Hi and welcome to Be The Flagship with our podcast host Jeff Parsons.
This is where we tackle the day-to-day talent management challenges you face, particularly
in hospice and small healthcare organizations.
And now over to our host.
Take it away, Jeff.
Hello again and welcome to Be The Flagship.
I'm your podcast host, Jeff Parsons.
We have another great episode for you today with guest speaker Heather Thompson and our
topic today, workplace culture.
But before we get started with Heather, let's take a quick break.
At Flagship Talent, we work with our clients to find and place the right talent.
What do we mean by the right talent?
We mean we find talent who will commit to your organizational goals and align with your
values and behavior expectations.
Talent who will perform to your expectations.
Talent who will stay and grow with your organization.
How are we different from our competitors?
We offer the lowest fee structure in the industry.
We offer the best talent guarantee in the industry.
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To learn more, contact Jeff Parsons by email at Jeff at FlagshipTalent.com or by phone
at 1-800-530-4189, extension 101.
Okay, we're back.
Our guest speaker today is Heather Thompson.
Heather, thank you for joining us today and could you tell us more about who you are,
what you do, and the organization you serve?
Hi Jeff, thank you for having me on.
I'm Heather Thompson and I am the Vice President of Hospice for Ultimate Plus Hospice.
I got my start honestly as a nurse's daughter.
My mom is a hospice nurse.
She's retired now, but growing up, I always saw what she did and the impact that she had
on family members and patients that she served.
I just thought it was such a beautiful thing.
That being said, my father was always in sales and I had that passion for sales and to be
in the community and selling something, whether it be a business or a product.
Years went by and I realized there was actually a position that was encompassing of the two.
I started my career about 15 years ago working for a company that had both home health and
hospice and I was in business development for them.
Loved the company, enjoyed what we did, enjoyed learning, and then they closed down the home
health division.
So, it was only a hospice organization at that point.
In my early 20s, I thought anybody that worked in hospice was completely crazy after having
dealt with it for a little while.
And so, I left and worked strictly in home health for several years.
Over the course of those years, my heart just of course pulled me back to the hospice world
and it's something that I am truly, truly passionate about and cannot imagine spending
one second doing anything other than what we're doing in hospice.
Okay.
So, I have a question for you.
So, I asked this question of other hospice professionals when I interview them.
Do you feel that hospice work is a calling, if you will?
Do you feel like you were led into that or it just sort of happened?
No, it did not just sort of happen.
I feel like it's in my blood.
My mom always says, you know, she's a retired hospice nurse and she's always said that hospice
care is the love of her life.
And after having been doing this now 15 years, I completely understand that.
And I don't think that people can be successful in hospice care or in home care of any kind
without the passion because we're serving people.
You know, we're serving families.
We're trying to help during the most painful times of someone's life.
And without having that passion for that, I just don't think that you have that full
draw to be able to give really all of yourself and all of your emotions and all of your skills
and knowledge all, you know, kind of wrapped up into one little package for a family.
So, yes, I definitely feel like it's a mission.
Got it.
So, when you say you're the VP of hospice, so is what is your primary focus?
Is it clinical operations?
Is it business development?
What is it?
So, I'm mainly involved in the business development side when it comes to the operations.
However, I do have a hand in the entire company.
So that's been very exciting.
Good.
And you're down in Texas, right?
Yes, sir.
We have an office in Mesquite, Texas.
That's our main office.
We also have an office in Fort Worth, Texas and one in Greenville, Texas.
And we're hoping within the next several months to open one in East Texas around the Maybank
or Canton area.
Gotcha.
That's exciting.
All right.
This growth, right?
Absolutely.
It's been so thrilling to see, you know, in the last two and a half years, every one of
these three current offices are brand new and we've either moved into them or you just
started an operation in that area.
We've got plans to grow further in Texas.
So it's been very, very exciting.
Gotcha.
Well, congratulations on the growth.
So Heather, could you give us more detail about your organization, please?
Perfect.
