We talk a lot at Eliza about accountability and ownership. It is even one of the criteria that we rate employees against when evaluating their performance. This concept really hit home for me this week when an incident happened with my daughter, who is in the fifth grade.

All the elementary classes at her school were participating in a reading contest, and the class that read the most books would get treated to a lunch out. Every student in the class had to read at least one chapter of their favorite book out loud. My daughter was really excited about this, since she’s been an avid reader since an early age.

About a week ago she came home with a note saying that she was talking in class when it was work time. This has never happened before and when asked about it, she said she was sorry. It happened a second time a few days later. She was given an after-class assignment.

When she got home I sat her down and asked why this was going on — she told me that she couldn’t talk about it. Now I am perplexed - is she watching too much tv? Is this the start of teenager issues? Have I been traveling too much and not paying attention to her?

The next day I picked her up from school and told her that no matter what - I HAVE to know what is going with her so I can help. She calmly explained that she didn’t need my help, but the little boy who sits next to her in class can’t read very well and his father beats him. My daughter was reading the assignment to him in class so he could finish it and not get in trouble. She was also whispering the words to him so he could read his book out loud.

I asked why she would do that and she said “because Mommy, it is the right thing to do and no one else would help him.” She went on to explain that if all the kids in her class didn’t do the reading to win the prize, they would make fun of him.

I looked at her in awe and it dawned on me - this is the example I will use when people ask how they can become more accountable in their jobs.

Every person at Eliza owns a piece of the culture and environment of the company. If there is another department or team member who needs help and support, it is up to each of us to take action.

If we stand by and watch things happen that we know aren’t right - we are just as guilty. If we sit around and talk about how hard or horrible things are and don’t come up with solutions - we are just as responsible.

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous  used under Creative Commons License

This is true in my daughter’s situation too. Even though it isn’t “my business” I set up a meeting with the teacher to tell her what’s going on. My husband went to the boy’s family’s house so he could talk with the parents and offer our assistance.

We are working to help that little boy succeed, because without him, the class can’t succeed.

That same all-for-one, one-for-all spirit applies here at Eliza, too. I am so glad I work here.

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Every year Eliza throws a holiday shindig.

Food, fun, friends and of course…

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(Note: you must have Flash to watch the dance video above - get it here)

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Dancing!

Our CEO and President Luke and Alex can cut a rug.  We found this footage in the old Eliza archives and decided to share with the entire Eliza family as part of the Holiday Party invite.

But the more we thought about it the more we just couldn’t keep it from the world — click the play button and enjoy. Or, if you’re lucky enough to be part of the Eliza family, swing by the party to see it live.

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I have written in past blogs about cultivating an exciting environment at Eliza and how we as a company are always striving to innovate and improving upon what we know and do.

As an HR professional, I don’t claim to know it all, and one way we try to keep our edge is to check out what other cool companies are doing.

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One of my all time favorite places is Zappos (and not just because they have awesome shoes and fantastic customer service). The crew at Zappos has continued to be the industry leader in both people programs and figuring out how to make their company a really great place to work.

One of the programs they run for new hires really caught my interest - after about six weeks they make new employees an offer to leave. Basically it is a test of commitment - do you really want to stay here?  This should be more than just a job for you — did you make the right decision joining us? It gives the employee a chance to more easily remove themselves from a fit that they know won’t work longer term, and that benefits the company.

The Eliza team talked it over and decided that we would try out this concept as an experiment. We let new folks know that after a month or so at Eliza, we’re going to make them an offer: cash to walk out the door. Then when the time comes, we sit down together and explain: we love you and don’t want you to leave, but, if you want to leave today we will give you a significant sum of money - cash to walk out the door with no hard feelings either way.

To date we’ve done this fourteen times, with a decision to stay instead of take the money each time. After folks make their decision, we’ve asked them how they felt about it and their thoughts on the process. Feedback about the offer varied overall - some thought it was really great and others weren’t thrilled about it.

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Photo by bandita, used under Creative Commons Licence

One thing that resonated from everyone involved was respect and appreciation for the fact that we are not afraid to try new things. I think that above all else is the kind of culture we want to feed and nurture - and continue to build on.

Eliza employees are always trying to learn from others’ best practices, we are not afraid to try new things, and we are confident enough in ourselves to stand up and say “hey, we tried this and it didn’t work” or “hey, we borrowed this from somewhere else and have adapted it Eliza-style”.

Eliza style is just that. We practice what we preach and we preach what we practice:

Everything Starts with Integrity
Always Innovating
Great Talent - Our People are our Core
The Customer is at the Center of Everything we do

2010 is going to be a fantastic year for Eliza - I can hardly wait to see what comes next!

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Engage With Grace ranks as one of the 10 phrases that became part of the healthcare lexicon in 2009. 

