Name: The Marketing Mindset That Helped Nebraska Medicine Cut Turnover and Hire Faster
Uploaded: 2025-05-01T18:30:04.010Z
Duration: 1 h 30 min
Description: The Marketing Mindset That Helped Nebraska Medicine Cut Turnover and Hire Faster

Transcript for "The Marketing Mindset That Helped Nebraska Medicine Cut Turnover and Hire Faster": Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm Sabra Sciolaro, chief people officer at Firstup, and I am excited to kick off our conversation today. As we begin, please go ahead and put your name and where you're based in our chat just so we can all get to know each other. Today's session is all about how Nebraska Medicine reimagined its employee experience, starting with listening then reinventing their talent brand. First, we're gonna introduce our speakers, then I'm gonna hand it over to Julia Bersin who will lead the conversation with our panelists. And finally, we'll save a few minutes at the end for questions. Please do submit your questions anytime, though. Use the q and a panel, and we'll get to as many as we can during the final segment. Okay. Let's meet our speakers from the Nebraska Medicine team. I'll ask each of you to introduce yourselves, and share your role at Nebraska Medicine. And why don't we start with Katie? Hi. Thank you. Yes. I'm Katie Beach. Really happy to be here today. I've been with Nebraska Medicine for ten years, and my current position is VP of people operations. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Frank, do you mind? Sure. Hey, everybody. Good morning. Good afternoon. I am Frank Lococo. I'm the vice president of marketing and communications, for Nebraska Medicine. I've been in this role, coming up on nine years. Wonderful. Okay. And, Tom? Hey, everyone. Paul Baltes. I'm the director of communications for Nebraska Medicine, and I've been with the organization for seventeen years. So I guess that that makes me the old man of the group. But glad to be here this morning, this afternoon. Wonderful. Thank you all so much, and welcome. I'm also happy to introduce Julia Bersin, the associate director of research at the The Josh Bersin Company. Julia, do you wanna share a little bit about your background, and then you can go ahead and kick us off. Thank you, Deborah, and welcome, everyone. I'm really excited for the conversation today. So, I'm the associate director of research for the Washington company. We're a research and factory and professional development company for HR, and we get to study all sorts of topics across the workforce, employee experience, AI, and people practices. And just a little more about me, I came from a background actually in marketing. So I think this is a wonderful blending of worlds, and, have the pleasure of interviewing the Nebraska Medicine folks today, and hearing their story, which I think, you will all be really inspired by. And, yeah, we'll we'll dive into all sorts of things around kind of what they've done on their marketing strategy, brand, and employee experience. So, without further ado, let's dive in. So I've got a number of questions, and this will be kind of like a fireside. So kinda jump in at every anytime. And then for folks in the audience, feel free to drop questions that you have for us for the Nebraska medicine team, in the q and a. So I want to start from the beginning. So I think I'm gonna start with this first question for Katie. So so when we initially connected, you know, you mentioned that Nebraska Medicine faced, significant turnover challenges post pandemic, and we know this was a pretty common state for health care organizations. It it was a rough rough period of time. And so I'd love for you to kind of paint a picture of what that looks like, for your organization and and also how it was impacting patient care. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Like you said, like most like many health care systems, we were facing a lot of workforce challenges, not only during COVID, but as we recovered as an organization from COVID. Our first year turnover peaked at fifty percent. Our voluntary turnover was incredibly high. All of that resulted in a high reliance on contract labor. What that introduces, as many of us know, is just impact on your team, impact on your culture, impact on, you know, all of us committed to deliver and continuing to to look to deliver quality patient care. So much of that is about the strong team and the consistency of that team. And our reality was because of the high first year turnover, because of the high overall turnover, we were losing more, having more colleagues walk out the door than we had walking in. And as an organization, had the wherewithal to stop, pause, and say, this is not working. Something's off. This is not financially sustainable and quickly came together to say our top priorities in organization is workforce, is recruitment and retention. So that's a little bit about about what we had going on from a workforce perspective as we, in our reality as we recovered from COVID. Yeah. No. It it was a tough time. And as you mentioned, I think, you know, high turnover has an impact both externally, but also internally on the other folks at the organization and just kind of morale. And, you know, one of the things that we we also connected on that was part of this this picture, around, was really around expectations from employees. So, the the pandemic kind of fundamentally shifted expectations. And And what we've seen across our research is that that goes beyond health care, but I know specifically in health care, I'd love to hear a little more about what you were seeing in terms of what employees were expecting, from Nebraska Medicine, and how, you know, maybe those things had shifted from before the pandemic. Right. You know, and as you think about the turnover and rebuilding of many of our core teams that we were doing, our reality as we had just as many new people as we did people who had been with Nebraska Medicine for a long time. And that's a complex and important reality to to acknowledge. Right? And different expectations from different from different tenures and different colleagues. And so the thing the fundamental shift that we experienced were everything from, their expectations of the overall employee experience no matter what tenure you were, how they were thinking about benefits and compensation and their expectations shifted, career development. And in a lot of ways, they had new and different expectations for the role they needed their leader to play in their career, in their day to day. And we found our leaders doing just as much technical and career development as they did light as life coaching and helping colleagues acclimate to the organization and become comfortable with their career. And those so those are some of the shifts that we saw and quickly recognized, gosh, things have changed. And the smartest thing we can do is acknowledge that and put ourselves in a position to understand where they're coming from and respond. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, that growing expectation and need for development from the organization is something that we've seen kind of across the board too. And it sounds like that was really shifting the role of leaders at Nebraska Medicine as well. So I know, you know, you were able to kind of unpack these things. And one of the the big initiatives, and this is where we'll kind of start to get into how, you know, marketing and HR came together on this project, but, was really to listen deeply to employees and really get an a better idea of what exactly is it, that's maybe driving some of this turnover, and how can we really support our employees better? So, maybe, Katie, you can start us off and then I'd love to hear, from Frank and Paul if you'd like on, this big employee listening project that you undertook. Could you walk us through kind of how you kick that off and and what kinds of sort of, channels and modes for listening, that that you utilized? Absolutely. This was one of the most critical steps that we took to set us up for success and to be responsive to our colleagues. Yes. We have the data. We could see the data to see turnover was high. There was a lot going on. We had turnover trends. We had a lot of data to work through. However, it was critical that we not operate under any assumptions about what's important to our colleagues, what they need from us today, how that had shifted. And so pausing and spending a significant amount of time listening to our colleagues and asking those questions was really what set us up for success. And there were many ways that we we spent months actually engaging and listening sessions with our call with colleagues across the organization. We have about 10,000 employees, and we were able to hear from half of them in this in this, process. It was everything from focus groups with key stakeholders. We did surveys, social listening. We talked to students that were considering a career at Nebraska Medicine, had precepted here, clinical, non clinical, all to really understand by tenure, by position, by department, by years, you know, experience what's important, what are they saying about Nebraska Medicine as an employer, where where do we want to be as an employer and then the work really began to bridge the gap between the reality of who they said we are and who we aspire to be as as an employer. And, we learned a lot. I like to say we asked and they were honest with us about, what we're doing well and where our opportunities are. And so much of our immediate strategies that we executed following the this research, this social listening, was based on what we heard, and it was around you gotta fix your onboarding and orientation. Leadership needs work. We know we can come to Nebraska Medicine and grow, but you've made it really hard to navigate career pathing and the many ways that that we can grow with Nebraska Medicine. And then we were dealing with some perceptions and misunderstandings about our total rewards package. Package. So those are just several examples that through this listening session and choosing not to operate on assumptions that we were ultimately able to be really responsive and successful in how we, navigated the next steps on Nebraska Medicine's employment brand. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's phenomenal the level of breadth and depth that you, were able to to use for your listening strategy. I mean, you touched on the many different channels, but also, not just listening to current employees, but prospective employees and, kind of perceptions that are out there because, as we know, that's a huge piece of the employment brand. And Frank, I'm going to dig into that a bit with you as well. But you also mentioned Katie, and you told this to me initially too, is that, you know, you you use that data to to inform your path and the things that you change with your employee experience. And I think that's so important to kind of start with what what are people actually asking for. So so, Frank, you know, what maybe moving a little bit, backwards in terms of, you know, the the before state of like, you described the situation as kind of the perfect storm to revisit the employment brand. And I'm sure, you know, some of the things that you, learned alongside Katie's team from listening, definitely emphasize that. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, you know, what really made this the right time to really put a focus on employment brand? Sure. So this was something that as we were emergent emerging from the pandemic, you know, we have this opportunity, the organization's top priorities, like Katie said, was was retaining our current staff, recruiting. One of our board members posed the question about, you know, what is our employment brand, and it really set off this cascade where, you know, our HR people team, you know, heard brand, and they immediately came to me and and said, hey. You know, we're getting this branding question. You know, is this an opportunity to work together? And absolutely. Like, you know, probably my top responsibility as head of marketing communications is protecting, nurturing, growing the brand. And so this is something I've I've got a lot of history with, and I absolutely jumped on the opportunity to collaborate on this. And it was a true collaboration from the get go, because we could bring our, respective subject matter expertise to the table. You know, Katie and her team have a long deep understanding of why people come here, why people choose to leave, and we have best practices when it comes to brand and development and evolution. And the partnership, we've come to realize is unique. It's not always as collaborative, within certain organizations. But we we set aside ego and we placed complete trust in each other that if we could navigate this together, we were gonna be much better off for it as an organization, as, as respective teams, and as a brand. And so we absolutely jumped into this together, and we were we were side by side throughout the process. Yeah. Yeah. And I I love that, and I think, you know, it's it's maybe one of my favorite parts about your story is this really close strong collaboration. And what you mentioned about, you know, we understand we have these complimentary skill sets. We have these complimentary sets of data and knowledge that we can bring to this project. And how do we make sure that we, tap into both teams' expertise, to really, really make this impactful and and create a really compelling employment brand. So, I think it I think it's really, really, inspiring, honestly. So, you know, I wanna get into a little bit of the the nitty