Thank you.
I will.
It's one of my favorite things to talk about.
So we're unique in the fact that we have three different divisions within our organization
in Texas and we have the home health division.
We also have a private caregiver, a PHC division.
And then we have my passion, which is hospice.
So we have all levels of care and really we are able to give the full continuum of care
to any of our patients.
We're very, very proactive when it comes to patients on home health that are declining.
We can then move them to the higher level of care within hospice or maybe a patient
on hospice that needs additional care that Medicare won't cover.
We then have the private caregiver division that we can have a caregiver come and stay
for hours at a time.
And then of course with hospice patients, those that improve, we call that extended
prognosis, we can take them off of hospice care and not leave them high and dry, but
put them back on home health care for therapy or rehab or just nursing care.
So we're an organization that has all levels of care and we all work very, very well together,
yet independently at the same time.
Gotcha.
Sounds like a great place, Heather.
Thank you.
And today's episode, we're focusing on workplace culture.
My favorite.
And you know, you struck, yeah, you struck me with some of the LinkedIn posts you put
out there, you know, recognizing your team or various teams and it's like, you know,
she understands, she gets it in terms of a workplace culture.
And, you know, that's why I reached out and said, Hey, you know, could you contribute?
Could you help?
So in your view, and again, the purpose is to interview practitioners, those who are
actually in the field or in the industry and get their views on these matters.
And in this case, again, workplace culture.
So how important is workplace culture in your organization, Heather?
Well, thank you for asking that, Jeff.
It's very important.
And you know, I am so proud of the fact that you recognized that we celebrate our team
members.
Because I'd rather be applauded for, you know, having a happy group of people and being in
a happy environment at work in what we do, which is so, so very difficult and emotionally
draining than I would be to, you know, talk about how many patients we have on census
or whatnot, because it's hand in hand.
Our company will not be successful unless our employees and our team members are happy.
And so, you know, when I came to the company, that was one of the very first things that
the owners, you know, even brought up was the company culture and how different it is.
And I really, really am proud of the way that our company organization and leadership really
instills the culture into our daily life.
So how do you think your work culture impacts your organization?
Can you give me some examples?
Oh, sure.
You know, we work with hospice care.
We work in end of life care and it's a sensitive topic.
And if our employees are miserable and they feel undervalued or they feel underappreciated,
no matter how sensitive their day to day job is in the home, they're still not going to
feel that pride and ultimate and not they will.
They'll carry some kind of burden or resentment.
And I think that that comes off in front of family members.
It comes off in front of patients.
It comes off in front of referral sources and physicians and the people that we market
too.
And so, you know, how hard is it for us to share our appreciation for what we each do
because nobody on our team could do their job without everybody else on our team doing
the job.
And so we understand how important each person's job is and it's easy to appreciate somebody
and tell them thank you or recognize something that they've done above and beyond.
So it definitely carries through the community.
And I think we've really built a great reputation for ourselves as far as our culture and our
happiness because people come to me asking for, you know, jobs or interviews quite frequently
based on the fact that the people that they've talked to within our organization are so happy.
And you just answered the next question I was going to have in terms of work culture
and how it's demonstrated outside your organization.
So I heard you say that you really feel strongly that your work culture, whether it's positive
or whether it's toxic, is demonstrated and people can see that outside your organization,
patients, patients, families, communities, that sort of thing.
Is that right?
Absolutely.
You know, in what we do, our emotions are involved in every single visit that we make.
These are hard visits.
These are hard conversations.
You know, sometimes these patients and their family members are finding out that there
is no cure and there is a shorter life expectancy than they expected.
And those are very, very hard conversations to have.
So we already have our emotions on our sleeves during the day.
Then if you were to top on being miserable because you can't work with somebody or they're
not nice to you or they're not complimentary or, you know, they're not supportive, that
just makes it 10 times worse.
And that's when we go home, we're miserable, we can't stand the thought of getting up the
next day.
And it's detrimental to what we do.
