The following transcript is provided unedited.
Julie Orchard:
So we had to figure out how we were going to engage our community in healthcare and my boss at the time, his name’s Brian Fix, was amazing in the way he put this forward. He goes, “Julie, I want you to work on a pipeline for MAs and I want to end poverty in Spokane.” And I paused and I’m like, “I’m in, how are we going to do this?”
Tony Lee:
Welcome to the HR Storyteller podcast series from the Society for Human Resource Management. I’m your host, Tony Lee, Head of Content here at SHRM. Thank you for joining us. Our HR Storyteller podcasts feature practitioners and thought leaders and human resources, sharing stories about why they love HR, what motivates them, and what’s moved them in their careers. Today, we’re joined by Julie Orchard. She’s the Washington Montana HR Strategic Program Manager for Providence St. Joseph Health in Spokane, Washington. Julie, welcome.
Julie Orchard:
Thank you so much.
Tony Lee:
We’re thrilled to have you, so you have an interesting story to share.
Julie Orchard:
I do have an interesting story to share. When I came into the field of HR, I kind of came in through the back door, if you will. I had a technical writing degree and I went to work for a Fortune 500 company and there we had an OFCCP audit. So nerd alert, once we went through the debrief from the audit, oh, that’s why we fill out the I-9s. Oh, that’s why we do all this stuff.
And I was in from that moment and I knew there was a lot of administrative work around HR. And then the more I started taking note of the other things, like new hire orientation and benefits and safety, I started asking for more and more of those duties because I really enjoyed them and saw how they connected with people. And it just took off from there. And then I became SHRM certified and started participating and volunteering on boards. And I’ve been just a huge proponent of the HR profession ever since.
Tony Lee:
That’s great. So you have writing talent. Does that come into play in your HR career?
Julie Orchard:
Really just the communication piece with memos and business cases and SWAT analysis and things like that. Definitely, you need good communication no matter what you’re going to be in. So it definitely had a hand.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. Boy, I got to ask. So what about the OSCCP audit that hooked you?
Julie Orchard:
Well, since I didn’t come in through normal channels, I was told, make sure these forms are filled out, make sure you’re filing these things appropriately, make sure you’re doing things this way. And I got most of my guidance from the HR department. And at that time, there was one HR manager and one HR assistant for 1,000 people in the Northwest for that organization. And so a lot of it fell onto your local person who was over about 250 people.
So I did as I was told. And then when the OFCCP came, oh, this is why I’m doing this. And then it was so much more important. We got out of that audit very well. And I was like, wow, I must be doing okay. So I think understanding the black and whiteness of just that, got me into, well, I can do this. And then I started understanding the more gray areas, and then it became much more human contact and human interaction, and how can I help this person live a better life?
Tony Lee:
What fascinates me is that so many people get into HR because they’re people persons, right and the other stuff, the paperwork they do, because they have to, but you seem to have an affinity maybe for the paperwork, for the nuts and bolts of HR.
Julie Orchard:
That’s how I started because I really connected with the profession in that way, at first. I was always very social with people in general. And that emotional intelligence piece, I think I had early on. My English teacher, we had to do this project and I had the whole class crying. And he’s like, you really should think about something in English. You should get an English major. So did in the way of technical writing and that’s how I got in. And then just doing the black and white pieces and understanding how that all fit, then allowed me to go back to that personal level and bring that forward.
Tony Lee:
So if you were advising somebody in HR, maybe somebody who’s new, who’s a people person and fearful of all the other stuff, what guidance would you give?
Julie Orchard:
Oh my gosh. I would say hands down, this is not the hard area. The black and white, the checking, the boxes. That’s easy. You can learn that. If you can connect with people, you’re in. This is exactly the role for you.
Tony Lee:
So you’re in a profession, in an industry that’s undergone a lot of change in healthcare, in the last few years, especially. What’s it been to be an HR professional in healthcare?
Julie Orchard:
So I had been in nonprofit world and I’m in a nonprofit still, but in a hospital system. I was excited about it because I knew it needed to change. It was that Titanic that takes forever to turn, but you knew things had to change for healthcare. It just could not continue the way it was going. So I knew there was opportunity for change there. And I felt because I didn’t have that experience, I could bring the experience from other businesses on how to change and that you needed to.