Thank you again to all who supported this non-partisan effort to have end-of-life care wishes expressed and honored. If nothing else, health reform has given us the opportunity to introduce the concept in a fresh way.

So, what other phrases should we add to that list?

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Few of us really eat as well as we should.

It’s especially tough in the office.  Tough to get the right food prepared.  So often we end up grabbing junk — and taking a long time to do it.

We’ve found a solution that’s working for us: the office snack bar.

Bring in some healthy, quick stuff: bread, peanut butter, oranges, apples, nuts, water - whatever else works.

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Put it in an open corner of the office and snack when needed.  Share with other folks and let them bring stuff in too — like a perpetual picnic.

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Go online and shop for clothes that have been selected to fit your shape at MyShape.com. Log on to Facebook and see ads that have been selected especially for you. What’s going on?

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According to Bruce Kasanoff, author of and founder of the blog NowPossible.com, what we are witnessing is the emerging personal economy—not just in commerce, but in areas as diverse as education, entertainment, politics and health care.

Here at Eliza we make personalization our watchword in all that we create, and so we sent Mr. Kasanoff some questions about this subject in which we’re so keenly interested and begged him to wax eloquent.

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Thank you to everyone who participated in the second annual Blog Rally – as you can see from this partial list of participants it was a great success.

We counted over 100 posts plus countless tweets and Facebook postings – people spreading the word and sharing their stories over Thanksgiving weekend.

And for that, we are incredibly grateful.

Here’s just a sample of some of the comments we saw:

“Engage with Grace, what a wonderful idea. Anything to get a real conversation started. If we can help people understand that by taking the time to make their wishes known that a great deal of suffering could be mitigated.”

“Wow, thanks a lot for that useful information. It is very true because sometimes you just get stuck and don’t know what to say. Some conversations are easier than the others. Sometimes it also depends on the person we are talking to.”

“Last year I had a discussion with my loved one because of the blog rally and unfortunately it actually came into play in Sept. when she was diagnosed with end stage pancreatic cancer. Something that we did not anticipate but really must be brought to light, especially with elderly couples; often the primary advocate is so distraught at the probability of losing their 47+ year partner, emotions cloud key judgment. We experienced battles with my uncle over increasing pain meds., etc. and hospice walked such a fine line because he, as her health proxy could have asked them to leave at any time (as we were told). So in addition to having a discussion regarding these end of life questions — elderly couples really need to think about whether their spouse will truly be able to carry out their wishes when the time comes.”

Let’s keep the momentum going, moving from the blogosphere to our dinner tables, to our presentations at work, to our friends at book group – anyone, really.

Thank you again, and best wishes to you and yours this holiday season.

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Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.

Our original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year – so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different. 

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post.  They’re not easy questions, but they are important.

To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:

Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this – just five questions in plain, simple language – can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.

So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.

Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.

One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.

(To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. )

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Another great article about the importance of broaching difficult conversations around end-of-life wishes appears in the Indianapolis Star this week.

The piece offers advice on how to have these conversations (including using the five questions  offered on Engage With Grace) in a way that’s non-partisan, not mired in legal mumbo-jumbo… just, well, human.

And what better example of humanity than the upcoming holiday season – family members gathered together for food, watching the big game, and hitting the stores for bargains.

So while we can’t promise that discussing end-of-life preferences with your loved ones will be easy as pie (pumpkin or otherwise), we do promise that the effort will be worthwhile.

And maybe even as satisfying.

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Dr. John Kroeker

John Kroeker didn’t know it at the time, but a hitchhiking nun in 1978 changed the course of his life.

This doctoral student in neurobiology and behavior at Cornell made an impulsive decision to drive the nun upstate to her ashram instead of going back to campus, and the conversation they had about meditation during that long drive was the impetus for him to travel to India after graduation on his own search.

He landed in Auroville, a utopian community on the southeastern coast. He didn’t stay long (“just a month”, says John) and didn’t find exactly what he was looking for, so he went off to Cal-Tech for his post-doc fellowship work.

But the planted seed bore fruit, and 30 years later Dr. Kroeker , internationally recognized expert on learning algorithms, bioinformatics, digital signal processing and speech recognition (and a co- founder of Eliza Corporation) not only is a long-time student of the Institute of Applied Meditation, but a teacher and mentor of their system of Heart Rhythm Meditation.

Aside from the obvious benefits of having a meditation savant forming best practices at Eliza, employees were the happy beneficiary of his expertise at a recent lunchtime seminar offering. According to research in the field, meditation with the proper breathing technique can have these positive outcomes:

Physical

· Bolsters immune system

· Lowers blood pressure

· Helps with pain management

· Increases metabolism

· Increases oxygenation of blood

· Circulation aid

Mental

· Stress management

· Maximizes concentration

· Develops decisiveness

· Improves creativity

· Improves communication

· Restores optimism

Eliza employees tried this interesting meditation technique as well, which places emphasis on posture, breathing, and connecting with the heartbeat—along with a high-tech computerized biofeedback display for a few folks who volunteered to be hooked up to a monitor.

