Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
Kevin Kruse: Hello, everyone. I'm Kevin Kruse. Welcome back to Culture Code. Our guest today is the Chief People Officer at Alto Pharmacy, Shannon Wilson. Shannon, welcome! And where are you joining us from today?
Shannon Wilson: Hi! Thanks for having me today, Kevin. I'm actually joining you from the Pacific Northwest. I'm just outside Seattle, Washington.
Kruse: Beautiful area. Haven't been out there in ages but have visited a few times as a tourist, so a return is long overdue.
Wilson: Yeah, absolutely gorgeous, especially this time of year. It's hard to beat the Pacific Northwest when it comes to summers.
Kruse: You have things like wonderful seafood and fish markets, and I'm in beautiful Philadelphia, where we have wonderful cheesesteaks.
For those who might not be familiar with [your company], how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Wilson: Absolutely. So we are a digital pharmacy committed to fulfilling medicine's true purpose, which is to improve the quality of life for everyone who needs it. And you know, Kevin, for most of us, if we've ever been to a pharmacy, there's a good chance we've had a bad experience at a pharmacy, whether a long wait or an unexpectedly high price, and that puts the burden on the patient. Oftentimes, they give up, and they don't follow their doctors' orders. We've had some success changing that. We make it easy for doctors to send their patients' prescriptions to us. We automatically search for coupons and discounts to help our patients get their medicine at the lowest possible price, and then we deliver it right to their door, based on when they scheduled in our app. We've got about 1,100 workers across the country, from pharmacists working directly with patients and providers, a full logistics team that coordinates the delivery process from start to finish, and a whole host of other people helping us bring this to life.
Kruse: Did you say 1,100?
Wilson: 1,100.
Kruse: And you already referenced, great cultures often have nicknames for each other; "Altoids" is the one you use. I love that. The longtime listeners will know that's something I always listen for. Are they going to reveal the inner name, you know, for the great colleagues they have at Alto? So, tell me again, I'm sorry if you mentioned it. A lot of people are talking again about the back-to-work issue. So, just so we have the context for our conversation, are you fully remote? Are you hybrid? Are you remote-first? How have you settled on this issue?
Wilson: We've got a bit of a mixture. Obviously, we have teams that are in the buildings or out on the roads, fulfilling those prescriptions and driving directly to the patients' homes. We have some teams that are in the office either full time or hybrid, and those are roles that really benefit from working together or at least coming together on occasion. Then we have other roles that are fully remote. So the approach we're taking, Kevin, is really to think about the role, the benefit, the nature of it, and then do what's right for that particular role. And, quite frankly, the person that's in it, making sure that we're setting them up for success.
Kruse: Now, company culture can sometimes be hard to describe, and each culture tends to be a bit different.
How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Wilson: Yeah, I think that's actually pretty straightforward. This mission is noble, you know, medicine needs some disruption. So, I would say we are patient-obsessed, purpose-driven, and values-based.
Kruse: Hmm. Say those three again for me; you see, I'm taking notes.
Wilson: Great, patient-obsessed, purpose-driven, and values-based.
Kruse: And so that doesn't happen by accident, Shannon; it just doesn't happen by itself. What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Wilson: This is where our values lead the way, Kevin. I think most of us have probably worked for companies where the values, or the vision, are sort of a poster on the wall. I won't name names, but I've even worked somewhere where it was like a badge I had to wear on my clothing every day. But values at their best don't only protect and propel your culture, but they get embedded into it. You start speaking "Altoid" in our case. And you see those values guiding decisions, providing a framework for the actions that you take. They gain alignment. Even when I have someone reach out to me on LinkedIn about roles, the first thing I say is, thanks for your interest. Here's our values. You need to start there and decide if this is a place you want to work. So, like I said, they lead our way, and we try to embed them into everything that we do, so that you have that sort of consistency. And you know, when you face a decision, do I go this way or that way? You can turn towards those values, and they help you make your decision. In that way, they democratize decision-making and, like I said, really help sustain the culture for you.
Kruse: And you bring up a good point that fostering a great culture starts in the hiring process, right? A strong culture will reject just as many, or more than it will attract. 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?
Wilson: Yeah, you're exactly right. I started out my own career as an individual contributor and then a frontline leader. And I know every day that I do this job, I'm one day away from that. But I try to stay grounded to that, and both myself and my peers take steps to stay connected. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about some of our feedback loops that keep the leadership connected to the frontline experience, not only the frontline leaders but the employees. Because we want those frontline leaders to have the support that they need, including training. But to your point, we are a startup. So, you've got finite resources.