And I will say this is the very first company I've worked at in 15 years that I have felt
these types of emotions when it comes to what we're doing, how we're doing it and the utter
happiness.
I mean, complete and total happiness in my line of work and in the company that I'm with.
And it starts from the owners.
That's what they built this company from is the idea that culture is going to be at our
core.
Mm-hmm.
And which leads me, has a nice bridge to my next question, Heather.
So what do you feel are the components of workplace culture?
You know, I look at it as a puzzle box with all these pieces in it, right?
And these various pieces, when you put them all together, can either form a pretty picture,
the one that's not so attractive as it relates to workplace culture.
So how would you define the components of workplace culture?
Well, I believe it starts with respect for one another.
You know, we're with these people the majority of the day and we're balancing ideas off of
one another, getting help from one another.
And what my boss says on almost a daily basis, Michael McGibbon, he's the president of our
company.
He says everyone has a voice.
And from the moment we have our first interview with somebody to the day that they decide
to leave the company or whatnot, everyone has a voice.
And so, you know, titles don't mean a whole heck of a lot when it comes to spreading ideas,
sharing what you think might work better.
You know, everyone has a voice.
And so whether it's a good idea, a small idea, or a big idea, we're going to talk those through.
We're going to figure out what would work best for us.
And we're going to put it into action.
And so whether it's somebody that's out in the field, it's a nurse, it's one of our medical
directors, or if it's somebody that's, you know, doing intake or in the office doing
administrative work, we want to know what ideas people have.
And so I feel like that gives people a really strong sense of community within our company,
because every voice does matter.
And again, like I said earlier, each of our jobs depend on the other.
And so, you know, if somebody has an idea that we can do better in any type of situation,
let's put it into action.
That's really important.
We also have a weekly issues call, where if there's problems going on, whether it's big
or small, and it's a operational issue, we put it on paper, we all get together as a
team and a company, we go over the issues, how it happened, what the suggested resolution
is, and we assign somebody to that issue to make sure the following week when we're in
our next meeting, we're following up with the issues from the week before.
And so that gives everybody kind of ownership in what we're doing.
It's a very transparent and flat organization.
Talk to me about your field staff, Heather.
One of the other things that we started whenever we decided to really grow this hospice organization
is making sure that our field staff was taken care of and that they were happy.
Because these are the nurses and the aides that are going out to see multiple patients,
you know, a day and a week and having to chart on it, then having to deal with their own
children and their own families.
And it's a lot.
It takes its toll on people.
Because most hospice organizations right now, each nurse and each aide has 20 to 25 patients
on their caseload.
That's 20 to 25 people they're seeing a week.
And that just seemed too much to us.
And honestly, that came from when I was a kid and remembering my mom going to work and
being gone all day long, and then coming home and huffing and puffing because she was sitting
on the couch doing documentation for hours and hours and hours.
And so we decided to have a very low nurse to patient ratio and a very low aide to patient
ratio.
So we only allow our nurses and our aides to have about 12, maybe 15 patients on their
caseload if we get a big pop in in referrals, you know, throughout that one week.
That way they can go home and spend more time with their family, relax.
They're not charting all night long.
But then on the flip side of that, our patients can be seen more often.
They can have longer visits.
Their families can be educated more thoroughly as well as the facility.
If they're in a facility, their staff can be educated better.
And so I just feel like even though that's patient care, that still is surrounding our
culture of the company because we want to make everything better for not only our patients,
but also for our team members that work so hard at what they do.
You know, that's that's really interesting.
And I made some notes.
And there are a couple of things.
But before we leave this, you know, nurse patient ratio.
So what I heard really is there is a focus on work life balance.
But you took a little different sled on it than what I typically hear, because not only
does it benefit your employees.
I heard you, you know, it's really interesting comment that you feel that it also benefits
the patients as well because they get more attention and more care.
Is that right?
Absolutely.