gritty around, your marketing strategy here and kind of the tactics that you used, Frank. So, you know, typically, organizations focus most of their marketing initiatives externally. And, you know, one of the things that, you were able to do is really apply some of those maybe more targeted, more sophisticated marketing principles, that are often used externally, internally. And so I'd love to hear kind of your your thought process around, treating employees the the way that you might treat customers from a marketing standpoint, and what kind of, yeah, what really helped you, apply that more, complexity or sophistication to to your strategy there? Well and Paul Baltes heard heard me say this probably a thousand times. I mean, we create perceptions that drive choice in marketing and communications, and this is no different. Right? You've got colleagues who have choices on where they want to practice, where they want to develop their careers. You have candidates who have a number of options out there of where they want to come out of school and and and begin their their health care, journey. And so, you know, a lot of the basic principles apply here, and we want to create perceptions that drive choice. And that was one of the the most interesting I I suppose not surprising, but in this in some ways, it was. The number one reason why people chose to come to us wasn't necessarily pay or benefits. It was the brand, and that's what resonated. And people know what our brand stands for, and they wanted to be a part of it. And so, you know, applying marketing principles to, whether they're candidates or whether they're our our colleagues, those are audiences. And so meeting them where they're at and having the authenticity. We could not put and sustain long term lipstick on a pig and say, oh, look at this brand new TV commercial and look at all this this these great assets. But it was really a testament of using the research to make fundamental operational changes, partnering with the enterprise, partnering with the people team to make true changes. And then we get the easy job of, or easy job of packaging it all up. And when we put out a request of, hey, here's what we're doing. We would love to have colleagues, physicians involved. We put it out on a Monday. And before the end of the week, we had more than 200 colleagues raise their hands. And we wanted to make sure we had authenticity in any of the materials that we were doing internally or externally. This is a a CNA. This is a nurse. This is a physician. This is an IT person. Like, we had from across the spectrum, people standing up saying, I wanna be a part of it. And the initial thrust was, I think, we had more than 70 people we were able to include in various internal and external, executions. And so, you know, each of our colleagues are brand advocates. Right? And if we really kind of strike at their heart, they can become brand activators. They're the ones who are executing on the brand day in and day out. So so going back to collaborations and strategic partnerships, that's in a a really important relationship. Yeah. Yeah. I mean and you mentioned kind of this both external and internal marketing from a brand perspective. Right? Getting candidates in, but also that priority around retention and the fact that every employee is an extension of your brand and that, sort of reach is so much broader, than what, you know, you can just do as a marketing team or as an HR team. And I know we're talking about your new brand. So, you know, Frank, if if you wouldn't mind kind of telling the group a little bit more about about your new brand launch, Together Extraordinary because I think, that'll help bring this this story to life a bit. And I know it's something that that you are, very passionate about. Sure. So as we were developing different concepts based on, you know, what Katie had said, the focus groups and the additional surveying. We had these concepts. We reanimated some of the focus groups because we wanna get validation that we were on the right track. We took the feedback, and we ended up, coming together with where we landed. From a consumer marketing perspective, we have a a a long term tagline out there of serious medicine, extraordinary care. That was not going to change. That is for consumers, for our clinical program marketing, and where we landed, for our employment brand, the the the line is together extraordinary. And we received and so there's relationship and familiarity there. But we received some feedback at our chief level. You know, why isn't it, you know, extraordinary together? And it's like, no. No. No. Like, people were very, very specific. Our colleagues were specific in the feedback. Why is there a period and what look. This is the feedback of our colleagues. And what they said was we first need to nail the together part, whether it's colleague to colleague, colleague and or nurse and physician, colleague and manager, whatever the relationship is, we have to get the together part nailed before we can become extraordinary. So there was very much intentionality from the feedback of our colleagues, and that's what we debuted, together extraordinary. And it's it's resonated hugely. You know, we retail rolls up to me and, you know, we have a company store and we, you know, we launched, you know, a whole line of merchandise that we have repeatedly sold out of because colleagues so embraced it, they want to wear it. And they want to wear it not just within our walls, but, like, out and about at the grocery store, at their kids' soccer game, at a church event. I I mean, it's it's out there and it's it's because it's their voice, and they they have ownership in it. I I love that. I think I mean, that's that's how you know. You know? If they're wearing the brand out there that it really resonates with them and that, you know, goes back to that listening piece so that, you know, they feel like they're a part of that. And, yeah, I mean, I think the the point you made about just even that nuance in how the two words come together and together being such an important piece, I think that speaks to also the teamwork, that this group was able to to really use to to, launch the new brand. So, really awesome. Paul, I I wanna put you on the spot next a little bit because I know you really spearheaded, the internal communications elements around this new brand, and some of, you know, those new enhancements to the employee experience, and based on the feedback that Katie shared a little bit about. So one of the things that you mentioned when we initially chatted was around kind of the technology within Firstup that really, enabled you to, use some of those more sophisticated marketing, practices, internally. Could you tell us a little bit more about, that kind of internal launch and how the technology really supported you