Whether you're a startup or not, from my perspective, nothing beats those on-the-job, learn-by-doing opportunities to cultivate both acumen and judgment, especially if you have a great leader, especially if they're giving you the care and support that you need. It can just accelerate you down your learning curve. And there is a time and place for training; it's harder in a smaller environment because they're a bit of a luxury, very expensive, and there's a limited ROI on that, especially if you don't have things like nudges and digital interventions to reinforce that classroom training. We do some of that, but you really need those follow-up interventions to land it and to make sure that it's exiting the training room and going into the day-to-day.
So, we do some of that, and we do something we call 'teaching at scale,' which is looking at our operational cadence and our processes to say, what do we do on what day, and who is part of that process because there are so many opportunities to learn if you do that. I think about one of the ones, this is something that I first learned when I was leading a tech team, which is the Cause of Error or the COEs. Tech folks will say that when something goes sideways, they'll have this whole review that goes five ways into what happened, and then they come back once they've got that fully documented, and they bring in their entire engineering team and take them through everything that happened.
They talk through what they think went wrong and how they could have avoided it, and how they're going to avoid it in the future. That doesn't have to just be limited to tech; you can use that anywhere. In fact, we just used it in operations not too long ago when we had one of the facilities, where we have a pharmacy, have broader facility damage. Someone came and did some damage; they were trying to get into not our building, but one of the other buildings, and they damaged the power and the A/C. We had a whole process to recover that building, take care of the patients that might be impacted because they had prescriptions that day, and make sure that we maintain the integrity of the medications that we keep there. This was in a Southern state, super hot, and you've got meds that need to stay at certain climates.
That event, Kevin, was just filled with learnings and lessons. When we got done with that event, our supply chain officer took time to pull the other team, including those frontline leaders that may face a similar situation in the future, and he went through that entire Cause of Error. Some companies might call it an after-action or post-mortem, but those are teaching-at-scale moments. You don't have to have a classroom; you can take real-life moments and let others learn and give feedback like, what did you think about this, why did you do that?
That's where the real learning happens, especially for the frontline because they're faced with so many different things. And especially if you're in an environment where you bias for speed, it's hard to keep up with the content. Sometimes the business can evolve faster than you can create and deploy content. So, those moments are gold. And I think that a lot of folks tend to tighten that audience up and say, oh boy, we had a tough day, let's bring a small group of people together to talk through it, and all that does is slow you down and it deprives a whole group of leaders from learning from that moment. And it creates single points of failure. So, we don't do that; we look for those opportunities to teach at scale and invite them to be part of it.
Kruse: Yeah, that's a great program, and you hit on some other things. How do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)
Wilson: Yeah, we have implemented a couple of feedback loops that I assume you'll expect, and a couple that maybe you won't, so I'll go through the ones you probably expect first. The first one is, we just relaunched a survey mechanism. Most companies have something like this. I grew up in a time when you used to deploy those once a year and have a big action plan. And, thank goodness, that's antiquated now, and we don't do it anymore. But you know, we found a partner that let us work with them to develop questions, both ones that they had sort of science behind, and benchmarks for, as well as some that were sort of very specific to our culture. So, we are able to get the right questions. They have the ability to let us target the right group, and then the frequency we choose. I mentioned that the annual survey is a thing of the past. There are some questions that probably don't change. Perceptions don't move very frequently, so you know, the thing I think of are things like total rewards. I'm probably not going to be changing my total rewards rapidly and so asking it more than once a year is probably detrimental because people are going to think, didn't you already ask this? Didn't I already answer it, and nothing's changed. So why are you doing that? But then there are other things you want to stay close to like safety. And you want to make sure that if sentiment changes that, you take note of that. I remember from work I did years ago around safety; one of the leading indicators that you could have a future safety issue is people's perceptions of the cleanliness of the workplace. And you know, we hypothesize that that's because there's sort of a relaxing of standards. You're not maybe taking as much pride in the workplace. But that was a powerful insight because the minute you start to see the cleanliness question happen, you've got to intervene quickly because you don't want that to materialize into injuries and such. So, there are certain questions you want to ask a lot and others you could probably ask less often. And then I think there are also stages of the employee journey; new employees probably need tailored questions; recently promoted leaders benefit from tailored questions, but I'm really excited that we've launched that. And here in about a month, we'll have the first wave, and then we'll start the regular cadence around it. And that more targeted approach. But the first one's just deploying now.