I’m a big proponent of free market and business and lots of innovation and ability to move and adapt, and that is not typically healthcare. So I was super excited about that opportunity. That’s what I thought going in. And then once I got in there, it was like, oh man, I’ve got a steep learning curve here. I worked for a medical group, so it was all the physicians and all the clinics. And there was about 60 clinics. And just learning the practice manager and what they’re up against in a clinic and then the physicians and what they’re up against and staffing for that type of role and all the certifications.
And so it was a steep learning curve, but once I got in there and our leadership is so great that they are already, we need to change. So they were already in that mindset by the time I got there. And then I took a role as an HR manager with the acute side of the business, two weeks before the pandemic. So at least I had some semblance of what I was getting into, but the pandemic really changed everything really dramatically.
I am proud to say that the organization I work for was already working on pipelines for RN, working on pipelines for MA, for nursing assistants before the pandemic. So I think we’re still down a bunch of staff, but we are definitely, we were primed a little bit more than other organizations because of the pipelines we were building.
Tony Lee:
So as an HR professional, what are you proudest of, of what you’ve accomplished there the last couple of years?
Julie Orchard:
So when I started with the medical group, there was a problem with medical assistants and being able to have enough. We were losing like 400 a year. Now we’re a huge organization. There’s like 110,000 in our system. And we had about 700 MAs and we were losing quite a few of them. So we had to figure out how are we were going to engage our community in healthcare. And my boss at the time, his name’s Brian Fix was amazing in the way he put this forward. He goes, “Julie, I want you to work on a pipeline for MAs and I want to end poverty in Spokane.”
And I paused and I’m like, “I’m in, how are we going to do this?” So it was great to have the opportunity to work the MA pipeline, but then when you put the hook of let’s end poverty in Spokane, that gave it a whole different twist. And now we had this big, hairy, audacious goal and I was in. So we started partnering with the technical high schools in our area and some places where kids on the margins, were going for assistance, career assistance, guidance, getting your GED.
So we started partnering with those organizations and getting out to the kids, explaining what it was like. You don’t have to be a doctor. You don’t have to be a PA, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to be in healthcare. You can be you and we’ll train you. So we brought them into an apprentice program and we hired them right out of high school. That’s all they had to have was their GED. And then they came into an apprentice program with Providence, and so they would work. They had to work 2000 hours in a year and they had to take some educational pieces on the back end, which we paid for, for them.
So they were earning a great wage, had a full-time job with benefits, with vacation, took the schooling behind it. And then at the end, they tested and then got their certification and then we brought them right into the organization and asked them to stay with us for two years to pay back all the money that we had invested in them. So we cut down first year turnover, regular turnover. We were engaging people from communities that had never thought about healthcare before. And I know for certain, having watched a few of those cohorts go through, we changed lives.
Tony Lee:
Wow.
Julie Orchard:
For sure. And it’s very impactful and I’m very inspired by it and excited about it.
Tony Lee:
That is a wonderful story. And not only that, it’s a tribute to alternative credentials, to the idea of not requiring college or-
Julie Orchard:
Exactly. Yes.
Tony Lee:
It’s looking beyond the traditional requirements.
Julie Orchard:
Yes. I have listened to, I’m a huge fan of Mike Rowe and his whole job works thing and college is not for everybody and it could be later down the road. But I remember, I had no clue what I wanted to do when I went to college. And then I futzed around for two years until I found what I wanted to do, and that’s fine for people too. The crippling debt that people come out with, I don’t know how you move on from that.
So I’m a huge proponent of, if you want to go work and explore, go do that. College will be there. It will be there and you’ll have some money to pay for it. And you won’t have to take out loans. And I’m a huge proponent for doing things a little bit differently.
Tony Lee:
And it sounds like you hit the untapped talent pool in Spokane as well. I mean, I guess people with criminal histories, perhaps people who-
Julie Orchard:
That’s a little tougher because we have DSHS rules about vulnerable people. So we’re trying to figure out how we can bring folks in from that population in, and it’s been a struggle.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s tough. So how many HR professionals are in your organization?
