Becoming America's most trusted health care company

Hear from David Joyner, President and CEO, and Heidi Capozzi, EVP and Chief People Officer, on how we all play a part in bringing our new ambition, purpose and values to life.

• Our ambition is to be America's most trusted health care company. "Every single interaction creates that one opportunity to build trust across the enterprise," David says.

 

• We define our purpose as, “to simplify health care one person, one family and one community at a time.” David says, “It's really important now that we come together... and make sure that we're pointing everybody in the direction that we're heading.”

 

• David and Heidi hosted roundtables with colleagues from across the enterprise as they defined our four values: We care. We innovate with purpose. We are accountable. We prioritize safety and quality.  “They go both outward towards our customers and patients and they go inwards” towards fellow colleagues, Heidi explains.

Creators and Guests

Host

Matt McGuire

A lifelong writer, editor and content strategist. Senior Manager, Enterprise Communications, CVS Health

What is Big Questions Answered?

Big Questions Answered helps us understand important CVS Health initiatives by taking a closer look at new products, powerful innovations and the big changes the company is making to achieve its strategic imperatives and build a world of health around every consumer. The company's senior leaders answer big questions from host Matt McGuire.

Matt McGuire
CVS Health is introducing its new ambition, purpose and values. We are recommitting to who we want to be and how we’ll get there.

This launch aligns our culture, strategy, operations and the experiences we deliver for our customers and colleagues around a clear and inspiring North Star.

It brings together our 300,000 colleagues under one simple, unifying framework. With it, we can set the standard for a simpler health care experience and lead the way in delivering it.

On this episode of Big Questions Answered, CVS Health President and CEO David Joyner and Chief People Officer Heidi Capozzi share our new ambition, purpose and values and why they’re important. We’ll learn why our ambition is to be America’s most trusted health care company, how we have the unique ability to deliver on our new purpose to simplify health care and how colleagues helped create our new purpose and values, which will guide our decisions and actions.

Welcome to Big Questions Answered, a podcast that helps us understand the important initiatives at CVS Health. I’m Matt McGuire from the Enterprise Communications team. I’ll be your host as we take a closer look at new products, powerful innovations and the big changes we’re making to achieve our strategic imperatives and build a world of health around every consumer. Thanks for joining me today as we get our big questions answered.

I’m here with David Joyner, the President and CEO of CVS Health, and Heidi Capozzi, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at CVS Health.

David leads more than 300,000 colleagues who are committed to making health care simpler, lowering costs and improving accessibility. And Heidi is responsible for all aspects of our human resources, labor relations, compensation and benefits, and corporate social responsibility efforts.

David and Heidi, thanks for joining me today.

Heidi Capozzi
Thanks, Matt. It's nice to be here.

David Joyner
Yeah. Thank you, Matt.

Matt McGuire
So, today, we’re talking about our new ambition, purpose and values. Let’s start with our ambition, which is to become America’s most trusted health care company. David, what does that mean to you, and why is it important?

David Joyner
Yeah. So, thanks. Thanks, Matt. Let me, let me start with just trust itself and because I think it's an important topic of the day. So, we have an enormous responsibility as one of the largest health care companies in this country — serving 185 million people — and trust is an essential, critical part of the work that we do. And we have this enormous responsibility, especially given the fact that trust is so difficult to gain but so easy to lose, that when you think about our responsibility as an organization, we need to become the most trusted health care company because that will allow us to be able to achieve the broader goals in which we're being we're being paid to do, which is helping people save time, save money, and become their advocate in health care.

I'm really excited about the fact this has become our really ambitious agenda and I think it's a really important point in time in which to pursue this and I think it becomes an opportunity for us to collectively get the 300,000 colleagues excited and passionate about who we want to be as a company, and it really boils down to a transaction and one interaction at a time.

I was in a CVS pharmacy yesterday and I watched the engagement of our colleagues serving customers at the pharmacy and it's those interactions that really matter and that's what builds that trust. It's same thing in terms of serving both an Aetna and or a Caremark customer. These are all things, again, it boils down to every single interaction creates, that one opportunity to continue to build trust across the enterprise.

Matt McGuire
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And those points you made about helping people save time and money and being their advocate are really core to building trust. So, Heidi, in addition to our new ambition, we're also introducing a new purpose and new values.
What was the process for developing these?

Heidi Capozzi
Yeah, I do think the process around this is really important, Matt. It's not like we went into a closet and created this and walked out and said here it is. Certainly, there was some of David's thinking, some of the leadership team thinking around this. But I think really importantly, we got the voice of our colleagues. We got our colleagues engaged.