Eliza likes to talk about getting “soul to soul” with people. That’s not just vendor to client, doctor to patient, health plan to member. We’re actually trying it out on the ground, co-worker to co-worker, starting with the heart.

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The recession has a way of bringing savings strategies into the mainstream. Competitive coupon clipping, for example.

There’s a great article in Healthcare IT News about how the recession has also driven a trend to more automated calls in healthcare – especially when it comes to connecting people with clinicians who offer health and wellness support.

It’s no secret that as the US healthcare system serves more aging and newly-insured people, the nursing shortage is widening. Demand for RNs is expected to continue to grow at 2 percent to 3 percent per year, while the supply of RNs is expected to grow very little as large numbers of nurses begin to retire.

So how can we help these folks be more efficient, without burning them out?

We like to say that Eliza never has a bad day – meaning that automated calls are really well suited for carrying out repetitive tasks in what are (by definition) a consistent way. Such as asking members a series of health screening questions.

By identifying and handing off patients who are already engaged, this approach gives nurses a morale booster too, since they can focus on the most rewarding parts of the job that demand that uniquely human touch.

Like coupon clipping, the benefits can be quantified in dollars and cents, as well as in hard-to describe-but-just as-important ways. Like feeling smarter about how we spend our resources.

So what’s your best strategy for weathering the recession?

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Eliza tries a lot of things.  Some work and some don’t.  That’s the price of innovation.
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One of the crazier things we’ve tried, that actually worked and worked well, was Speed Recruiting.

Basically take speed dating (five minutes at a table, bell rings, rotate, repeat) and apply it to an interviewing process and there you have it.

As for the origins, let’s have Elaine explain in the video below:
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We’re really fortunate to have a Human Resources guru who knows what she’s doing (read her take on motivating innovation), and not afraid to take chances - all the things that Speed Recruiting was designed to tease out from folks interested in joining team Eliza.
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She explains in the video above.
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Thanks to Dawn, Elaine, Brook (pic above) and everybody who participated - especially all of the future Eliza rock stars we met in 5-minute speed sessions.

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Eliza had quite a happening at the 2009 Health 2.0 in San Francisco.
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Click through the slide show below to see the whole shabang.
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Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.
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Highlights include Eliza hosting a cocktail party…
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… (we always love a party).
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Alex was interviewed in a session called “Three CEOs and a (kick @ss) President” where she announced Eliza and Sprigley joining forces (having met one another on stage at a past Health 2.0).
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Then Alex and Josh teamed up to reveal ElizaLIVE and show some early results from the millions of members participating in this multi-modal platform that uses web 2.0 technology to create a killer experience.
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Big thanks go to Matt Holt and Indu Subaiya …
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… and the folks on the Eliza team
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Of course there were the obligatory antics - costumes, stage falls, etc.
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But as they say, what happens at Health 2.0, stays at Health 2.0….
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… well, maybe not. Check out the video above.

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WOW! I know that word doesn’t quite explain the feeling of having your company and president mentioned (several times) in HR Magazine, but it is about all I can come up with.

SHRM, which is the Society of Human Resources Management, is a great organization (I actually belong to the Austin chapter) that has been around for awhile and are the creative bunch behind the magazine.

The topic of the article is Motivating Innovation - a very timely article on many fronts, but especially for us.

Research tells us that “teams are considered the engines of innovation and creativity that lead to future products and services”.

What does this mean in English? It means that true creativity, productivity and success comes when we work as a team and especially when the members of those teams don’t work in the same departments and represent different perspectives.

I don’t want this to sound too easy - it isn’t. True innovation and using that concept to motivate people is easier said than done. It requires us to think a bit more than usual, expend more of an effort and may even seem like it complicates the overall process. All those things are true, but the effort put forth will be rewarded hundred times over.

The most recent example of innovation and using the team approach is our Recruiting Event. The original concept came from Dan, we then had a brainstorming meeting with Dan, Ivy and Sarah. Everyday some other member of our growing team comes up with a cool slant on it.

The responses to our unique and unusual ad has been beyond anything that I have imagined – and we’ve had over 85% compliment us for being different.

Why are we different? Because there is no “I” in Eliza, er, I mean “team.”

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Eliza’s located on Boston’s North Shore.

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It gets cold in the winter…

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… so when the weather turns nice it has to be enjoyed.

Bookending the summer season were a couple of events

An impromptu Spring Fling BBQ (professional chef Melissa whipping up a feast including steak sandwiches with orange and chili sauce):

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and a company-wide picnic capping off the season:

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Food, fun, friends.  What more could you ask for?

There’s still some sun left, so get out and make the most of it!

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