S2E2: How Do We Do It?

The Life Science Effect

Host Steve Vinson continues exploring BPM Associates' core philosophy, following up on Simon Sinek’s idea of starting with "why." In Episode 1, Steve shared why BPM does what it does—now, he turns to "how" they do it. Before diving into the business side, Steve shares a humorous and mostly true story about his recovery from outpatient surgery, which highlights the value of a great work environment and how it can translate into better outcomes for patients, employees, and even clients. Steve emphasizes that BPM’s approach centers on strong leadership, effective project management, and living out their core values. These principles, coupled with rigorous internal processes, help BPM drive successful, lasting change for pharma and medical device companies. Tune in for insights on how BPM nurtures its people, ensures client satisfaction, and continually strives for improvement—ultimately creating a workplace where change is embraced and employees are empowered to excel.

MUSIC: Acid Jazz-Kevin MacLeod used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

I'm Steve Vinson, and this is Season 2, Episode 2. If you watched the Simon Sinek TED Talk, or if you listened to Episode 1 of Season 2, you know that Sinek asks us to begin our communications with why, then how, then what. In Episode 1, I talked about why BPM does what it does. Today, I'll talk about how we actually do it. Then in future episodes, we'll get into what we actually do, but first, a story about that time I was recovering from outpatient surgery. Now it involves anesthesia, and I didn't get permission from the nurse to tell this story, so I'm changing some of the details to protect their privacy and maybe my fragile ego, but the gist of the story aligns with many of the conversations I've had with several folks at that same hospital. I'd say this story is mostly true, true enough, we'll say. You'll get the idea. I was walking down the hall of the hospital in my very fashionable hospital gown, in my grippy socks, and the nurse was there, of course, to make sure I didn't fall over. If I did fall over, it wouldn't hit my head. It was all part of the anesthesia recovery process, of course. I asked them how they liked working there. I have a habit of doing that at this hospital system, and you'll see why later. But they answered me, and they said they love it. They love working there. They said the administration listens to the employees, and they implement things that'll make nurse lives better and also make for better patient outcomes. They said they wish they'd started there sooner. See, they used to work at another hospital that's farther away that I've been to. I don't particularly care for it, the times I've had to use it. They lived near the hospital where I was, and they would drive past this hospital every day on their way to work for many years. They would think, you know, my commute could be a lot shorter if I'd just work at this hospital since I live closer, but we all know how that kind of goes. You get an inertia, and it takes hold, and it's hard to leave a job. As long as you feel like you're making a fair wage and things aren't too bad, folks tend to stay, even if something else might be better. It might be better. It might be worse or even the same, and if it's no better or no worse, then you went to all that trouble and the stress of changing jobs, maybe leaving work friends, not knowing where the coffee pot is. You might be right back to a job that's no better than the job you left, so we tend to stay with the devil we know because changing jobs is hard. A number of years ago, this particular nurse finally reached the tipping point at the other hospital. The specific reason or the reasons they left aren't that important. We've all been there. There's a proverbial straw, a bad day. The dam finally bursts, whatever that metaphor is, and they finally decided to leave the old job and take a job at this hospital, and now their only regret is they should have done it sooner. It's not about whether the pay or the benefits are better. I didn't ask about that. The pay and benefits might be better, but it's really the working environment is better, and the staff gets what they need to do their jobs well, and the administration truly listens at this hospital. If something will make the patient experience better, they listen and they take action. If a procedure can be changed to improve patient outcomes, they listen and they take action. If something can be changed to help the nurses have a better working environment, they listen and they make that change. I told this particular nurse that their story sounded the same as the other stories I've heard when I've talked with folks at this hospital system. I have a habit of asking them how they like working there, even when I'm not under anesthesia wearing a very flattering hospital gown. Now, I happen to love this hospital system. I really don't want to have to use it much, but when I do need it, this is where I try to go. If I need a doctor, if I need a procedure done, if I need anything, this is where I start. Thankfully, they're covered by my insurance. I feel safer there. I feel more comfortable there. Their systems are patient-friendly. It's easy to schedule there. The staff seems to like their job. The billing always seems to work out okay. I've had disputes, but they haven't been contentious. It's just like we've got to figure this out, and we fix it, and we move on. I