And, so, David and I hosted numerous roundtables with colleagues from across this enterprise. We talked to clinicians, we talked to pharmacists, we talked to folks in the call center, we talked to the folks in the front of the store. I have to say, I mean, the experience was really inspiring. And we got their feedback. We wanted to understand what would resonate with them and make them feel engaged. Where we really went deep with them was around the values. And I think it was very inspiring for me to hear how important those things were to our colleagues. You know, they basically said, look, values are the things that help you make decisions. They're your North Star in many ways. And they also set out how we deal with one another, how we behave in an organization. I was also struck by the coming together around some really key things. Care, for example, came out in spades across all of these groups. That's really unique to a company like CVS Health. It doesn't show up in the value statements of a lot of organizations. And so there were things that I think were very authentic to us, matter to people and that they felt really would serve our organization well as we go forward.

So again, this is going to be a way for us going forward to really set out a vision and set out what we stand for that unites over 300,000 colleagues across this organization.

Matt McGuire
Yeah, and I like that approach. I think the best way to get colleague buy in is to engage them in the process.

Matt McGuire
David, could you tell us more about our new purpose and values?

David Joyner
Yeah, maybe it's just to follow on to what Heidi was saying. We spent time with focus groups trying to understand what was important, what resonated across the enterprise, across all the various job functions as Heidi mentioned. And, I think the one thing that I really am excited about is, in addition to being the most trusted health care company, it's how do we get there? And we all collectively agree that health care is just simply too complex. It's virtually impossible to navigate. Sometimes it's self-inflicted. We create our own challenges because of what it takes to actually serve our customers effectively. So, this simplification — making health care simple both at the at the consumer or at the family or even how we're thinking differently in the communities — I think is really important for us to say is it really can be that simple in terms of trying to make things easier. So, the focus groups led us to what I would call four themes that we took away. And it's and the most important thing is this is consistent across job classes, business units. It’s what I believe becomes that unifying event.

So as Heidi mentioned, We Care, which is the first value. It's all about the culture and if we go back to why asking people why they're here, a lot of folks are very mission driven. And they're very focused on their on the purpose and their mission of caring for individuals either in a health care setting or caring for our customers that actually have contracted for us to manage their health care costs. So, I think it's meaningful to our customers and ultimately it becomes that meaningful advocacy that I mentioned earlier.

The second is Innovate With Purpose. One of our nurses said it's really important to have the courage to do things outside the norm. And, so, I want people to think if it's not working, if it's too complex, how do we simplify the experience for our own colleagues and ultimately how do we simplify it so that it becomes easier for customers to do business with us? And, so, it takes an environment and a set of values that makes it OK for you to want to change the status quo. Because the only way we're going to continue to move forward and be part of this changing the health care in this country.

The next is Being Accountable. So, as we are accountable, one of the front store colleagues talked about calling another store if an item is out of stock. So, it's not going to a customer saying it's out of stock, it's actually taking that next step to go look for how to solve the problem at hand. So, it's the important part of being accountable to the customers in which we're serving, looking and exhausting the various ways in which we could meet that need. And it cuts across again all different types of jobs and customer settings. So, this accountability is very real because I think that then ultimately all ties together with the with the trust element.

And then lastly, the theme that came out really loud and clear was Prioritizing Safety and Quality. So, whether you're a pharmacist or a nurse or in the care delivery side of this, there's a really important aspect to making sure what we do day in and day out is both safe and has the highest quality, because it's something you simply can't sacrifice being in the health care business.

So, I'm hoping that, you know, that we simplify even how we want to talk about our values helps us begin to simplify the things that are important to the organization. And I know the ELT, the executive leadership team, is excited about, you know, landing on a new set of values and a new purpose and mission. And I'm hoping it's equally as excited to the broader organization.

Matt McGuire
Yeah, absolutely. I got to imagine it will be, especially since, you know, a lot of these things are already happening in everyday interactions and we're just kind of putting a name on them, so…

Heidi Capozzi
Hey, Matt, I just maybe will follow on. I mean, I think you know it's probably inherent in what David just said. But I think one of the neat things about these values — and we talked about this with all the colleagues — is they go both outward towards our customers and patients and they go inwards. So, we need to care for our customers and we need to care for each other. We need to be accountable externally, and we need to be accountable internally. And I think that's important to remember as we as we go about implementing these and living them every day.