there? Yeah. Sure. So you've heard the importance of recruitment, retention, the brand, and engagement. Real on the internal comm side, we're really focused on engagement. Engaged employees are more likely to stay. If they see their work and themselves in that brand, they're gonna feel more connected to the work they do, which is going to be better for everyone involved. So on the on the comm side of it, we really looked at to answer the question, how can we really influence engagement? So it's it's making that together extraordinary brand come true and highlighting in cases where it does. And then on the technology side of it, on the platform side of it, we I've I've referred to our our previous iteration of internal comms platform as providing us big, dumb numbers. So this was a homegrown. We built it off of a WordPress blog. It was great for 2013, but it it didn't provide us what we needed to do in terms of segmentation of audience, getting data back from how the engagement, was showing up in the interactions on the platform. So so being able to segment audience by role, by location, by other attributes that's in our our HR data system, that that was the game changer. And for this effort, especially, was really important because we could see in different areas, different roles where the engagement was lining up or sparking. More importantly, potentially, was the ability to see that come back in two way communications through user generated content where people can quite literally get on the platform, communicate with the rest of the organization, and say, here we are together extraordinary. So that data for us, it's it's almost like a map that lights up. Like, the navigation system in your car and says, here's where to go. Because we can see this is maybe working. This is an opportunity to work better over here. Yeah. Yeah. You spoke to two things that really stood out here to me. One is around personalization and reaching people, and I know a large portion of your workforce is not in front of their computers all day. So, you know, those traditional things like email that might reach, someone who is behind the desk is is not necessarily gonna get in front of, your health care workers, and other folks out there. So I know, that was something that that I think supported your team quite a bit. And the the other thing that you mentioned, too was kind of around this two way communication element. So, rather than kind of this blasting out and particularly with the new brand and, Frank, you know, you mentioned this too. Like, the colleagues wanna wear it. Like, they're they're embracing it. They're owning it. You're able to see that coming back from employees through communications. So, yeah, that was that's very cool. Yeah. Yeah. And and I think on that front, one of the one of the specific methods that we've used is creating a you know, what what is essentially an email journey the same way that we would do that externally and not just in health care. In any in any industry where you're trying to engage potential customers, there are a variety of ways to do that. So we're looking on the internal side of things, using the the journeys function within Firstup. So we started this first year colleague's journey. So on week one, you start your job. One week after that, you receive a communication, and it's a video from the CEO that basically says, hey. We're glad you're here. Hope your first week is going well. Don't forget to share with your network, your friends, and your family online that you've made a a great career decision and you're part of an extraordinary team at Nebraska Medicine. And then every month through the first twelve months of their, their tenure with the organization, they get a different message that's strategically focused on different aspects of what it means to work at Nebraska Medicine. And then at the end, they get the twelve month, hey. Congratulations. You've you've completed your first year. We're so glad you're here. It's a celebratory message. And then they start on another journey that extends throughout their their career where every year on their work anniversary, they get a they get a special message, and it changes up, regularly so they don't see the same thing over and over again. But, even for those of us who've been here for a long time, you get those messages, and it's sort of like, oh, that's cool. And, like, I'm involved with creating it. I get one on my work anniversary. Oh, hey. Thanks. Me. Thanks, me. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. You're like, thank you for set setting that up. And and, Paul, I know, you know, a big part of designing that that onboarding journey, was in collaboration with Katie's team too. And so, you know, how did you, how did you decide, you know, which touch points should happen at which time? And what are the things that we really wanna, you know, get across to our employees, in their first twelve months at the organization? Yeah. This goes back to the importance of the partnership that you you talked about before. So being able to work closely with the the people team and the data the HR information data that they have that's gathered through exit surveys, through engagement surveys, through other methods where the HR team is understanding where people are making those decisions. So that, like, quality HR data should be a gold mine for communicators, not just for the the people team or the HR team. It's it's very important leverage for deciding when to communicate what message. So one of the things we found specifically was that at that three to four month mark is where new colleagues were making that decision where if you ever played schoolyard football, it was, you know, fourth down, are you kicking or sticking? So at three to four months, people decided, this is a great place. I'm gonna stay or it's not a good fit for me. I'm gonna leave. And so when the people decide I'm gonna leave, we have data that shows in in many, you know, broad numbers why that is. One of the things we found was, I want support tuition support for going back to school, earning a nursing degree, or getting a a certification to work in a different clinical field. We can do that. They just have to know about it. Saving for retirement is important. People may not know that, so let's fix that. If they don't know that, that's on that's on us. That's a failure for us to share that information with them. So at those division points in someone's career journey, part of what the journey allows them to do is to say, hey. Did you know that we'll pay for your nursing degree? Well, I didn't know that. That's basically free money. I'll look into that. Or we'll help you save for retirement. Or did you know that we have these professional development opportunities, these personal development opportunities that don't cost anything? It's