just feel like I'm going to have better outcomes, like the procedure is going to go better, the treatment is going to go better. If the administration listens and acts on their staff's suggestions and thoughts and feelings, well, their staff is going to listen to me, and the doctors and their nurses are going to listen to me, which confirms my belief that if you focus on people first and work to create a great environment, the customer will notice, and the customer will have a better experience. What does any of that have to do with how BPM does business? That's what you came here for, right? Let's get back to Cynic's advice first and try it out with BPM's why, how, and what. As you know, our why is we believe in the power of extraordinary people working together in a great environment to accomplish important, lasting change. How do we do that? We leverage strong leadership, effective project management, and a commitment to our core values. What we do is we lead teams to deliver complex technical projects at pharma and medical device companies. Typically, we lead teams that have client experts, contract resources, other BPM experts. The projects range from R&D to manufacturing, asset delivery, to quality improvement and business process excellence. Let's try that out in Cynic's style. When he was talking about Apple, if you watch the videos, it's really compelling when he talks about Apple. Everything we do, we believe in the power of extraordinary people working together in a great environment to accomplish important, lasting change. We do this by leveraging strong leadership, effective project management, and a commitment to our core values. We happen to lead complex technical projects at pharma and medical device companies. Want to buy some? Maybe I have a future as a TED talker. We'll see. Important, lasting change. Change, as we know, is essential for business. The right people working together is essential for change to be successful and lasting. If it's important, you want it to be successful and lasting, right? We're talking about a world where change isn't scary. It's a world where change is welcome and we look forward to change, where people cannot wait to wake up and get to work on solving the most important challenges of our time. And people do change the right way, a way that leads to job satisfaction and lasting impact. At BPM, we believe a strong, skilled leader makes all the difference to completing projects on time at the right cost. A strong, skilled project manager leading a good team is going to leverage the principles of project management and organizational change management to ensure the project's done on time and at the right cost. And team members will feel like they gained something in the process. In short, they will accomplish important, lasting change. And even if BPM is not serving as the project manager, maybe our resource is an expert on the team or some other kind of individual contributor, that's all right. We still believe in leveraging project management practices and we'll support whoever the project manager is, whether it's a client or even another contract company. Because to be a great leader, the project manager needs great team members. And we know how to do that. A good leader knows how to be a good follower as well. All of that having been said, how do we do our work? We start with our core values of people first, relationships matter, service to a greater cause, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. We leverage those values and also our core traits of desire and curiosity. We express, model, reinforce all these values and traits in everything we do. We add in a set of key skills that we can round out what it means, what the definition of extraordinary people is, and what the definition of great environment is. And applying all these, whether we're recruiting for the next extraordinary person or developing our systems in the training curriculum or working with our folks to develop and grow, these values, traits, and skills are what guide us as we're doing those activities. So we're always building and strengthening our processes and tools to ensure people have what they need to be in their happy place and to do their best work. We started the journey a few years ago by focusing first on our people, the people of BPM. Because, again, by taking great care of our employees, we believe they will take great care of our customers. So we listened and we took action. We worked hundreds of hours over the past few years to improve our internal processes and expand what we can offer people. We partnered with a professional employment organization so we could offer big company benefits at our small growing firm. That's not just health insurance, by the way. It's also, well, health and dental. But it's also an employee assistance program that is normally only offered at bigger companies in which you can call and get any kind of support you want when it comes to that. And what you can call and get any kind of support you want when it comes to mental health, physical health, whatever. And it's free to employees. There's also discount programs. There's tons of training. So it's as if we were a hundreds-of-person company offering these benefits. We regularly conduct salary surveys because we want to make sure our compensation is fair and equitable. BPM employees take advantage of our PTO program, which is take as much PTO as you need. In fact, we encourage folks to take PTO because they're such