Feb 23, 2021
Health Catalyst Response
5yThank you for sharing this feedback about your experience since joining Health Catalyst less than a year ago. And what a challenging year this past year has been, at so many levels! I also want to share that I agree with the concept that if something seems too good to be true, it is most often actually too good to be true. I feel regret that your actual experience relative to your expectation has been negative, and feel there are some important learnings for me and for other leaders to internalize and then work to change, in order to become better. I have asked a number of other leaders, particularly in the professional services organization, to read your review and consider what learnings we might take from your experience, and others' similar experiences.
One critical learning, which I'll mention to all team members later today in our all-team-member meeting, is this concept that Health Catalyst isn't too good to be true, and we all need to understand this. I always want us to strive to be the best we possibly can be, but this will also always be within very real constraints tied to financial expectations and sustainability. This is a key learning that I'm taking from your feedback, that we need to be respectfully transparent in communicating with team members what to expect at Health Catalyst, from before a team member joins, through their tenure at the company. And this includes, very importantly, clearly communicating what is expected and required within each organization, including within the professional services organization.
For example, in the professional services organization, we have studied and benchmarked many other professional services organizations, and our goal has been to make the team member experience as positive and sustainable as possible within the context of running a financially-sustainable professional services business. And, as an example, we worked over an extended period of time to develop a model where a team member, on average, could work approximately 45 hours per week, take three weeks of vacation, in addition to 3 1/2 weeks of company-paid holidays, and still meet our billable hours and utilization thresholds to be financially sustainable. This 45-hour expectation is meaningfully lower than many other professional services organizations' expectations. But it is still challenging and demanding and requires significant effort and focus and time management skill to sustain. We could have and should have been respectfully transparent in sharing this expectation so that every team member understands what they are signing up for when they join our professional services organization. We can also offer short-term flexibility to a team member who is facing difficulty, absolutely. But longer-term, it becomes challenging to be breakeven as a business unit without those threshold levels being in place. As a result, working in professional services is likely not the best fit for everyone, and we have many other positions and other functions at Health Catalyst which might offer more schedule flexibility and less pressure. There are often other trades associated with making these changes, like for example the compensation for certain roles which are higher-pressure and require more hours are often higher-paid roles as well. But these are important tradeoffs for us to be transparent about, and to support team members in identifying the right position given their individual circumstances.
I also acknowledge a number of recent situations where a teammate has decided to step back from a position due to exhaustion and/or other difficulties associated with a particular job. In the situations where I have been directly involved in helping a teammate navigate through these difficult circumstances and then make the decision to make a change, I have also internalized some important learnings from these experiences, related to a learning I shared previously. It is that we need to do a better job of describing the positives and the negatives of various roles, including promotion opportunities. Sometimes we talk about promotions only in terms of the positives -- base salary increase, more responsibility, new stretching career development experiences, more total compensation, etc. But there are also very real negatives -- often more hours, more pressure, more stress, more difficulty associated with these new responsibilities and increased scope. As such, we also will be communicating that we are supportive of team members who decide that they would like to stay in their current position long-term, and we will continue to work to pay above-market for that position, across every position, function and level at Health Catalyst.
Thank you again for sharing your feedback regarding your experiences during your first year at Health Catalyst. Your feedback has prompted some insights that we'll work to incorporate, including by discussing some of these themes during today's All Team Member meeting. Best, Dan