part of being a part of being a colleague with the organization. And then the the theme that that goes throughout is really, like I said, it's a celebratory. The visuals are bright. It's hey. It's we're glad you're here. The the message that the through line throughout that that twelve month journey is, we're glad you're here. The work you do matters. And one of the one of the messages is actually that, like, a reminder. The work you do matters. No matter what you do, you're an important part of the health system and an important part of us accomplishing our mission. So so important. And Katie and Frank, I see you both nodding your heads and wanna make sure if there's anything you wanna kind of chime in on on those kind of first twelve months and the different elements, or or any pieces that Paul talked about. I was just thinking Paul could be an HR person now with the way he he talked about that data. That was awesome. No. I I would echo everything he said and so much of we just were able to leverage data and say if this specific trend is happening at month eight, then at month six, we should push this. And that so there was just so much sophistication around how we matched the timing of the content to the reality of the data, and it impacted our turnover in a positive way. And it wasn't just about pushing information. There's there's call outs in there to say, hey. Next month, your leader is gonna is gonna do a stay interview with you. Here are things that you should start thinking about in advance of this conversation. So just really proud of of the way it helped our new colleagues navigate the organization year one. Absolutely. Something Katie just said there sparked something else. It's this is part of, you know, a a communication strategy or even, you know, a specific tactic like this is not going to single handedly change something. It's part of a bigger picture. It's a bunch of gears working together in a in a bigger machine. And part of the reason we were able to be successful, and going back to what Frank talked about with the the employee listening that we did at the start of this campaign development, is having a foundation of communication within the organization. You know, we I called our old system big dumb numbers, but it allowed us to do some things that we wouldn't have been able to do if we were doing just a print newsletter or something like that. It it it it builds on a culture of communication so that when approached for something like this, people feel comfortable saying like, oh, yeah. I can do this. And and I wanna do this, and the company genuinely welcomes my feedback. That doesn't that doesn't get built overnight, and it's it's the kind of thing that is is sort of the the oxygen in an organization. So people aren't necessarily gonna say, you know, I was gonna quit, but the intranet is great, so I'm gonna stay. But that part of that can influence the culture around communications and make sure communications feel authentic and less like you know, I I I joke with with the communications team. It's it's what differentiates us from saying, like, we're the communications team. We're helping to amplify messages from the company and listen to feedback. The opposite of that is being the, you know, the ministry of propaganda, which people will see right through and will have an opposite effect on engagement. And, Paul, you made you made me oh, go ahead, Frank. I I was gonna say, the only thing I would add is, you know, we're the the platform offers a lot for us to do and that we're gonna continue to do. But to going back to what Paul said, you know, is internal comms gonna, you know, be the deal breaker of of whether I stay or go. You know, because we've been able to allow user generated content, it builds a sense of community. And people love to see themselves out there, celebrate their colleagues, celebrate their teams. And, you know, Paul and his team have done a great job, you know you know, kind of top down with stories, but also this bottom up with user generation. And to see some of the comments out there and just rallying around each other, recognizing people, it does really create the opportunity for a sense of community. So, you know, we continue to fuel the sense of that together. And, you know, it it's been exceptional. And it's it's it's not always taken for granted because we do have some folks in our organization who, you know, are are concerned, you know, with that with that ability because it could be used you know, it's it's almost always used for good. It could be used in other ways. But the sense of community that you see, I think really fuels the together part. Yeah. Yeah. Love what all of you kind of added into that. I think it really speaks your culture to have that community there and to your brand. Right? That together element is coming through, by connecting employees, through the platform, and creating much more of a kind of bidirectional, dialogue. And I think, you know, I just wanted to acknowledge too this this element of data really helping, facilitate a much more personalized experience because, you initially talked about some of that kind of standard HR data that you have. Right? Someone's start date, the team they're in, the role they're in. But then you also talked about, you know, we have this data on when people are actually leaving the organization or making those decisions. So how do we tap into that to communicate folks the right things at the right time? And I I think that's such a, you know, strategic way of looking at this too. Okay. Well, I've got some more questions for kind of all of you together, and I I definitely wanna talk about the results that you've seen through this work because, they're pretty compelling. So, you know, maybe we'll start with you, Katie, and just a little bit about some of those people related results, that you've achieved through all of these initiatives around employee experience and the employment brand. You know, what was the impact on turnover, on hiring, and maybe any, like, overall feedback that you heard from employees as well? Sure. When we started the the journey to explore our employment brand, what Frank and I recognized right away was we have to have some pretty strong, key performance indicators. How are we gonna measure whether this works or not? And by no surprise, many of those KPIs were people related. And we launched the brand April fifteenth of twenty twenty four already having established KPIs. And once we got through three months of rollout that was a really high volume student recruitment time, just a lot of activity going on internal with internal talent movement, new talent coming into the organization. So it was a really great time to measure the impact of of this work. And, the way we measured that was we took those three months and said, okay. Here's