Health Catalyst Reviews

Your comments are so generous and encouraging. I am very glad to hear that your experience has been consistent with what we as a leadership team hope is the experience of every team member, every day, at Health Catalyst. I know there are many situations in which we fall short, but it is very meaningful to hear of circumstances like yours, where your experience has been so positive. We will keep working hard to live up to your generous words. Thanks again for taking the time to share these positive comments.... MoreLess

Thank you for your review and for your encouraging words. I agree with your assessment -- 2017 was a challenging year for us as a comp;any, both because of external factors, but also because it was time for us to take the next step in our maturation, and those steps are not without pain. I feel sincere gratitude to you and to our hundreds of other teammates who stuck with us through the challenges of 2017, including a major reorganization mid-year, to make it to the other side of those challenges. We are fortunate to be seeing significant success and growth in 2018, and we're excited to continue with that momentum by finishing strong in this quarter and continuing throughout the rest of this year. Thank you for your direct contributions to that success. Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thank you for sharing these thoughts. One of the reasons I personally read and respond to every review on Glassdoor, in addition to reading every free-form comment submitted in our semi-annual Gallup surveys to all team members, is because it helps me and it helps us as a leadership team stay more directly connected to the perspectives and experiences of team members at every level at Health Catalyst. This includes receiving feedback that has not been filtered through many layers of management, which does often happen in many organizations (including Health Catalyst). We have also included an ability on our intranet site to submit anonymous questions, and I read and respond to every question submitted. These channels often offer unfiltered, unvarnished feedback regarding situations on the ground that are real and important to understand.

Reading and listening to this feedback also helps us recognize patterns in the feedback that reinforce the need to address an issue. Some of the feedback you have shared seems to fit with a pattern of feedback from these other sources regarding the importance of improving the skills and effectiveness of our managers at Health Catalyst. This was a theme in the most recent Gallup feedback, and led to us conducting a follow-up anonymous survey to team members, in April, to better assess their direct experience with their manager, as compared with the best manager in their career experience. We shared the survey results with all team members and discussed them as part of the April 20th 2018 All-Team-Member meeting, if you'd like to see the full results. On the one hand we were encouraged to see that 61% of team members rated their current manager an 8, 9 or 10 (with 10 representing the best manager of their career). On the other hand, we were concerned to see that 9% of team members rated their experience with their current manager a 1, 2 or 3.

This feedback has resulted in our focus on developing additional training materials, mentoring time, and implementation of a 360-degree feedback mechanism, by the end of 2018, for every manager at Health Catalyst. As we collect this feedback, we will emphasize the principles and practices of the most effective managers. This includes the characteristics of servant-leadership and of humility, with increased importance within management of practicing these characteristics. Managers should encourage creative discussion and multiple perspectives when interfacing with members of their teams, rather than shutting down creative or opposing ideas. This is critical to our success as a company, that managers and leaders remain open to new ideas rather than becoming defensive or dismissive. It is an inappropriate and incorrect application of the characteristic of humility for a manager to expect blind obedience to his or her perspective from the team. Rather, effective managers need to be open to new ideas, careful listeners, and enable the best ideas to rise to the top and influence direction. We will emphasize this perspective in our next All-Team-Member meeting this Friday, and reinforce it in the next training meeting with managers.

I want to thank you for caring about the mission of the company. I care about the mission as well. I hope you will stay with us, bring your best ideas, even if they are contrary to current practice, and we as a leadership team will work to reinforce and provide support to you to bring your creative ideas to your teams, and reinforce to our managers how critical it is for them to listen carefully to your ideas, to be open and not defensive, all in support of the mission of the company. Thanks again for sharing this perspective. Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thank you for your sharing this perspective. I'm glad to hear you felt that most teammates tried to live by the principle of assuming positive intent. I'm sorry to hear that you encountered examples where some team members abused that trust and did not seem to face the consequences of these choices. We do have a stated performance management policy that includes providing team members with a second chance, when there has been a performance issue. However, this should not be an excuse for not addressing performance issues. We'll reinforce this message in our next manager training meeting. Thanks again for sharing your experience and perspective. Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thank you for sharing this feedback with us. I've read your comments a few times, and we've discussed your comments also in our weekly leadership team meetings, and they, coupled with some similar feedback received through other channels, have helped inform some decision and changes recently implemented. Let me share a few observations related to your comments.

First, thank you for sharing your positive comments about your experience at Health Catalyst. I'm grateful to hear that your experience has been positive. We as a Leadership Team certainly want every team member to feel cared for, loved, respected and given autonomy to do the best work of their career. And we care about the loved ones of our team members as well.

Thank you also for your specific and insightful feedback. Let me address each category of feedback. First as it relates to our "product" orientation, your comments are resonant and fair. Three years ago we were in a very different situation regarding the maturity of our technology products. It was critical for us to make a meaningful pivot and invest heavily in the development of the next-generation data platform, as well as to begin our investment in building true Health Catalyst software at the apps layer. Under Dale's leadership we've made incredible progress, and it's been exciting to witness the launch of the DOS platform and each of the apps suites that we've launched thus far (Patient Safety is next in June!).