The other things that we've got are things like all-hands meetings. I think everybody does that and you cover business results. You try to educate, do things to build trust, and of course, you always have Q&A. And our CEO, Alicia, facilitates the Q&A. She fields a lot of those questions too. The other things we do would be roundtables or site visits. In fact, we just had the supply chain officer and a member of my team. We're out at one of our facilities, talking to the drivers, and got some great feedback on what's going well, and what isn't. I spent some time at the pharmacy, not too far from my home here and got some feedback from Stacey. We got a brilliant leader there, a frontline leader. That's taking care of that team and serving our patients, and I spent some time with Stacey. She gave me feedback about how our annual review cycle and our merit cycles weren't really serving her needs because she has hourly employees, and they have different expectations. And you know what her feedback led to a change in. And I think we're going to keep making some changes next year based on that. Well, I know we're going to make some changes next year, based on that.
Kruse: You cover so many important points here, including, you know, this last one, that everyone should have some sort of survey tool in place. That's great for quantitative data, but it doesn't replace the qualitative, the face-to-face conversations, getting out into the field, getting out into site locations where a lot of this can bubble up. And you're right. I've been doing employee engagement work long before they even had the term employee experience. It was just engagement, and back then, you know, early years it was, and I'm talking 20-30 years ago. A company was doing a good job if they did the survey once a year; it's like half the companies did, half didn't. Now it's considered antiquated. You know, your word about once a year. If you're a big company that's not changing, not growing, maybe you can get away with it. But almost all great companies now are moving to some sort of a pulse survey format, and I often will say, you know, the faster your company's growing, the more frequently you need to survey because you've got more new hires and more things changing and inevitably breaking along the way that need to be addressed. And I really like what you said is, you know, not all items need to be asked on every survey, so you could do shorter ones focused on certain issues certain times a year, and then maybe the annual cadence is the right thing for total rewards, or something of that nature. So, I really like that approach.
Wilson: What's great is the partners out there now recognize that, and they're changing their offerings so that you can do those things.
Kruse: Yes, the space has changed a lot, and it's for the better. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?
Wilson: Yes, there are a couple that come to mind, and they're actually feedback loops that maybe you haven't thought of. The first one we call it the Voice of the Employee or the VOTE. Employees can submit a question, a concern, feedback, even recognition, and it goes out onto a board. A member of the leadership, it could be a frontline leader all the way up to a member of the C-suite, responds to it. Everyone gets to see not only their question but the answer and who answered. When we do that, it's visible to our entire company, so all employees can read it because if you have a question, I probably have the same one. Why not share them with everybody rather than just making it between the person asking the question and answering it. And what's great is it creates this conduit between the senior leadership and the frontline experience because you've got to keep that sort of visceral connection to what's happening right there at the frontline.
Another initiative, Kevin, is something we call the Alto Spotlight. This came to be when I was talking to Alicia. She shared a story from her time at General Motors. She was visiting one of her plants, and the leaders there were telling her about a brilliant idea. They had a pain point in the plant, they implemented it, and things were going incredibly well. Of course, she wanted to take that and share it with her other plants. She was digging way into the details of it, and the more questions she asked, the more she realized she didn't have the right people in the room to answer it. So she finally asked, "Who came up with this? Who identified the problem, and who came up with the idea?" It was a frontline leader. They brought her into the room to talk to Alicia and give her all the details. It was such a powerful moment for Alicia in her career because it gave her so much more color than she could have gotten by having that layer of separation from the person who actually did the work. She said, "Shannon, what can you do to replicate that?" We worked together and came up with the Spotlight. We invite team members to a live session with our senior leadership team, our VPs and higher. We give them a template because we know that could be nerve-wracking. They can take us through and tell us a little bit about themselves, their Alto journey, their superpowers, and things they are working on. We invite them to give us feedback about what's going well, what's just okay, and what needs work. They get to ask us questions. This program may be the most organic way I've seen to build sponsorship yet. It's just so powerful because in some cases, people share things with you that you're fascinated by. On my team, I have a team Jeopardy champion, a national spelling bee champion, people who have lived in five or more countries, and published authors. You find people that you have things in common with. In fact, just last week, we were doing the Spotlight, and one of our team members on the engineering group shared that she is now an empty nester. Alicia just took her youngest to university, and it was great to see the two of them bond. It's both exciting and a little heartbreaking. You're creating connections in this moment by letting people tell their stories and letting people say, "Me too. Yeah, I've been there. I felt that."