the outcomes we've had. How does this compare to the previous year in the same time period where we had very similar activity happening? And the results spoke for themselves. We saw 16% decrease in turnover comparing same quarters. Traffic to our website increased significantly. And as, you know, as a leader in HR, of course, I care about app the volume of applications and visitors to our career website that that all shows interest in the organization. Right? I care most about, did we hire those individuals? Did we convert them from I may be interested. I wanna explore to signed up. Yes. Can't wait to join your organization. And we saw, a 22% increase in conversion to higher when we compared those quarters to quarters. What that told us was the communication resonated, and it wasn't just about the marketing. It wasn't just about the website. It was the way that we set our leaders up to understand what is together extraordinary and what's the role that you play in helping to spread the word, talk about the brand. It was important that recruiters, the recruiting team could speak to the brand and that not only all of our marketing material was consistent, but that they could actually speak to what this means. So there were so many stakeholders that we had to pull together and continue to lean into to all have a a similar voice and message around what Together Extraordinary is. And like I said, the the KPIs that we chose from the beginning, and and not only compared that quarter spoke for themselves, but we continue to see that a positive momentum with those same measurements. One thing I wanna add in is, from the get go. So Katie and I were leading this, but we appointed members of our respective teams to build out the action plan. One of her managers of talent acquisition, one of one of our internal communication strategists, and one of our marketing strategists. So they develop the plan. They execute on the plan from the get go. And, Katie and I were presenting last fall on this topic, and one of one of my counterparts presented similar. Similar topic, similar results. You know, we had a 41% increase in website visitors. They were pretty much right there. We had a 36% increase in applications. They were pretty close. We had a 22% increase in, new candidates hired. Like Katie said, they had a two percent increase in candidates hired. Why? Because they took the the lead with the employment brand at their organization. The people team, HR team was brought in so late. They weren't geared up for the volume that was generated. And so all this great momentum, all this great work, yet they were unable to execute because it just speed to market wasn't there. And so because we have this collaboration, we were able to follow that performance all the way through to actually get people in the doors and in roles and positions. Yeah. Yep. And and that importance of the partnership so early on really kind of kept our teams in sync through this entire process, which I think is just so key, and really compelling results, around kind of reversing reversing the trend of kind of losing more than you were bringing in, and those numbers speak for themselves as you said. And now, you know, Katie, I wanna talk about nurses specifically and, you know, for other kind of health care folks on the call. And we know that, you know, it's we we've been in nursing shortage. And I know that, you know, you're forecasting turnover, what you said to be kind of half of what it once was. Like, what's been really effective in terms of, improving retention particularly for this really important group? Gosh. It's it hasn't been just one lever that we've pulled. It's been all the things that we've already talked about on this call, but it's been, floating strategies. It's been, leadership, and and, like, how we improved their onboarding and orientation into the unit, very specific communication tailored to their to their to that audience, and we did some enhancements and and some changes to our total rewards for this group based on not only the research, but what was happening in our market and made some really intentional enhancements and adjustments to meet the needs of that of that specific group. But like I said, it wasn't just one. We listened to it. We asked them what's most dissatisfying about your unit, your role, and the answer wasn't the same for everyone. And some of it was a customized retention plan and and culture plan for that unit. And some of the adjustments were, okay. This applies across across the landscape of nurses. But it was really taking that time to pause and and listen. And through the research, that was a group that we had a whole analysis on with nurses across the organization, but we knew what we we knew why they why they come to Nebraska Medicine, why they leave Nebraska Medicine, and then, what they needed us to adjust to want it to stay. Yeah. And that's what we would have. To to build on a couple of things there. One that Katie just talked about was specific to benefits and total rewards. Back to the technology and the platform, one of the things we've been able to do is build these content hubs. So we have our you know, like many like many organizations, when you log into your company computer, the first thing you see is the Internet home page. Well, now we have we're able to put a a content hub right at the top of the page that says, here's all your benefits information. So you do not have to go on a scavenger hunt for, well, my dental insurance is over here and my PTO accrual is over here, which is, I think, probably fairly common, and it is a fairly common dissatisfier for people. And and, not a great employee experience and not a good use of employees' time. Also, kinda disrespectful to, like, hey. We value, but spend the next hour going around, looking for this information. Secondly, to go back to to what Katie and Frank were talking about before with all of the numbers involved. So if you're a communications person joining this and you're, I I I accept that not everybody is in the position that we're in working for an organization that really values marketing and communication. Sometimes you gotta really go fight for it. You gotta run up the org chart to say, like, hey. This matters. This matters. There's a number that you can attach to this. There's a dollar sign attached to it at your organization if you can find it. The cost of turnover is a real number. What does it cost you to replace an employee when they leave? There's a dollar figure attached to that. Well, what if you could reduce that number? There's a dollar figure attached to that. So what if you went to your chief financial officer or your operations leader or your CEO and said, hey. What if we could impact, not fix, but impact the number through communications, through HR policy, through a variety of things, and