Matt McGuire
Yeah, I agree 100%. And to follow up on everything we’ve talked about so far, why did we choose to research, create and implement a new ambition, purpose and values? And why now?

Heidi Capozzi
Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say, really, it's really more about the future, Matt. I mean, I think what we've done is really try to put a stake in the ground about who we want to be. And it's something that we are uniquely capable of being and doing because we are CVS Health and we have all these incredible assets and incredible people. Not only that, but we can be something in a space that really matters in people's lives across this country. So, to be able to unite around, you know, we want to be the most trusted health care company in America. We believe we can uniquely simplify health care for everyone in every family, in every neighborhood across the country. And we can do that by living our values. I think that's awesome. And by the way, it's not something that we alone created. We engaged our people. And so that tells me, you know, our people are motivated and passionate behind this as well.

So, again, you know, when you've got a huge population, over 300,000 people are part of this, to be very clear about where we're going and how we're going to get there, I think is not only uniting and aligns us in ways that make us stronger, but it can be really motivating and exciting, too, as a member of this team. So, that's how we got here.

David Joyner
Yeah, and I would just maybe, just to follow on to that because Heidi and I talked a lot about when is the right time to do this. And it's not good for any organization to swap out your purpose and values and stuff every year. It's just not productive. It makes people confused. But if you look at what's happened over the last year and what has happened over the last several years, we've made a lot of acquisitions. We continue to round out the organization in terms of being a large, diversified health care company.

And that's why, I think, it's really important now that we come together, post some of the acquisition of new businesses, and then make sure that we're pointing everybody in the direction that we're heading. And I think it's a one unification and it's a one rallying cry for the broader company to come together and talk about who we want to be and why.

And, so, to Heidi's point, we didn't do this in a vacuum. And the most important part of doing this is making sure that we talked across both the colleagues and the different businesses. And this is all really resonating based off the feedback that we're getting. So, I'm really excited about where we are and where we've landed as a company.

Matt McGuire
Nice. So, David and Heidi, to wrap things up, could you tell me, what do you expect to see from colleagues and leaders that will tell you we’re succeeding?

David Joyner
The measure is, are we continue to be successful. So, do we or does our brand stand out in this marketplace that stands for that for the things that that we've just talked about. And if we really are successful, I think our customers are going to see a very different experience. They're going to, hopefully, see an experience that takes the friction out of the process, that feels like this organization helps wants to help them save time, money and get healthy and each one of our businesses becomes best in class.

So, we'll have the opportunity for each one of the operating business units to perform and compete and do this and serving their customers in a unique way. But we also have this overarching theme of what this enterprise is capable of. And, so, if we're doing this collectively across the business then truly we will become one of the easiest companies to do business with. And I think that will continue to elevate both the brand and hopefully get people excited about coming to work every day to serve our customers. And ultimately that should lead to this perpetual success that I would expect that we're going to we're going to be able to deliver.

So a lot of this is the be, do and say, you know, those are all things that if we're living and breathing it, then it's always very consistent and it helps become, you know, that trusted health care company because of the people in which we hire and the people in which are serving, serving our customers.

Heidi Capozzi
I don't think there's anything to add, Matt. That captures it perfectly.

David Joyner
So, this marks 39 years with the collective company. And you do a lot of reflection on different iterations of this organization and the people that have made us successful in the past. And it just gives me great pride in terms of what we've been able to accomplish over the last year, what we've been able to accomplish over my 39 years with the with the company and I've never been more bullish and more excited about where we're going.

There is an enormous amount of pressure and complexities in the market. There are cost pressures, there's just complexity in terms of navigating the health care system. So, I think by making it simple — simple for our colleagues, simple for our customers — is such a critical point in time for us to really begin to separate ourselves from the pack. So, I think we have the size and scale, and I think we've got the talent and the leadership. And now it's just that that whole growling around the values and the and the purpose, I think, is really a is a, like I said, it's been a very exciting time for this company. And I really appreciate Heidi being along for this journey, helping me help organize ourselves around the values and the purpose as well. She's been a great, great team member in this. So I'll close with that, Matt, and let you, I'll let you wrap up.

Matt McGuire
I’ll do my best. David and Heidi, thank you very much for stopping by today. It has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. I’m very excited about this path forward.

Heidi Capozzi
Thank you, Matt.

Matt McGuire
And a big thanks to you for tuning in to this episode. Until next time, I'm Matt McGuire. I look forward to joining you again to get more big questions answered.