Medtech Snapshot: Creating Quality Focused Teams Who Impact Patient Advocacy

Medtech Snapshot episode #124 features COO Graydon Hansen walking us through how you ensure every teammate within the organization is a quality disciple and advancing patient advocacy.

Graydon's insights
1. management does daily floor walks
2. respond to every issue raised by your employees
3. help employees understand how our tech impacts the patient
4. ensure employees know how their jobs align with the bigger picture

READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW

Welcome back to another MedTech Snapshot, the podcast where we discuss all things MedTech. One question, one answer. It's a highly digest discussion.

So, joining me today is COO, Graydon Hanson. Graydon's going to share with us a variety of things as it relates to global operations. So, I'm really looking forward to this discussion.

All right, Graydon. So, I'd like to look at, you know, we're still in this discussion about our teams, right? But I'd really like to look at another part of it, which is kind of that ownership of quality and patient advocacy. So, can you kind of walk us through, in your experience, how do you ensure every team member within the organization is a quality disciple and someone who really is advancing patient advocacy? You bet.

I think the first thing is you have to make sure that people are connected with the organization. And there's a lot of dialogue about that. People talk about building trust.

I like to refer to it more as about building a relationship because trust is part of a healthy relationship, but a relationship is a two-way street. So, for example, very simple things. When you're walking the floor, it should be every day.

Leaders could be out on the floor every day. Back to my China plan experience, I'd walk the floor every day in the first month or so, people started taking their in trouble because that's not the background culture in China. When they finally realized I was there to support them and help them, when I started solving what some people would think of as trivial problems, but to the operators, they were not trivial problems.

Started really facilitating solving those problems and making people realize that we had their back. Then in our quarterly all-hands meetings, people would raise issues. Some were fairly straightforward and simple.

Some were quite complex. But to make sure that your people get a response to every issue raised, even if the response is, hey, we looked at that, we're not going to do anything, but here's why. Leadership should be going to where the operators are.

Don't catch them in the hall or go in the break room when you see them on break. Go out of the floor, be gowned up, talk to them in their environment. Ultimately, you build that relationship with people that are connected to the business.

The next phase of this, and these stages can lead, of course, but the next phase is to make sure that your people have a very clear understanding of the technology, the product itself, why your product changes lives. I worked for a company once where someone was so patient, was so enamored with the product that she purchased from us and had implanted in her body, that she had the prescription tattooed on her forearm. It literally changed her life.

It was a career enabler for her. Stories like that, even sometimes patients coming in and speaking, making sure that your people understand that what you have is a life-changing technology, whether it be a joint, an implant in the eye, or something else. It can be life-changing in many cases.

The next level of this, and again, these can all be interwoven and conducted in parallel, but the next part of this is to make sure that they have profound knowledge of how their step in the process impacts the patient. If someone is performing a particular task, for example, doing the optical inspection, putting the prescription on the lens from that, to make sure they understand, look, if there's an error or something goes awry in this step, and the wrong lens is implanted in someone's eye, for example, that's a problem. You want to make sure that that person understands, intimately, how their exact process that impacts the patient.

You put that all through the process with all your operators, all your people that are converting material. The last step, then, is to ensure that they have a voice. That goes back to building that relationship.

What happens when you really develop this culture, and it doesn't happen overnight, but you develop this culture, and you go out on the floor in your daily walkthroughs, and you will inadvertently have numerous people raising quality issues if there are issues, and again, you have to respond, even if it's, I'll get back to you later, have that culture when you come out on the floor the next day, the next week with a response to them. But if people have what I like to call profound knowledge, which is a very deep and intimate understanding of the technology and how their process that impacts that, and they're connected to your business, you have a good relationship with them, they know that you have their back, and obviously, if you have low turnover, back to the earlier question, if you're making these investments in culture and you're turning labor 50, 70%, this isn't going to work, but you have low turnover, so you're investing in your people, you'll end up with quality advocates, and people will be aggressively and assertively stepping up and speaking up when there's any issues that are happening that may impact product quality, which ultimately is efficacy and safety of the patient.