drive that number down. That gives you real leverage to go up to your organization's leadership and say, there's a dollar figure that we're losing here. We're leaving money on the table. Some of that we can fix with communications. And, Julia, can I add one more? I wanna add one more thing that I think was really significant for how we reduce turnover. I talked about listening to our nurses. We also listened to our leaders and said, what's preventing you from spending more time with your frontline staff? And we're in in partnership with our CEO, took that person that that that, insight and the feedback that we received from the leaders, and then we removed barriers for that. Knowing that the one of the most important things that they can do as a leader is spend time with their teams. We had to be responsive to the fact that we were piling things on that frontline leader, and let's let's not do that anymore. Let's let's let's put them in a position to spend time with their teams, and that was that was very impactful as well. Right. No. That's such a good point. I mean, yeah, how do we open up capacity for leaders to actually make the experience better too because that's obviously a huge piece. Right? You know, HR can only do so much or provide so much. Really good points touched on across the board here. I know we have tons of, good questions kinda coming in through the chat. Wanted to close us off with maybe just a quick rapid fire around the group, and then I'll hand it back to Sabra for, some q and a from the audience. But if you could all offer maybe one quick piece of advice, to other health care organizations or even other organizations that are experiencing similar challenges, you know, what what would that be? I'll go oh, go ahead, Paul. Okay. I I would say I I've talked a lot about the importance of data and big numbers and stuff like don't ignore the little data too. So you can look at spreadsheets of we have this percentage of engagement from our physicians on this and nurses on. But the little individual anecdotal data can really help tell the story of what so every time we send out the everybody gets a happy birthday journey message and, like I said, a work anniversary message. Sometimes people will reply to those, and we see them, and it's just somebody saying, hey. Thanks. I love my job here. I can't measure that in a spreadsheet, but it is a great one. It's a great pick me up, but it's a great thing to be able to go back and say, look, this is working. Somebody appreciated that. I love that. I love that. Katie? I think the biggest piece of advice I would give is don't make assumptions about what's important to your colleagues and your leaders. Spend the time listening because when you listen and you understand, you can make really smart and strategic decisions. Absolutely. I I would echo what Katie just said. Authenticity matters. This was an effort built on the voice of our colleagues. And if we didn't action on their voices, on their feedback, it would have been a colossal failure. But to the organization's credit, we action so much of what's been said, but this isn't a journey. We didn't cross a magical finish line on April fifteenth of twenty twenty four. This continues to be this evolution, and we're already thinking about two point o and and whatnot. I know we've got a lot of q and a, so let's get on it. Yeah. Well no. I mean, fantastic way to close out just this part. Katie, Frank, Paul, thank you so much for sharing your story, and, congratulations on the fantastic results that you've seen from this work. I'm gonna hand it back to Sabra now to moderate our q and a from the audience. And yeah. Thank you all so much. Thank you guys so much. That was really wonderful. Just so many, thoughtful insights, and they spurred a lot of questions. So I'm gonna start in. The very first is how do you balance these communications while avoiding the information overload that many staff feel in the fast paced health care environment? I'll I'll start on this one. So this goes back probably five or six years when we were reevaluating our need for for communications technology, and we did very similar to what Frank and Katie outlined for our employee listening research that we did for the employee brand campaign. We did a communications audit. So we brought in an objective third party to to look at us and as they said, you know, somebody's gonna have to come in and tell you you've got an ugly baby and you gotta, you know, nobody you're not gonna find it yourself, but what's working, what's not working? What what can we what successes can we build on, what things aren't working can we get rid of. And so a lot of that data influenced where we went, and so we were able to build a consistent communications approach where we do not bombard people with a bunch of daily emails. They get one email a day that's a it's an e newsletter. It's sort of like your daily newspaper back in the day. But then they can use the Firstup platform that is the basis of our intranet to look at the mix of information that's generated from their colleagues, from people who have either similar interests outside of work or work in a similar field, location within our health system, or that need to know information that comes from the corporate level, from the enterprise level. And they can do it on their own time. They can look at the app if they wanna do that while they're on a break or if they're at home waiting for, you know, the spaghetti to boil or whatever they're doing. They can look at it there on their own time if they want. Or, you know, there's there's time at work. When you open up your computer, the first thing you'll see is our Nebraska Medicine Now home page where, you know, you may be coming to look up a policy or put in a PTO request, but you'll get that news and and some of the nice to know information there too. Yeah. That's great. And it's so important. Right? We talk so much about the attention budget and figuring out how much of it to take and and what to fill it with is is incredibly strategic. Yeah. The next one is how did you engage or adjust for the doctor audience? So the doctor audience was included in our research. So we did have a focus group of physicians. Physicians were a part of our survey. I think there's a question in there about how we got 5,000 of our colleagues to to reply. I think we've demonstrated and and a previous boss said, you know, build confidence, earn trust. I think we've gotten trust from our colleagues that if we're asking you a question, we genuinely wanna know, including from our physicians. And so they did participate. They did raise their hands to be a part of the campaign and were. So we we absolutely had engagement across all of our our work groups. And I'll share one data anecdote on now that it's the stuff is out there that goes back to us