5y
Thank you for sharing your perspective and feedback about working at Health Catalyst since you joined less than a year ago. I'm sorry to read about the negative experience you've had these past several months, and that a number of elements of the job and the company have not measured up to your expectations. Any time a team member has a negative experience, one that does not measure up to our potential, I feel regret and disappointment. And I hope we should each feel a desire to learn from these experiences and feedback, and then strive to understand what we can do to improve.
I agree with your feedback about the importance of recognizing hard work and extra effort. While we at Health Catalyst have designed a compensation framework that is favorable for every team member, and assumes that every team member is meaningfully contributing to the company's success and should therefore be recognized with above-market compensation, we also have mechanisms in place to additionally recognize extraordinary performance. But these additional mechanisms typically manifest themselves over longer periods of time than just the first year of employment at Health Catalyst. For example, our annual equity grants to team members are a meaningful part of every team member's compensation who has been with Health Catalyst for at least one year, and the default grant value is designed to contribute to overall compensation that is above-market. There is also an individual-performance component in determining the grant size that includes the up-sizing of grants to recognize extraordinary performance, and approximately 20% of team members, those who have demonstrated extraordinary performance, receive an upsized equity grant during that annual process, and this can have significant incremental value. As team members consistently demonstrate this extraordinary performance, they can also qualify for promotions at a more rapid pace than the default timeline of once every 3-5 years.
Our efforts regarding diversity are another area where sustained, consistent effort over many years yields meaningful improvement and progress, but it takes time to see the fruits of this effort. As we have discussed several times in all-team-member meetings, we have sustained an effort now, in a focused way, for the past seven years, in improving the female team member experienece at Health Catalyst. We have studied the data, striven to learn from it, implemented initiatives that took time to take effect, and built an infrastructure around strengthening this experience for female team members over time. And we have seen meaningful progress in terms of pay equity (we have achieve near-perfect pay parity), in the number of women to apply for positions at Health Catalyst, in the number of women who are hired, in the overall proportion and representation of women at every level in the company, including the board, the leadership team, and every other level and function. We also have studied the engagement and satisfaction and turnover rates of women at Health Catalyst as compared to men and to our overall averages here, and currently observe that the female team member engagement and satisfaction scores are slightly above the overall Health Catalyst scores, currently in the 99th percentile in Gallup's database. We are applying the same long-term focus and consistency now to the experience of team members of color. This has been a focus now for the past two years, and we anticipate needing to continue this focus for many years to come in order to see meaningful progress in this area as well. I agree with your sentiment that in order for real progress to be achieved, there must be a much deeper commitment than a marketing or PR campaign, and I certainly feel a deeper commitment to this important area. I also acknowledge that progress here comes slowly, and that we are not perfect at Health Catalyst, and have much work to still do here.
I also acknowledge that there is always room for improvement as it relates to our technology and as it relates to the team member experience. We are consistently working to improve and strengthen our technology capabilities, and this was a major focus of our 2021 planning process. We are in a competitive, dynamic space, to be sure, and our 2021 planning review certainly uncovered areas of needed investment and strengthening of our data platform technology capabilities, as well as our apps-layer and data-layer capabilities. We have prioritized these areas in our investment decisions for 2021.
And as it relates to team member engagement in the context of being a public company, with signfiicant expectations that come with being a public company, I do acknowledge that we do have high expectations from our investors -- and that this has been the case for the past decade, whether private or public. Ever since we accepted VC investment, with that investment we also accepted high performance expectations. Finding ways to deliver on those expectations while also remaining centrally focused on team member engagement is very challenging, to be sure. It requires a daily focus, at every level, including at the CEO level, to constantly work towards meeting and exceeding these financial expectations, while consistently advocating for our team members who are producing this strong performance. We do face constraints each year that we must operate within, and we are required each year to "earn the right" to be an independent company. But we also must keep working on and advocating for team members, and I still feel that my head should never hit my pillow in any given day without me having worked to improve the team member experience at Health Catalyst. Here again, there is no doubt that we have room for improvement, and I'm striving to learn and understand which areas need the most focus, by receiving unfiltered feedback and being open to that feedback. To that end, I appreciate you sharing your feedback in a transparent and unfiltered way here on Glassdoor. I hope that as you continue forward at Health Catalyst, you will observe improvement, over time, in these areas you've highlighted. We'll keep working to improve in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. Best, Dan