And not only the attention from the care side of things, but their nurse can go home and
relax and be with her family and regroup and come back at 100 percent tomorrow and not,
you know, having to jump from patient to patient to patient and just be exhausted all the time
and not having spent time with the family and that kind of thing.
And so all of that was very crucial when we were coming up with a game plan for how we
were going to build this organization.
Gotcha.
The other thing I made note of is the comment you made.
You know, everyone has some voice and that I believe you mentioned that that came from
one of your owners.
And you know, it's a very powerful statement and just a few words.
And so, but talk can be cheap sometimes.
How is that demonstrated in your organization?
Everyone has a voice.
So when is it communicated?
Is it during orientation?
How was it communicated to your employees and how is it demonstrated?
It's the beginning of that communication is started in the interview process actually,
because we want people to know that they're going to be empowered in this company and
their voice will be heard.
Each one of our team members, they do something specific and they're an expert at what they
do, whether it's, you know, the intake coordinators or medical records or, you know, clinical
staff.
Everybody has an expertise.
I could not go out and do a nurse's job.
I could not sit down at an intake position and put patients in to the system and pull
records and that kind of thing.
And so we rely on their expertise to come up with ideas that might make our organization
slow better.
So several years ago, one of our team members came up with the idea of doing pet therapy
and felt like we were in a really good position to start that.
And within the next week, there was an animal, there was a pet therapist, the pet was in
training and we were on the right track to start that therapy process within the next
month.
So everything's in full force with us if it's a good idea.
If it makes sense, we're going to do it and we're going to do it as quickly as we can
because our patients will benefit from it now rather than later.
So that's always been very important to our organization and how we kind of hear everybody's
ideas and thoughts and good ideas.
Wow.
Those are great points, Heather.
Let's take a quick break and then we can wrap things up.
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Okay.
We're back with Heather Thompson, Vice President of Ultimate Home Health and Hospice.
And we're nearing the end of our discussion, Heather.
I'd like to thank you again for your willingness to contribute to the thought leadership for
hospice and other small healthcare.
Is there anything else you'd like to say regarding workplace culture?
You know, one of the things that's most important to me that I love to do on a monthly basis,
our HR director is incredible and she's very encompassing of everybody's time, their workload,
but she's also very passionate about celebrating one another.
And so once a month we get together for a party and we celebrate birthdays or anniversaries.
Here recently we've even expanded to new home ownership and children graduating, you know,
amongst our team and just celebrating everybody's personal lives and their accomplishments, big
and small.
We eat together, we have cake together, we talk, we laugh and we just stop working for
an hour.
And it's so, so valuable.
We get to know one another on a personal level.
We get to be friends, you know.
I feel like I've gained more friends working at Ultimate than I have in the last 15 years.
And so, you know, we just kind of take the badges off and we sit down and we celebrate
each other.
It sounds as though you look for an excuse to recognize other people and you look for
an excuse to celebrate.
Absolutely.
It helps us not only with the heaviness of our jobs, but it helps us just to appreciate
one another better and really learn to like one another on a personal level because that
makes everybody happier at work.
If you're working with your friends, how could you fail at that?
Gotcha.
Anything else Heather?
No sir, I truly appreciate everything that we've discussed and your time and willingness
to hear about Ultimate.
It's been fun.
It sounds like a fun place to work, you know, sounds like an enjoyable place to work.
And I really do appreciate your thoughts around workplace culture and the importance of recognition.
So keep that up and you always have an open invitation to contribute to this podcast,
Be the Flagship.
I really appreciate it Heather.
Thank you, Jeff.
Okay, so let's end with a quote today, shall we?
And this quote is very relevant to the discussion with Heather Thompson and it certainly hits
on some of the points that she made.
And the quote is by Albert Schweitzer and the quote is, success is not the key to happiness.
Happiness is the key to success.
If you love what you're doing, you will be successful.
What a great quote.
Have a great rest of your week.
Be the Flagship in your industry and we'll catch up next time.
Bye now.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Be the Flagship with Jeff Parsons.
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Until next time, take the step to become the flagship in your marketplace.