Julie Orchard:
Oh my gosh. I think we have like 500.
Tony Lee:
Wow.
Julie Orchard:
Yeah. It’s huge.
Tony Lee:
So do you feel a sense of support when you work because a lot of their departments of one, if they’re doing everything, they’re people at small companies, what’s it like to have 500 HR colleagues?
Julie Orchard:
It’s pretty great. It’s a matrix organization. So I don’t know who to reach out to most of the time, but I might know someone who knows someone that finally gets us there. It was wonderful to come from being an HR director with a staff of three, to the big organization, because now I didn’t have to worry about the reporting anymore. There were folks who did that and I could really concentrate. When I came in, I was an HR business partner. I could concentrate on my portfolio and really get much more strategic about where do we need to go? What leader needs training? Do we understand that they really affect 100 people? And if 100 people are having a bad experience, we’ve got a bad problem. So I really enjoyed getting to the strategy of it all and making that portfolio stronger.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. What’s the biggest challenge that you have. I mean, it sounds like you’ve really turned a corner and done some amazing things. Is it working with doctors, working with managers, working with senior leaders? What were the challenges?
Julie Orchard:
I would definitely say doctors are informal leaders and some of them just want to be doctors, but when you’re in a clinic environment, people look to you and you’re a leader, you’re a informal leader. And I don’t know that they understand that. So I think we have a big opportunity to do some training in that way of, you are running the clinic, whether you are one of three doctors or one of 10 doctors and people look to you as that informal leader and your words matter.
So if you say some things that fall on people, that starts setting the culture. And so really having those physicians understand that’s part of their work too, fantastic doctors. I mean, we all are good at something and then some things aren’t so great. So it’s just a matter of bolstering that up.
Tony Lee:
Keeping healthcare professionals on staff and not jumping to the next great opportunity. I mean, traveling nurses are making more money than … It’s crazy. What’s the secret or is there one?
Julie Orchard:
Yeah, that’s a great question. When I took the HR manager role, I also took on the travelers and I watched that cost just go over the top and I got, everybody needed them, everybody needed them and it was critical and it was just gut wrenching to watch, know that people were going without staff and super tired. I mean, did we think this was going to go on this long? It’s not even a marathon at this point, it’s waiting for the next wave and just trying to do your best when there’s a little bit of downtime.
But the traveler piece, it’s trying to make our environment sticky once they get there. Isn’t Spokane great? Weather’s always unique and wonderful for whatever it is at the time. We’ve got ski hills, we’ve got outdoors, we’ve got four seasons. We’ve got great colleges. We’ve got great schools. People are great here. And just trying to make it sticky internally as well with the staff that we have and the doctors and the patients. And so trying to make that sticky, so they stay.
We’re looking at anything and everything, to pipelines that we already had established for bringing nurses from college and having them work as a nurse tech for 20 hours a week and then hiring them on when they graduate. We’re running into the schools not having enough nurses to teach. So now what are we doing to help bolster our universities with our ends, when we have very few options, but we’re looking at how we can partner better with our community to provide better service and make things sticky for people.
Tony Lee:
And what role does the organization’s culture have in all of that?
Julie Orchard:
A ton, a ton. Our survey that we had last October, how many people resonate with our mission? And it’s like 93%. I have never seen anything so high. So the people who want to be at Providence St. Joseph are mission focused and continuing to put the mission in front of our staff all the time and live it. Not just me, not just my boss, not the RN next door, the doctor next door, everybody. So I think that putting that mission in front of people continually and keeping them grounded in that is, I would say it is a little bit of a challenge because of the competing priorities, but that’s something that we continually do to make sure that we are making the culture what we want it to be, and that will make it sticky. And people who want to be there, will be there. People who leave that don’t have a connection with, it’s probably an okay thing.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. Well, wonderful stories. Thank you so much, Julie Orchard, for sharing what life is like as an HR professional in the healthcare space, not an easy thing. You can hear all of our HR Storyteller Podcast by visiting our website at shrm.org/podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
Julie Orchard:
Thank you for having me.