Kruse: Yeah, I love this spotlight program. I'm sure there are many innovative ideas and problems that are solved, but putting the spotlight back on the area you did is just another form of connection and skipping levels along the way. We know, of course, that care is a top driver of engagement, you know. Do the people at work care about me? Well, you can't care about someone you don't know. And now, all of a sudden, there's a whole lot more people that know that, you know, she's newly an empty nester and just went through this experience of dropping a kid off at college. So, just these ways to bring more connection and to spark that care is delightful. How often do you run that program?
Wilson: We do it every month, and so we invite a few folks in each month, and, you know, get to hear their stories. And you're exactly right. It's connecting people and finding those shared moments that's really powerful. You know what I love is the team has been vulnerable, sharing the things they're working on. They've been brave, giving us feedback about what they don't like, and they've asked some really incredibly probing questions.
There was one that came up, and she was a frontline leader, and she was sharing that she was struggling a little bit because she was tempted to be a pair of hands for her team. And I think we've all been through that in our career. If you've been leading long enough, right? You've had that temptation of either, well, I just jump in and do it. I can do it quicker because I don't have to slow down to teach anybody, or, and I think this is probably the more insidious of the two is if I jump in. I'm helping my team by doing some of the work. I'm helping them. And I say insidious because it's well-intentioned but over time, it's you know, so much burden sits on you rather than really empowering your team to do it and help you shift up to that level as a leader. It can really slow you and your team down, and I remember when the person shared it, I immediately thought back to a time when I was leading a building; it was in South Carolina, 7,000 employees out, you know. It's probably the hardest job I've ever had in my entire career. And it was because I was going through that huge learning curve.
And one of the things that helped me break that cycle, especially the, well, I want to help them was when I would get ready to do something, I would say, am I the only person that can or should do this? And if I do this, who am I depriving of an opportunity to learn? And that broke the cycle for me. Now I'm not helping them. I'm harming them because I'm depriving them of the opportunity to learn, and far be it from me to do that. So I shared that with her, and she reached out afterward and said, "Wow, that was so powerful because you're exactly right. I felt like I was helping them, and in some ways, I am. But I'm also hurting them a little bit because I'm not taking the time to teach them and let them, you know, learn and grow."
Kruse: So, incredible example! Incredible example! And I'm sure there's a lot of us listening to this story who kind of twinge, realizing our own micromanaging natures, which isn't always for bad reasons. Not that we don't trust people. It's not that, you know, we are picking apart their work. Sometimes it's because we think we're being helpful, or, you know, if we settle down, we realize, okay, like, it's how I feel valuable, you know, or I want to be a superhero myself. I feel good. I saved the day. And we're actually harming the development of the team members when we're jumping in. And that way, it's a good room.
Wilson: You're exactly right. And I'm gonna date myself here. But you don't want to be Mighty Mouse, and you know, here I come to save the day. Like, that's not who you want to be but it's so tempting to do that, and you can often rationalize really well-intended efforts there. But that's why I had to find a phrase that helped me break that cycle and sort of shamed me into doing the right thing, for lack of a better word.
One thing I'd say about this program, Kevin, is I've shared this with some of my peers over the years, and people will say, "You know, oh, great. Well, what do you think about nominations? Or do you restrict it just to your top performers?" And I would caution against that because things like ratings, we know that it's really hard to keep bias out of ratings. And in these cases, you want to build connections to your entire population, and you want to hear all voices, and so, resist the urge to do that. And if you're going to be targeted at all, think about more in the line of sort of populations.
So, for example, a few months ago, I had a handful of new leaders join, and I wanted them to learn our history and how we do things quickly. So, I invited the talent spotlights for a couple of months. They were long-tenured team members. And so I wanted them to hear not only all the expertise that those people had, I wanted them to connect with them because they were probably gonna be like the smartest person in the room for them that they could lean on and ask questions for, and I wanted them to stay connected. As these leaders were coming in and implementing things, or if they had ideas, they needed to keep an ear to the ground on the experience of the tenured leader.
