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Welcome to The Culture Code podcast. On this podcast, you’ll learn how to grow, shape, and sustain a high-performance culture with the CEO of LEADx, Kevin Kruse. From designing and delivering highly effective leadership development programs, to measuring and improving the employee experience, you will understand what it takes to cultivate a thriving company culture. Through interviews with Chief People Officers, deep dives into key topics, and recordings of our invite-only community sessions, we bring you cutting-edge, data-backed insights from the most desirable companies to work for in the world.
Kruse: Hello, everyone! I'm Kevin Kruse. Welcome to Culture Code. Our guest today is the chief people officer of Omada Health, Nancy Vitale. Nancy, welcome! And where are you coming from today?
Vitale: Thanks, Kevin. I hail from the Bay Area.
Kruse: I'm happy now. Normally, I'm from the beautiful city of Philadelphia, but I'm sitting in San Jose, California, so we might be sort of neighbors for this call.
Vitale: Exactly.
Kruse: Let's start with something very basic. For those who might not be familiar with Omada Health, how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Vitale: Absolutely. We have about 720 employees located across the entire US. We are a virtual healthcare provider. We specialize in treating chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and musculoskeletal conditions. Our care approach is really grounded in behavioral science, and it's enabled by both a human-led care team as well as a technology platform that supports our members' daily needs.
Kruse: So, tell us a little bit more about that. Let's even assume we have listeners from outside the United States who aren't familiar with our healthcare system. So, you're providing care, but it's remote. It's all virtual, is that correct?
Vitale: That's right. Our business model is virtual, and our organizational model is virtual as well.
Kruse: And so, who would be the player in this case? What organizations are you working with to deliver the care?
Vitale: Absolutely. We have multiple channels. Payers can include health insurance companies that many in the US are familiar with. It can also include broader well-being platforms, and employers make up a good chunk of who is actually buying our products in support of their employees' health.
Kruse: That's great. Nancy, we're here, of course, to talk about the culture at Omada Health. How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Vitale: Absolutely. In a few words and keeping it simple, I'd say we are mission-driven, values-focused, and remote-first.
Kruse: I might poke on that remote first in a little bit because that's certainly a hot topic in the human capital community these days. What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Vitale: Yeah, absolutely. There's a number of different things we do. We've been around for over 12 years. Last year we actually went through an exercise to reexamine and refresh our company values. I would describe our values as really the foundation of our culture. We have been focused on integrating and embedding those values and the related behaviors into our daily processes and practices over the last 18 months or so. I'll give you a couple of examples, Kevin. One is our performance review discussions and our performance review process. There is an explicit discussion of values and related behavior that are lived strengths and also values that might need attention in order for an employee to maximize their impact. An employee will self assess a value that's a strength and a value that might need a little bit of work from their perspective. A manager will also discuss with that employee their perspective on strengths and opportunities, on values and behaviors. Then, from a recruiting perspective, we incorporate different questions into our structured interview process through behavior-based questions to assess candidates against our core values and those related behaviors.
Kruse: So, Nancy, just give us a couple of examples. What's one or two of the values that you have?
Vitale: Yeah, starting with trust is our first and foremost value. Seek context is another key value. Act boldly, deliver results, succeed together. And remember why we're here. That "remember why we're here" component circles back to mission driven. It's really the foundation of why Omada exists.
Kruse: And you said that this actually was, I find this fascinating. So just back to the point of great culture isn't accidental. So you had a process, you said, about 18 months ago, it started to sort of refine or redefine the values and roll them out. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that process looked like?
Vitale: Yeah, absolutely. It actually started before I joined Almada. I joined in January of 2022, and at the end of 2021, our Co-Founders actually led the process and realized, after a decade of Omada's existence, it was time to take a look given how we had grown, and how we had evolved into being more intentional about those values. And so they led the process, and it was kind of fun because, as I was going through the interview process and then through the negotiation process, they started to bring me into the fold a bit more, just in terms of input and thoughts. And then, when I joined the organization, we were in the process of expanding the reach to all of our employees, we call our employees "ours", to provide their perspective and input as we were refreshing those values and ideas on how we could integrate those. So we rolled those out in Q1 of last year, and have really been focused on integrating those more explicitly, intentionally, and deliberately into our day-to-day and holding ourselves accountable to those values day-to-day.
