7y
I am very sorry to read of your experience, and I feel frustrated that we have not made more progress in improving the female team member experience at Health Catalyst. While I can see some evidence of progress in meaningful areas, your experience, along with other feedback and data, highlights that we have more work to do. I just received and reviewed feedback from Health Catalyst's Women Empowered Affinity Group where Linda Llewelyn (our Chief People Officer) solicited feedback from female team members on their experience. While I was pleased to see some areas of positive feedback and progress (parental leave benefit, schedule flexibility, improved work-related travel experiences), there were still a number of clear areas of needed improvement. We will be sharing this feedback with the Leadership Team on Monday, as well as with the Extended Leadership Team next Monday, and then sharing with all team members during the next All-Team-Member meeting. We'll also be rolling out "unconscious bias" training for all team members in the next month or so, to try to help every team member become more aware of ways in which their behavior may be negatively impacting others. We are starting to see some progress related to career path opportunities, as we have instituted a consistent process to post leadership positions, receive applications, conduct interviews with an interview team, and then make hiring decisions. This process has recently resulted in the promotion of a few female leaders at Health Catalyst, including Carol Owen's recent promotion to the Leadership team, joining Linda, Les and Holly as female leaders on the LT. But female team members are still under-represented relative to the total Health Catalyst population in some key areas (like within the SEL and Sales organizations as you point out, as well as on our Board). And the female team member proportion of the total Health Catalyst population is significantly under-represented relative to the overall population (approximately 30% of team members are female vs. 50% overall population). This is similar to the total technology industry female/male representation, and highlights a broad and far-reaching challenge. This is an issue for which I have personally devoted significant time and attention, and I will continue to do so. I study the Gallup Engagement Survey results, including a careful review of the female team member engagement results overall and the answers to each individual question, as a useful guide to how we are performing. At an overall level, I was pleased to see in our most recent survey results, from June 2018, the female team member overall "Grand Mean" score (4.37) to be slightly above the company average (4.35), and as a reference the overall grand mean score of 4.35 placed Health Catalyst in the 96th percentile in Gallup's global company database. I was also encouraged to see the female team member scores above the company average in individual questions "someone cares about me at work" and "there is someone at work who encourages my development." I was concerned to see the female team member score below the company average on the question "my opinions seem to count", which feedback was also highlighted in Linda's summary of the Women Empowered feedback. I also attend the Women Empowered Affinity group meetings as often as I can, and I participate in the Health Catalyst mentoring program, which provides me an opportunity to participate directly in the mentorship of female leaders at Health Catalyst. We will be rolling out some additional initiatives designed to increased the pool of qualified and interested female candidates at Health Catalyst, including our sponsorship of scholarships for female students which will include with the scholarship an internship within Health Catalyst's tech organization, and we hope that efforts like these can also contribute to improvement. We will continue to work to improve the female team member experience in the days, weeks and months ahead. I regret that your experience was not positive enough to persuade you to stay at Health Catalyst. But I express appreciation to you for the 3+ years that you devoted to the company, and I wish you success moving forward. I also offer my personal commitment to keep working to improve, and would be happy to listen to your additional thoughts and perspective, if you'd be open to visiting with me directly. Thank you again for your feedback. Best, Dan