So, if you're going to be targeted at all, think about it more that way, then restricting it to some sort of nomination process. You certainly can, but I think you've got a little risk that you could embed some bias in, and you'll miss some important voices.
Kruse: What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Wilson: I am a self-professed introvert bookworm. So, this is hard to choose my favorite, but I would share one that shifted my thinking, and then, I think, reflects the brilliant minds I get to work with, and that is "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard Feynman. So, I don't know if you know him, but he's a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. One of the things he's most remembered for—there's a lot of them—is this idea of the Freshman Seminar. And what he says is, if you're going to really understand something deeply, then you have to be able to convey it in plain language to a smart novice, and that's why the freshman seminar is for a freshman in university. If you can't teach a freshman seminar on this, you don't really understand what you're talking about. And that transformed the way I thought, and it was a really powerful, you know, it was a fun read, but it introduced me to this character that I just had to dig in and learn more about. And I've read a lot about him, but he was highly intelligent, endlessly curious, and seemingly fearless, and that just fascinated me, and I found it entertaining. So, for my team, I would share that with them, because I would use those same adjectives to describe them. They're intelligent, curious, and fearless, and I think they might have a good time reading it.
Kruse: I love that. Actually, my last book, which just came out about a month ago, is about goal setting, sort of the do's and don'ts, or the pros and cons. And I write about Feynman because he was incredibly accomplished, and yet he was not one to necessarily set a specific goal. He would just chase his curiosity. What was he curious about? And he would go chase that, and great things would happen. So, for all the people that we could say wrote themselves a million-dollar check when they were poor, and then they got their million dollars, there are many more who got their million dollars just by chasing what they were curious about, what they were passionate about. I love that book and example. Here's another one. What's something you know now that you wish you knew when you first became a Chief People Officer? Write yourself the letter to the younger version of yourself; what would you say? Hey, here's a warning.
Wilson: I would hand myself a beginner's guide to startups. I've been part of large consumer organizations that spin up new business lines, and we used to say, you know, "Oh, we're in a startup environment." But you're not really in a startup environment when your investor is your boss. It's not until you're out there, existentially making a go of it. And I tell you, I spend more days asking myself, "Is this normal?" In fact, I don't think I've asked that question as much since I was a teenager. It's just all the time when you're out there in a startup world. There are just odd moments that leave you scratching your head, and you have to decide which way to go. But there's also a lot of great things about a startup, and if I wrote a book, I'd include things like, if you choose to work in a startup, it's special because you get to wear multiple hats. There are so many on-the-job learning opportunities; opportunity abounds, and the influence and autonomy are markedly different than in an established or bureaucratic environment.
Kruse: That's great. So, think about the second and last question. We're getting into Q4 of '23. You're probably starting to think about your 2024 plan or maybe have a draft. You know, what are some of the priorities or focus areas for you and your team?
Wilson: Yeah, so Alto is at a really exciting point in our history, in the fact that we've got a line of sight to being fully profitable, which is a big milestone for our startup. There are a lot of these moments where we're either looking at the way we've done things or the way we do things to say, "Is that a sustainable business model?" And if not, we're refining that. Or we're saying, "Is that scalable?" meaning, if we hit that milestone and suddenly accelerations happen, and we suddenly scale up, are we ready for that, or are systems going to break? So, both through the end of the year and early next year, I expect to be spending a lot of time on foundational things and making sure that we go back and inspect them to say, "Are they ready for the pressure of scale?"
Kruse: I love it. What excites you the most about your company right now?
Wilson: Well, I'm excited that we have several key partnerships that we've been working for. In fact, there's a couple that we just recently finalized with our partners. We spend a lot of our time in the fertility space. A lot of our patients are struggling with fertility, and they come to us as they're working with their doctors on that. So, Carrot and Future Families are two that are helping people through that time. We've got other partnerships like Progeny in that space. And there are others that we think we're going to be able to announce in the coming weeks and months. This is really exciting because, as I mentioned, we've got a lot of people that are fully dedicated and believe in this. Landing those agreements as partnerships is going to introduce just a host of new patients to Alto and see what's possible in the pharmacy space.
Kruse: Shannon Wilson, Chief People Officer at Alto, congratulations on all the great work, and thanks for spending time with us, sharing some of your wisdom today.
Wilson: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Kevin. I've really enjoyed it.