6y
Thank you for this thoughtful review, and thank you for contributing to our company's success for many years! I am glad to hear that the all team member meetings have been helpful -- and we'll try to keep improving in terms of starting and ending on time! I'm also glad to hear that the benefits are positive, including the education benefit. Each year we'll work to continuously improve in this regard.
I also appreciate you flagging the challenges you're facing in terms of the workload you're expected to shoulder. This balance between personal sustainability for team members, from a work/life balance perspective, and financial sustainability for the company, is delicate and difficult to achieve, and must be constantly monitored, with the need for frequent adjustments. We will discuss and reinforce this concept in tomorrow's all-team-member meeting, and will follow this up with emphasis to the extended leadership team in our next weekly meeting.
As I have shared in our most recent all-team-member meeting, we as a leadership team would view a reasonable expectation for most roles at Health Catalyst to be fulfilled within a 40-50 hour work week, while also enabling team members to take each of our company holidays as well as a reasonable amount of vacation time off (a total of around 7 weeks between company holidays and vacation days, on average, per year). This should be true across functional organizations -- technology, professional services, sales & marketing, R&D, and general & administrative positions. For those with management responsibilities, and for more senior leaders, there will likely be some additional hours required to fulfill those added responsibilities. If a team member is consistently finding that, beyond exceptional situations, they are needing to work significantly more hours per week than this, then they should flag this to their manager and/or to HR, and we can work together to address the causes of this situation. Causes may include that we are under-resourced, or that we've set the wrong timing expectation, or that there is more training needed to enable effectiveness, or that this is not the right job fit. Whatever the cause, we can work our way through it in order to improve.
We also recognize that certain team members may choose to work more than 40-50 hours per week, of their own volition, perhaps to enable them to take more time off per year while still meeting their job expectations, or perhaps because they want to qualify for promotion more quickly than would normally be the case. This is certainly a choice that any team member can make, but it should not be a requirement.
I also agree that we need to become more standardized in our use of technology, and less like the wild west. This will be an area of focus as part of 2020 planning. I also really like your suggestion for all managers to hold small group discussions, and perhaps we can encourage managers to do this proactively, reinforcing that we at Health Catalyst would be happy to reimburse the expenses associated with these small group lunches.
I still hold lots of lunches with team members -- typically 1-2 per week, as part of my overall goal to hold 200 skip-level 1:1s each year -- and I continue to find these 1:1 discussions incredibly helpful. My 1:1s sometimes include a meal, other times are just a discussion, but regardless, they are an incredibly useful way to hear direct feedback from teammates about what's going well and what can be improved!
Thank you again for your review and for your service these past 5+ years. I really appreciate your commitment to our company! Best, Dan
