Commentary: Engaging productivity at Sharp HealthCare

Toward the end of each year, Sharp HealthCare “occupies” the San Diego Convention Center to host its all-staff event. Sharp commandeers most of Southern California's buses to transport its 22,000-plus community (employees, physicians, contract workers and volunteers) from eight staged locations. Think Woodstock with military precision.

This gathering is the marquee event of the Sharp Experience—an all-encompassing program to engage, inspire and motivate its employees. The system's workforce loves it. While attendance is voluntary, 98% (a record) registered for the 2014 event.

What is the all-staff event? It's part state-of-the-union, part revival, part vaudeville, part pep rally.

The 2014 event's theme, “Live Big. It's Your Legacy,” explored individual and collective identity. Outside the hall, exhibits invited participants to document their personal legacies, share their stories and contemplate their remaining “jelly beans” (days on the planet).

Inside the hall, program activities coalesced individual participants into a collective “whole” to celebrate and advance Sharp's health and wellness mission. Master of ceremonies (and CEO) Mike Murphy announced a new seventh “pillar of excellence” (safety) and recognized individual, team and division accomplishment in the other six pillars (quality, service, people, financial, growth and community).

Sharp's award-winning film team released four compelling videos documenting how the organization improves lives. Not a dry eye in the house. Elsewhere, the Sharp Choir sang. Senior leaders staged camp renditions of '70s game shows. Featured speakers testified on end-of-life care. Everybody danced.

What is the Sharp Experience really? It's healthcare's most advanced effort to improve productivity through workforce engagement. Since its 2001 launch, Sharp's productivity across all categories has skyrocketed. Operating in a tough market, Sharp HealthCare is a national leader in patient experience, employee satisfaction, productivity improvement and financial performance.

It's not accidental. The system's genius is recognizing that custodians and kitchen staff are just as important to organizational productivity and customer experience as nurses and doctors.

Managerial science lags behind real science by 50 to 70 years. Most healthcare companies employ time and engineering science to enhance productivity. It's not enough. Human beings require autonomy, connectivity and a sense of purpose to operate at the highest performance levels.

Our biology confirms this. At the dawn of life, single-cell organisms inhabited our planet. Over time, cells combined and specialized to form more-complex species, culminating in human beings.

The Sharp Experience illuminates how biology works within high-performance cultures. Individuals combine and specialize to act with single purpose. In essence, the organization and its people become a single, high-functioning organism.

Sitting in the audience, I felt both the collective energy and my connection to healthcare's larger purpose: to provide better, more affordable and more convenient healthcare for all Americans. We cannot achieve that vision without fully engaging all of us who work in healthcare. That is my Sharp experience.

David Johnson spent 28 years as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and BMO Capital Markets before launching 4sight Health, a boutique healthcare advisory and venture investment firm.