, including co-founders Ken Sim and John DeHart.  Nurse Next Door came in 8th in 2008.  This year, they were named the top employer in BC for firms with over 100 employees.

Nurse Next Door is a company that is getting a lot of things right.  Like Zappos, another very successful values driven company I featured in this e-newsletter, while respect is not explicitly included in their core values, the workplace practices at Nurse Next Door are fundamentally respectful, and mirror those of the Employer of Choice Companies I feature in Road to Respect.   

I had the opportunity last month to sit down with John DeHart and learn more about what propelled Nurse Next Door to the number one spot as BC’s Top Employer.  I am pleased to be able to share the highlights with you in this first e-news of a new decade.  

EP – In Road to Respect I talk about values based hiring. At the BC Business Top Employers awards ceremony this year, I heard you say that you hire for attitude, exactly what I had heard from Ellen DuBellay of Four Seasons Hotels. Can you tell us a bit about your hiring practices?  I am particularly curious about the innovation question that is part of your process.

JDH – Our entire hiring process is structured around our core values.  You can train someone for skill.  You can’t train someone to be aligned with your core values.  For us, it is the golden rule.  Not everyone will be aligned with our core values.  But to work here, you have to be.

When you have your core values alive in your company, they attract the right people, and they repel the wrong people.  Values are like honey to bees. 

We get about 200 applicants for every position. Our ad will say something like, company obsessed with core values looking for like minded people, so right away people get it. When they come to be interviewed here for the first time they are invited to a group interview. We bring in up to 8 potential candidates in every initial interview.  We find that a number of people will not come to a group interview and guess what?  We won’t hire them.  It is not a culture fit.

Find a Better Way is one of our core values.  We are on a journey for continuous improvement. We are looking for individuals that can adapt to a new environment and thrive in our culture.  If you don’t like change, you won’t like working here.  So in the interview process we might ask “How would you change this interview process to be better?  How would you do it and why would you do it?”

Another core value is Admire People.  To figure out whether applicants are aligned with that value one of the last questions we often ask in the group interview is “ If we could hire one other person around this table who would we hire?”  The responses we get really help us determine who will be able to live the Admire People value in our culture.

EP – How did your develop your core values?

JDH - We used the Mission to Mars model referred to by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great.   It is about discovering what your values really are.  The process is quite simple.  We asked each member of our senior management team to list the five people they would put in a space ship to re-create our culture on Mars.  You take the traits of those people selected, see how they intersect and that is how you discover what your values are. 

Our four core values are Admire People, Wow Our Customers, Find a Better Way,  and Be Passionate About Making a Difference.   They are our moral compass.  They are our guide and they dictate the actions of every single person in our company. 

EP -  How do you ensure that the values are lived in the workplace?

JDH - If your core values are truly alive inside your company, you should base every decision on them.  It is a hard thing to really live your core values, because it is going to force you to make decisions that you might not ordinarily make, for example, to fire that top performer that doesn’t completely align with your core values.  That is a really hard decision to make.  In our company we do that all the time, and everybody knows that, so it becomes an expectation. 

Everyone in our company is empowered to do their job.  If a team wants to fire someone, they can go ahead and do that.  They know that when they come and tell me about it I will only have one question to ask.   “Did you live our core values during the process?” Everybody knows that the only question I will ask them is that one.

If someone is hired and there is a core value misalignment, they will literally get called out by the team.  In our culture, to call someone out on our core values is a serious issue.  If you are in our culture and you don’t live our values, someone will call you out.  We live and breath this stuff.  It really defines our company.

That goes for our franchise partners as well.  We have turned away great potential partners who did not align with our core values.  In training with them we focus on helping them build a world class culture from the ground up.  We are teaching them the right way to do that. 

We do workshops with our staff on how to build core values, how to find your core values and how to bring them alive in your culture. 

EP - Why should businesses focus on this stuff?  Why is culture important?

JDH -  A lot of entrepreneurs ask me, why should I focus on this, is there a return on investment?  As I said for every position we get about 200 plus applicants. We don’t spend money on recruiting.  We attract the right people because of our culture.  