While I'm excited about all the progress, I acknowledge that we're still early in the journey to mature product leadership, including the buildout of the product management function and mindset, and maturing our approach to technology roadmap development and leadership. We are actively working on these areas.

Regarding our status reinforcing the culture, I appreciate you sharing the concern around not allowing a "blame" culture to emerge. We've felt this concern as well. Our recent emphasis on learning from failure, as discussed in our two most recent All Team Member Meetings, led by Carl Anderson and Dale, I think is a step in the right direction. Further, I'm excited that we're incorporating "SOAP" (Suboptimal Outcome Analysis Process) learnings as part of every ATM meeting, to help us integrate learning from failure as part of our culture.

And I am also hopeful that we will continue to make progress regarding our diversity efforts as a company. This is a personal area of focus for me, and I appreciated your reference to the article recently published on this topic, with the link here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/diversity-workplace-principle-driven-approach-talent-pool-dan-burton/

We will continue to make progress through a principle-based approach to diversity, including the principle of advocacy in situations where we need to accelerate our progress.

Thank you again for your thoughtful, insightful feedback. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss further. Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thank you for sharing this feedback, and I am very sorry your experience included the negative elements you referenced above. Consistent with the cultural attribute of humility, we as a Leadership Team have reviewed your feedback, coupled with other related feedback, and discussed ways in which we should consider changing in order to improve the team member experience and decrease the likelihood that your negative experiences would be repeated.

One concrete action we are taking is to make more consistent and pervasive the practice of going through a formal interview process for promotional opportunities and for new roles at the company. We as a Leadership Team recognize that this is a needed step, and that the upside of moving more quickly to fill positions, without a formal interview process, is overwhelmed by the downside of the potential of not considering all qualified candidates, and for team members to be less confident in the fairness of the process.

Linda (our Chief People Officer) and I are drafting a framework for a consistent interview process to be reviewed next week with the Leadership Team, and then by the Extended Leadership Team, and afterwards to be implemented as company policy.

There is a second policy change we are also working to develop, review and then implement, which I believe will also enable us to much more effectively identify any areas where we may have managers/leaders who are not acting in a way that is consistent with our cultural attributes. We are developing a 360-degree review process in which every manager at Health Catalyst will participate, including direct and anonymous feedback from members of their teams on their experience with their manager. This is part of our effort to enable managers at Health Catalyst to become best-in-class and continuously improve. I acted as the first manager to receive this 360-degree feedback, collected by our Chairman, and then reviewed together with the Board and with the Leadership Team. It was a really helpful process for me, and I believe it will help all our managers become better. We will implement this feedback process, starting with the Leadership Team, followed by the Extended Leadership Team, and then all people managers, in 2018.

I feel regret that we did not implement these changes sooner, such that you might have chosen to stay at Health Catalyst and continue contributing to the mission of the company. I apologize that we did not address these issues sooner. Thank you again for sharing this important feedback. Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thanks very much for sharing this perspective in your review. I'm also glad we have supported the creation of affinity groups like the LGBTQA group and other affinity groups. I felt like I really benefited from attending the most recent LGBTQA affinity group meeting, and found the perspectives shared were really important for me to understand.

We talk quite a bit about our cultural attributes (as you know -- sometimes I likely sound like a broken record at ATM meetings). When we do, we emphasize that we want every team member to be smart, hard-working and humble, with humility representing the most important of the three attributes, because humble people are also great listeners and learners, and humble people respect others and value their thoughts and perspectives. These elements are foundationally connected to valuing differences and embracing diversity.

We as a leadership team feel a deep desire and have a strong commitment to work every day to enable every team member to feel cared for, loved, respected and treated as a colleague and as someone whose ideas are worth listening to and learning from. I'm grateful to hear that you feel this way, and we'll keep working to keep it that way.

I also appreciate your feedback regarding the disruption of switching projects and assignments. I know that your experience has been felt by many others, particularly after last summer's reorganization. This is a topic we're studying as a leadership team, and a topic that is multi-faceted. We launched an anonymous survey last Friday to all team members, soliciting your feedback on your experience with your manager(s) at Health Catalyst as compared with your experience with the best manager in your career. That is one facet of this challenge. Another facet that we'll be collecting more data on, through the next anonymous survey we'll launch to team members in a week or so, will help us better understand how we can improve in the area of every team member "knowing what is expected of them at work" (one of the Gallup engagement questions). I would hypothesize that your experience having to change projects after six months negatively effected your understanding of what's expected, and could also decrease your ability to do your best work as part of a high-functioning team. I would invite you to participate in both of these surveys. I will read and re-read every response, and we will devote significant time as a leadership team internalizing the feedback and then implementing changes that can help us improve.

At the same time, because of the company's pace of growth and expansion in a dynamic market, this growth and expansion also accelerates the need for us to make adjustments and changes and to evolve to scale with the growth. So some of the changes may be unavoidable, but whenever we can enable continuity, we should strive to do so.

Also, feel free to reach out to me or to Linda (our Chief People Officer) directly if you'd like to share more about your experience. Thanks again for sharing your feedback, and for your contributions to the company's success. Best, Dan... MoreLess