From the warehouse to a hospital storage cabinet, supply chain leaders see a direct connection between employee satisfaction and patient care.
George Godfrey, chief supply chain officer for Coral Gables-based Baptist Health South Florida, and Steven Chyung, chief supply chain and procurement executive for Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente, told Becker's how they support and empower their employees.
Satisfaction
Both leaders stressed the necessity for employee satisfaction, specifically within a supply chain environment they see as a service.
"Satisfied employees are engaged employees," Mr. Chyung said. "It's probably the most critical aspect to making sure we're delivering quality services to our members and clinicians."
"It's easy to get lost in the boxes and forget what the end result is," Mr. Godfrey said. "We are dealing with a loved one's care; it's very important that we get it right."
Engagement
Mr. Chyung said Kaiser Permanente promotes employee engagement through targeted initiatives. The company launched three programs after the pandemic to address employee emotional and physical well-being, learning and development, and reinforce the company's "speak up" culture.
One aspect of those programs are the wellness calls Kaiser Permanente uses to support employees' overall health and wellness, providing tools that support healthy eating and encourage mental health awareness.
At Baptist Health South Florida, Mr. Godfrey holds weekly huddles to keep his team connected. Different team members host and participate in the huddle each week. The huddles include a problem-solving session, where more than 100 supply chain employees watch a few colleagues work through a problem in real time. The result? Fewer problems.
"Now I have 100 people solving problems before they become problems," Mr. Godfrey said.
Improvement
Mr. Godfrey and his team utilize data and technology to create tools that allow supply chain employees to self-manage everyday tasks. These tools assist with processes including inventory management, contract and invoice administration, vendor communication and workload management.
"Employees have better satisfaction because they're managing a process," Mr. Godfrey said. "Letting the computer manage the transactional, weedy-type stuff [instead]."
Kaiser Permanente utilizes biannual anonymous surveys to take the "pulse" of employee satisfaction and identify opportunities for improvement.
"We look at things like engagement, team dynamics and culture of health. It's something we're continuously measuring," Mr. Chyung said. "As a result of the programs that we've launched, we can see our engagement scores continue to track very positively. Employees feel like they belong, that they're adding value."
Leadership
Within all the initiatives and huddles, both Mr. Chyung and Mr. Godfrey said leadership holds a key to continued employee satisfaction.
Mr. Chyung noted how leadership participation in wellness initiatives is crucial to employee engagement and leads to a sense of inclusion.
"It's leading by example," he said. "When we talk about mental health, people have to see that their leadership is demonstrating, in a very tangible way, the things that we say are important."
Mr. Godfrey expressed how important it is for communication between a leader and their team to not only be frequent, but consistent and meaningful. Trust is equally important, he added, for employees to feel like their boss is "ready to go" if they need help.
"Leadership has to be committed to the cause," he said. "Having employees know they can go to leadership … escalate an issue and it will be addressed. Those elements are critical to having a very successful operation."