Kruse: It's great. 70% of engagement is correlated to the manager, and front-line managers touch more employees than any other leadership group. What are some of the ways you develop your front-line managers?
Vitale: Absolutely. Well, let me start by just reiterating why this is so important. One of the things that we track for Omada as a whole is manager net promoter score, and we measure that by the answer to the question, "How likely are you to recommend your manager to a colleague or someone they should work for in the future?" We do this because we know that frontline managers are such a critical group in their daily interactions with Omodans. And this helps us monitor the experiences that folks are having with their managers over time and gives us insight in terms of adjustments that we might need to make, or where there are skill and capability gaps that would help boost that manager net promoter score even further. So we do have a team of two dedicated individuals to learning and development and organizational effectiveness. And what we've been doing in the last year, actually, we just launched a new program for managers and senior managers called Management Development Experience or MDE for short. In this program, we leverage an external platform that provides an array of courses and content that we can readily curate. And that content is aimed at developing certain targeted skills and capabilities of our leaders. We supplement these courses through a series of what we call learning cafes, where we bring our managers together to share insights, discuss their learnings, and to enable pull-through actions in a more intimate, peer-to-peer, smaller group setting. We're seeing great feedback from the participants on this so far. But it's early days. We literally just launched it this year. So we'll do an assessment at year-end, and then see how we can take that further and make improvements going forward.
Kruse: When you talk about the learning cafes, and I know you're virtual first, are these 1-hour Zoom sessions, 2-hour Zoom sessions? Do they happen once a month, once a quarter? Tell me a little bit more about them.
Vitale: Yeah, they can range from 45 minutes to 90 minutes. They're facilitated by our head of learning and development, and they will focus on a particular topic. So if we were focused on, say, financial management in a given month, the managers will then come together in smaller groups of up to maybe 20-25 max and just have a discussion. Then we'll send people into breakout rooms on Zoom to have, you know, 4 or 5 folks talking more explicitly about their learnings and insights, and then come back and share out. So it's really the value of the learning cafes that solidifies those insights and can be applied to how folks operate day-to-day, you know. Content is easily curated. It's really about how do we pull that through in terms of behavior change and knowledge application for the folks that are going to make a meaningful difference day-to-day.
Kruse: I love that focus on, you know, how do you defeat the knowing-doing gap? Without that attention on the pull-through strategies, so much of the L&D work can be lost. And for our listeners, I want to go back and just highlight something that's so important. Nancy, you talked about the net promoter score for your manager. I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with the idea of an ENPS, an Employee NPS, which is a good, simple question for gauging engagement for a company. This idea is taking the same concept but you're not evaluating the company; you're evaluating your direct manager. LEADx did a study five years ago, and there's an 80% correlation between this one-question NPS on your manager and how you feel about the whole company. It's almost the same. I think it's so underutilized. It's basically a simple manager effectiveness question that reveals so much about the health of the team, which leaders are great, who can be mentors for others, and which leaders maybe need a little extra assistance. How often do you gather that data, Nancy?
Vitale: Yeah, we do it twice a year during our engagement and employee experience surveys. I have to give full credit to Bruce Dudley, our head of learning and development and organizational effectiveness. As we were discussing our talent and people strategy and the key metrics that really matter for us to monitor on a periodic basis, he was the one who really pushed us to see it's not just ENPS, but MNPS, and looking at both of those in concert because of what you just described, Kevin. I'm so grateful that Bruce influenced us to take a broader view.
Kruse: Sounds like Bruce and I should have a beer or coffee at some point because we would really geek out on this stuff. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?