We were just named the #1 employer in BC.   Ken and I don’t personally know most of our staff and that is contrary to what “should” be happening in an employer of choice company.  The reality of our operation is that 95% of our employees are out in the field.   The one thing that glues us all together is our core values.  It is crucial that wherever our employees are, they are experiencing our core values and we work with our franchise partners to ensure that is happening.  As a result, our turnover rate is really low. We have 1000 employees in the field. Average turnover in our industry is 70%.  Our rate is 7%. 

In our corporate “heart quarters” our turnover is 1%.  People just don’t quit our company. We don’t deal with labour issues. We are growing quickly. We have 35 locations in Canada and we are expanding into the US.  Our success really comes down to that vision process.  We have really built our whole culture around our core purpose - why we do what we do, our core values and our vision of what we want to achieve, what we call our painted picture.  By really focusing on those 3 components it has given us the stable base to build a great company.

To build a great brand you have to brand from the inside out.    First you have to build a great culture. Once you build a really great culture that lives and breathes your core values, only then can you really build a great brand.  Southwest Airlines is my favorite example of that. 

EP - While respect is not spelled out in your core values, the practices which characterize your workplace culture are fundamentally respectful in that they support, empower and recognize difference to support success.  One great example I read about is the Mommy shift?  Why is that important and how does that fit with your core values?

JDH - We realized that a lot of our caregivers are Moms.  A lot of them are between the ages of 30 and 40.  They need to work, but they also need to be able to dedicate their lives to their children.  We have been in business for 8 years.  Around year 5 a lot of our employees started having babies. Our value of Admire People caused us to ask ourselves, how do we make this work for our employees? How can we keep them employed?   

We approached our clients and asked them if they would interested in a shift from 9 – 2 as opposed to 8 – 4 and we found that a lot of them said yes, they would if we found the right person.  So we tailored an entire shift around a Mom’s schedule.  They work from 9 – 2.  They can drop their kids off at school, pick them up after school, they can have days off when they need them for professional days, holidays.  Our clients are ok with that.

EP -   How does leadership fit with your values?

JDH - The role of a leader is to bring focus to a company.  My job is to make sure we are always focused on our core values.  I can shed a lot of power and decision making to our people because I have one rule; whatever you do, make sure it fits within our core values.  Power becomes less a characteristic of leadership and is shared within the company. 

A team member may not make the right decision, they may lose money to do something, but if they have lived our core values then that is ok.  We will then coach and train them to make the right decision next time.  As long as they followed our core values, we continue to empower them.

EP - How do you keep that culture of innovation alive?

JDH - One simple way to make sure you are living your values is to talk about them continually. We talk about our core value of Find a Better Way all the time.  We have best practices to ensure that.  We follow the LEAN method started by Toyota.  We have a continuous improvement committee.  They meet every week.  We have a program where everyone submits suggestions on how to improve things and that committee looks at those and chooses one every single week.  We have a whole system built to ensure that we are continually looking for new ideas.

We track and measure what we are doing.  We track how many ideas we get and how many are implemented.

We have a daily huddle, a mandatory meeting for everyone here at heart quarters and part of that meeting is looking for missing systems.  I will always ask if anyone is missing anything they need to do their jobs.  That is just one way to make sure you keep this alive in your culture.

EP - How do you give people permission to make mistakes?

JDH - Warren Buffet said I don’t care if you lose money, I care if you lose reputation.  As a company we are willing to take a financial loss to live our core values.  People know that in our company because they know that the founders, Ken and I, have done that.   The only mistake is to mess with our core values.  If that happens, you won’t be here anymore. 

EP - What I am hearing you describe in your culture to me demonstrates respect, and yet respect is not articulated in your core values.  How do ethical values like integrity and respect fit with your culture?

JDH - I look at integrity and respect as get in the game core values. As a company if you are hiring someone that does not have integrity, you should be giving them a pink slip. No one should be hiring anyone without integrity or who does not want to demonstrate respect. Really it doesn’t matter what your core values are.  If you are living your core values, that is integrity, that is respect.