being able to see by role. So we can't fake this. Somebody who's a physician, that is their their HR data has in their attributes is they are a physician. And we can see the physician engagement numbers and fellow health care folks out there. It's hard it it it can be hard for some to believe. They're some of our most engaged audiences on our content. Now they don't comment on post. They don't hit the like button on post. So the perception has been, well, physicians don't read this stuff. Like, oh, they read it. They just don't necessarily comment on it. But having that data is really important to go back and say, actually, last month, we had an 88% physician engagement, active engagement metric on our content. They're there. The audience is there, and they have stethoscopes. Alright. Next one. Which team owned and managed the journey touch points, and how were those identified? That's a combination between, the communications team, the internal comms team, and Katie's people team. So we go to we build the content informed by the data that they generate in, the research that they have. We we are you know, we're the platform administrators. I'm, you know, I'm doing a little Inbound here. Yeah. Yeah. We're we're managing the content on the platform, but the content that we develop specific to the journeys is is influenced by the data that Katie's team gathers. Just back to that partnership. Right? Just Right. Exactly. Love it. This is interesting. Any creative strategies to continue to drive an engagement program so updates trickle down to the workforce, specifically aside from executive updates and spotlight articles that are supporting the website updates? I think the way I would answer that is I challenge the team to look at all of our different internal and some of our external engagements where appropriate and how do we tag in together extraordinary so that it becomes this threaded element to a lot of our our efforts. And so ensuring that, you know, when we're doing we celebrate colleague week. How do we do it under the umbrella of together extraordinary? And just ensuring that it's Paul Baltes Paul Baltes heard me say this also a thousand times. It's all about frequency and repetition and ensuring that we are intentional and deliberate about, continuing to keep the top of mind. And I'll I'll add, I think there's the behavior that we're that we're trying to drive and surface through Together Extraordinary. I'll use the example of our career passing strategy and framework. We've been really intentional about we don't just say we have this career path thing and look what this is and this is how you can grow. But now we're starting to tell the stories of the leaders who have really helped their colleagues and, like, examples of I get a a leader had a conversation and look where this colleague is now and and vice versa. So really just trying to lean into that and celebrate the the really aligned behaviors that are result a result of the research that we did. And it reinforces to other leaders, oh, this is being recognized and celebrated, so let's do this too. And a really easy visual way to do that well, I mean, Frank talking about making sure that that brand shows up. We we made foam core, like, selfie frames with the Together extraordinary branding on it. We take them everywhere we go. So we had a new employee event yesterday. We're encouraging people to get with a a friend or a coworker in those frames, take the pictures, share it, whether it's internal on our platform or externally. We take the I just had to reorder some because we use the ones before so much. They kinda got beat up a little bit, but it's a good problem to have. We take them everywhere and encourage people to take pictures and share. Right. When they see their colleagues, right, and they hear these stories, it does it does reinforce. One of the questions is kinda tied to this. So how do your leaders demonstrate the important behaviors to also communicate the work that you do matters. We put them out on the platform. They're they're sharing those messages and and saying, this is this is it right here. This is what we're talking about. These are our values in in action. This is together extraordinary. Wonderful. Alright. Let's see. This is a little more in the weeds. How long was the information gathering process, and how did you get the feedback from about half your employees? It's impressive, and it says it's always a struggle for their team. I I tried to answer that earlier, in one of my my answers. Katie, I think the the pros I think we spent about sixteen months doing discovery to get to the, kinda get to the employment brand. But but there there was so much research. We distilled it into kind of three big chunks, and we were presenting it on a regular cadence to our executive leadership team. But it takes time. And, you know, we the Katie and her team do a great job surveying through the colleague engagement survey, but we knew that wasn't deep and wide enough for what we needed to do. So it provided great insights, but we needed to go deeper. And having our outside agency partner conduct that And and some of those focus groups and some of those interviews was kind of this outside third party, so there could be a lot more transparency. But I I I think we just created the opportunity and, you know, we've kind of built that confidence and earn trust with employees if we're if we ask, we care. And and very specifically, that initial push of listening was about three months. So we spent about three months initially gathering that feedback through those various vehicles. And then as Frank said, from there, we got the we got the information, we got the research, and then we would go back. But initially, about three months. Okay. Alright. I think we are just at time. There are so many great questions. We are gonna find a way to get back and answer these, and reach out to you guys, because I think we could spend another hour going through and having, even more discussion. But if you are interested in diving deeper into the Nebraska Medicine story, we have published a case study outlining, more details around the approach and the results. Since all of you are registered for the the event, you will get a copy of the case study sent to you. It is also in the resources tab here and, of course, available on the Firstup website. I have to thank you guys again. The the story, the details, all of the insights and partnership you went through, it's really inspiring to see so many people come together to make a difference, in their in their, environment, their community at large, and and where you work. So really well done, and thank you so much. And thank you everyone else for sharing some time with us today. I so appreciate it, and hope everyone has a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks. Thank you.