hard workers. We sometimes have to remind folks, hey, you haven't taken any PTO in a while. Let's get somebody to cover your project so you can take a week or so off. If they need to take a day off to take care of something in their family or they have to run a particular errand or go vote, they can take that time. And it's not tracked. It's not limited. We have involved everyone in our DEIB strategy development and training. Every employee at BPM is part of a task force that works on a particular element of our program, of our strategy. And these task forces work on assessing and developing our practices using global benchmarks that we evaluate in conjunction with our DEIB consultant. And we have monthly recurring meetings that we call culture development meetings where everyone comes together. We focus solely on ways to build and improve our people-first culture. It's anything but a typical staff meeting. We can inform folks of what's going on with an email or whatever. I love the mug, the coffee mug that says, I just survived a meeting that could have been an email. We really take that to heart. I mean, if we're just trying to convey some information, we'll send an email. If you have questions about that email and you want to discuss it in a group setting, especially if it's a way to move our culture forward, let's do that in a culture development meeting. Or anybody at any time can access leadership and have a heart-to-heart conversation. One-on-one or in small groups. We apply the same rigor to how we serve our clients. So now that we had spent several years working on our internal processes, we turned our focus on, we continue working and building our internal processes, but we also, for the last couple of years, have been focusing on our client delivery practices. So our project methodology and delivery process is comprehensive, and it balances the needs of a diverse client base, the needs of specific projects, and a standard approach to project management and change management. Our resource management process and tools allow us to quickly identify any resource capacity issues, any problems that might be coming up, and identify those potential problems and opportunities well before we get to them. We've streamlined our recruiting process and we have partnered with a staffing firm, actually, so that we can bring well-qualified resources to clients two or three months faster than we were able to do it before. This allows us to respond quickly and to bring the right resources on board at the right time for our clients. The faster we can find someone when we've identified a need at the client, the quicker we can find a well-qualified resource. Because we're small, we don't have a bench at the moment, so we knew we needed to compress the time it took to find a well-qualified resource to bring them on board. Speaking of onboarding, we have worked on that process quite a bit as well to make sure that one thing that clients tell us all the time is to bring on new folks because they don't have the time to train them or to bring them on board or to tell them what it's like around here to bring them on to the client culture. We have built that process and really built that up and strengthened it so that we are the ones, our program directors are the ones doing that training. We have enough experience at our clients that we could say, you don't need to do that part. Some things have to be done by the client employee, but the things that don't, showing them where the coffee machine is, telling them what the etiquette is on when you have to make the next pot, but more importantly, what is it like around here? What's it like doing work here? What are the different processes and procedures at this client? We take care of that so the client doesn't have to. Our program directors provide oversight and experience and expertise to make sure resources are successful. We strive to identify any issues well before the client even notices. We want to ensure project success even if we didn't bring on the right resource. We don't always get it right. Stop. Nobody gets it right every single time and we recognize that. We do our best to get it right the first time, but if we don't, we try to notice that before the client does so that we can work on making a change, help that person be extraordinary someplace else maybe. Even if we don't notice it and the client notices it, we don't like that situation, but we make sure we quickly jump in to make sure the project is successful and we make a personnel change if we need to. Our account managers are able to help the program directors and the client sponsors always be monitoring for what's important and how are we doing? Are we meeting your needs? Do you have any other needs that we can take care of? In all, we think focusing on strong leadership, effective project management, and a commitment to those core values are not just embracing change, we're driving it. Together we can create a world where change is welcomed and leads to lasting positive impact. From a story about me in my flattering hospital gown talking with the nurse as we walked down the hallway together to truly building an organization that values people and the belief that if we value our folks, our folks will take care of the client. Make sure you like, subscribe, comment. Let's engage together, reach out. I'm at stephen.benson at bpm-associates.com Go to bpm-associates.com or thelifescienceeffect.com to see more and hope to see you next time.