Vitale: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely want to underscore the company values work that we've been focused on over the last 18 months. I'm really proud because it was led by our co-founders, not the People and Culture or HR team. We certainly were key supporters of it, key shepherds, key facilitators. But it was really a broad organizational effort where everybody's voice could be incorporated into that. So I definitely highlight that. And I'd attach it to maybe a particular result that I'm proud of this year, which is our certification as a Great Place to Work. I think that's a testament to how our Omodans feel about Omada's culture and their employee experience overall.
Kruse: What's especially impressive about that achievement, congratulations, is that it comes from an outside organization getting that data from your internal employees. What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Vitale: One of my recent favorites is "Irresistible" by Josh Bersin. Josh is a thought leader and world-renowned HR industry analyst. His book is based on his decades of organizational research and frames the key things that the world's most enduring, employee-focused organizations do differently. Omada is a young company; we've only been around for over 20 years. But our ambition is to be a long-enduring company. I think for all of us, particularly our leaders, some of these concepts align with our philosophy, things like "coach, not boss" as we think about the role of the manager, or "culture, not rules." You might get a kick out of that one, Kevin, given your book "Great Leaders Have No Rules." I had to put a plug in for that one.
Kruse: You'll get extra social media support on this interview just because you worked in a plug for my book. What skill or behavior do you wish your employees did more of?
Vitale: Absolutely. I became a chief people officer back in my days when I was at Genentech. I think, you know, it's a reminder of a couple of different things. One is having a clear vision and strategy for talent and people that's integrated into your company's business strategy that doesn't sit off the side of the desk. Ideally, co-create that with your team and with the leaders. Another one is to prioritize and focus your efforts for impact. I think I, in my early days, got caught up in wanting to do it all and achieve it all. And that's a recipe for disaster. The good chief people officers are ones that, you know, make sure they're clear about the impact of what their priorities and focus are, and have the courage to say no but proactively manage those expectations with their team and their leaders. So those are a couple of things I would say.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Wow! Great advice. I often will say, you know, if you're a know-it-all, you make everyone else miserable. If you're an achieve-it-all, you make yourself miserable. You're just never satisfied. So if you think about all the great success that Omada has had and is having, and the challenges ahead in this crazy world we're all living in, what's maybe a focus area for you and your team in the year ahead?
Vitale: Absolutely. I mentioned, you know, one of the aspects of our culture is remote first. I'm not saying we are perfect at it. I think there's a lot of room for opportunity, but it's an asset for us. As a lot of other companies are calling people to return to the office, we're doubling down on our remote first, but it's not remote only. One of the things I'm excited about in the year ahead is, you know, with a couple of years now of experience under our belt, doing reflections. In fact, we just sent out a pulse survey to our team this week to seek their input and feedback on what's working well and what's not. Do you have suggestions on how we can improve being remote first? We're taking an approach of really analyzing how we do work and collaborate asynchronously, and how we do work and collaborate synchronously. One of the things that we're also looking at for 2024 is, how do we be more intentional about in-person gatherings? As I said, we're remote first, we're not remote only. And even though those in-person gatherings are infrequent and represent maybe a small percent of the time that people come together, they can have an outsized impact on our ability to collaborate, be effective, and really support our culture. So I'm excited about just being much more intentional and setting the wheels in motion to be even better at remote first and leveraging the ongoing strengths that we've seen in the last couple of years as well.
Kruse: It's so great that you're doubling down and getting data. What excites you the most about your company right now?
Vitale: Yeah, one of the things I'm excited about is we have some customer deals in the works that are going to significantly expand our reach. And that for us translates into more members that we can support on our mission to improve health. I'm also excited about the continuous improvements we're making in our platform and what that can mean for customers who are looking for more effective ways, or as opposed to point solutions, to come to a platform solution to support the health of their employees. So, you know, hopefully, over the coming months, you'll see some of those exciting announcements, and we can go back and talk more about that too.
Kruse: That sounds great, Nancy. Thanks for the great work in the field of healthcare that your company is doing. Thanks for spending some very precious time with us today and sharing your words of wisdom. We appreciate it.
Vitale: Thank you, Kevin.