Cancer diagnostics provider Clarient has nearly tripled from 135 to 391 employees in the past 4½ years and gone from making $500,000 in the first month of its existence, January 2005, to $28.7 million in the second quarter of 2010.
Naturally, there have been growing pains along the way, but CEO Ronnie Andrews says the organization's open culture and tolerance for risk-taking have helped ease those pains and keep Clarient's growth moving forward.
“Nobody gets fired for making a mistake,” he says. “People feel a sense of empowerment here. Their job matters. Their decisions matter.”
Based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., Clarient earned the distinction of Best Place to Work in Healthcare among medium-sized companies—those with 100 to 999 employees—and the third-best overall. Clarient applied for the program last year but did not get the minimum response rate from employees to qualify.
View the ranked list of the 100 Best Places to Work in Healthcare for 2010
View the ranked list of the Medium Employers categoryThe company's open culture goes both ways, Andrews says. “We get the team in a huddle and tell it like it is: ‘It's going to be a tough week, or a tough month,' ” he says.
In the other direction, “Every employee here knows that if they can't go to their supervisor, their manager, they can, for lack of a better word, go up the chain,” says Sherrie Kline, senior director of human resources. “There's no retribution. There's no punishment. We want to know what's going on.”
Occasionally, Clarient has parted ways with managers who did not appreciate that aspect of the culture, Andrews says. “It seems to permeate. Sometimes we have to weed out the people who don't play the game that way, and that's tough,” he says. “But we send the message that we're very open and transparent.”
Trust and communication were among the most important differentiators among respondents from medium-sized companies that made the top 100 list and the overall pool of those that applied to be Best Places to Work, according to an analysis by Modern Healthcare partner Best Companies Group.
Asked if leaders were open to employee input, 79% of the total said yes, while 88% of those from top 100 companies did so. The difference on the question of whether corporate communication is detailed enough was 81% vs. 91%; financial information communicated well, 76% vs. 86%; changes well-communicated, 75% vs. 85%; and organizational communication trustworthy, 79% vs. 89%.
Recruiting and retention has been essential to Clarient's growth because even in near-double-digit unemployment, the specialized nature of the company's work means many of those it recruits have plenty of options.
“In this current environment, you'd think there were plenty of people out there,” Andrews says. “I would expect the unemployment rate for some of the types of people we hire is 0%.”
A central motivator for employees at Clarient is the company's mission and servant-leader culture around helping cure cancer patients, Andrews says. “None of us is more important than the patient at the other end. That holds us together and keeps us strong through good and bad,” he says. “Because people are struggling with a ‘deadline' disease, it helps us all rally and focus.”
Clarient has helped maintain that atmosphere with holiday bonuses of up to 2% of salary if employees met certain metrics. They boosted that to 3% this past year as the company became profitable for the first time, he says. Given the challenging hiring market the company faces in certain specialties, employees receive $1,000 for referrals who are hired—and more than one-third of positions are filled that way.
Clarient pays its employees well—exempt salaries average $123,571 and nonexempt $53,363—and the company has absorbed 100% of increases in healthcare premiums for the past three years, paying more than 75% of medical, prescription and dental coverage, and 100% of life and disability.
Among all medium-sized employers that applied to be Best Places to Work, 73% of respondents said their pay was fair, compared with 82% of those from top 100 companies. Overall, the divergence on whether benefits were fair tallied 77% vs. 88%; amount of healthcare paid, 74% vs. 86%; and both dental and disability had the same 77% vs. 87% spread as benefits overall.
Clarient has put into place the architecture and has been working to flesh out a Clarient University program that provides employees with career and life skills that go beyond technical details needed to meet regulatory requirements, Andrews says.
“We give folks a chance to stretch beyond what they think they can do,” he says. “We have a dialogue with people: ‘Here are where your skills are, here are your career aspirations.' We want to make sure there are programs within Clarient where they can go get those skills.”
“One of our mottos is, ‘Train them to go, but motivate them to stay,' ” Kline adds. The company has seen voluntary turnover of only 9% in the past year.
Training and advancement proved to be another important differentiator for top 100 medium-sized companies. The question of whether “my supervisor helps me develop to my fullest potential” received an affirmative response from 81% of total respondents and 88% of those from top 100 firms; ongoing training is adequate, 82% vs. 89%; expectations for advancement are clear, 72% vs. 80%; and what the company says about advancement can be trusted, 71% vs. 81%.
Employees at Clarient also have unified around a philanthropic spirit—particularly through the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, where the company is a bronze sponsor and consistently among the top 10 in Orange County, Calif., in money raised, despite being the 60th or 70th largest company in Orange County supporting the race, Andrews says.
“Our tag line is ‘Taking cancer personally.' Employees put energy behind it,” he says.
During the recession, Clarient has looked out for employees and their families—and employees have looked out for one another, Andrews says. When gas prices soared, the company gave bi-weekly $25 gas cards to those below management level—and Andrews has heard that employees living nearby gave theirs to those who commute from Los Angeles and other, more far-flung locales.
“Even when the recession hit, we were still growing as a company,” Andrews says. “We didn't cut back and drive more earnings. We said, ‘We're going to stay with our plan, and keep hiring people, and not put more pressure on the team to do more with less.' ”
