Geofrrey Smith: I to a healthcare system the other day. I I said to them, I said, do you take the pulse of your patients once a year? Then why are we viewing employee engagement as a once-a-year event or survey versus a living, breathing, real-time organism that can change shift to shift, patient to patient, team leader to team leader.

Jeff Ma: Hello and welcome to Love as a Business Strategy, a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business, but we want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from. We believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. I'm your host, Jeff Ma, and as always, I'm here to have conversations and hear stories from real people about real business and real life. My guest today is Geofrrey Smith, and Geofrrey brings over 25 years of diverse experience in human capital management, focusing on employee engagement, leadership development, and culture change. He's navigated careers from corporate leadership to building his own startup, and today he consults with innovative leaders in healthcare, helping them implement modern people and talent strategies to really impact caregivers, patients, and the world. So, Geofrrey, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Geofrrey Smith: I'm great. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited about this.

Jeff Ma: Jeff, the question I ask everyone right out the gate is, what is your passion and how did you find it?

Geofrrey Smith: Yeah, so my passion, um, is really on the employee experience, uh, particularly in healthcare. I have over 25 years as you mentioned, uh, in employee engagement, leadership development, culture change. But the last decade has been 100% dedicated to the healthcare industry. And where I've really found my passion and purpose over that time was really when my personal and professional lives collided, um, when I start to see the importance of my own work through the patient's eyes during my wife's battle with cancer. I got to see her firsthand hang on every word and instruction of the nurse that made her laugh and coincidentally tune out the physician that wouldn't make eye contact. So I really got to a point where I saw my business of employee experience in healthcare and saw how it truly impacted patients and their families and the ultimate patient outcomes. Um, for, for the people that are in the toughest time of their life, the biggest fight of their life. And I saw how transformative employees being truly engaged in their work is in impacting both, you know, patients and families alike.

Jeff Ma: Wow. So you had obviously a very, very impactful experience being on the patient side or with your wife. What happened specifically next, like you you you're experiencing this, you're seeing this, you're saying, wow, this matters. So what did you do with that? What did you do with that moment?

Geofrrey Smith: It's so I actually had my own kind of moment where everything became very clear on kind of a path to purpose. Um, I did, you know, I mentioned culture change, employee engagement, leadership development, those types of things. I like to say in many industries engagement can be quote unquote a buzzword. Um, but in healthcare, it's really a necessity for optimal patient outcomes. And I was one day I was spending I was doing an all-day workshop at a very large academic health system, over 25,000 employees in my backyard uh here in Connecticut. And we were doing an all day workshop on employee engagement and leadership development. We were bringing in different parts of the organization throughout the day, OD&LD for 90 minutes, um nurse leadership for 90 minutes, C-level. And we got halfway through the workshop and broke for lunch and coincidentally, uh both fortunately and unfortunately, my wife was 800 yards away in the cancer center, uh being prepped for a bone marrow transplant. I say fortunately because we have that system in our backyard. Uh unfortunately, obviously, she was going through it. So when we broke for lunch, I walked across the street, walked into my my wife's room. Her nurse had her arm around her and my wife was crying. And I just ran over and I said, 'Why are you crying?' And she said, 'Because Gloria didn't bring me my lunch today. Gloria sings to me when she brings me my lunch.' And it was just this really powerful moment that here I am talking to the CEO of a 27,000 employee health system with whiteboards and PowerPoints, you know, about how employee engagement impacts patient outcomes and a food service employee is impacting my wife's mood as she fights for her life. And it was just a moment of real reflection and real power to me. And when when I went back to the next session, there were actually a couple of people in the healthcare organization giving me and my colleague a little bit of a hard time saying, 'Hey, I see you how we could do a lot of these ideas with our nurses, but I'm not sure how we scale this across the organization.' And I just raised my hand, I said, 'Can I tell everyone a story? It's like 45 minutes old.' And the tenor of the meeting changed. It changed from whiteboards and PowerPoints to true human connection and how acts of love, compassion, and just authentic presence can be truly transformative. And every touch point at a healthcare system has an opportunity to create an extraordinary human experience or in some cases not so much. Um, and that started me down a path of really looking at my role in this high-paying cushy corporate job, um, how much of my time is spent doing things like that? How much of my time is is truly impacting both those that provide and receive care? And over the next few months, I really dug into how much of my work was meaningful and how much there was I was doing things that had nothing to do with patients' lives, nothing to do with getting our arms around nurse and clinician burnout and caregiver engagement. And I decided my role wasn't enough. I was only doing about a third of my time where I truly felt like I was making an impact on the on the world of healthcare on those that both provide and receive care. And I woke up one morning and just resigned and been on a path ever since for the last two years, um, trying to find where I can make the biggest impact on the world of healthcare.

Jeff Ma: Wow. That took a lot of courage, I'm sure. And here you are. How has, how, how have things been since that departure?

Geofrrey Smith: Well, I, I believe uncertainty can be empowering. I don't think I've ever found anything bigger in my life without walking through a phase of uncertainty first. Uh, I still after two years, I don't know if I've found exactly where I fit in and where I can make the biggest impact, but I have been absolutely every day I work I wake up and work on something I love. And I have had the privilege to collaborate with some of the world's leaders in both children and frontline well-being and mental health, nurse and clinician burnout, caregiver engagement, patient experience. I'm working on a project right now helping a a group of amazing innovative healthcare leaders create a model of love and compassion that can be delivered to healthcare organizations as systematic change. Uh with my entrepreneurial background, I've helped nurse and clinician entrepreneurs that are trying to build products for the front lines, by the front lines and help them launch their companies and products to market and and and help their amazing ideas see the light of day in a very difficult industry to get into. And it's just been very meaningful, impactful, purposeful, cathartic, rejuvenating. Um, up, you know, I've also, you know, started, you know, a podcast based on moments of experience inside healthcare and beyond, uh, that has been extremely rewarding, telling amazing stories of of people finding their purpose and being inspired to truly change an industry that has a hard time making a lot of change in it. I like to say healthcare is at the forefront of clinical innovation yet lags 30 plus years behind the private sector in people strategy.

Jeff Ma: I'm curious. So, doing away with kind of the, the kind of old work you were doing, if you found yourself in that, in that type of room again, whiteboards and PowerPoints, that kind of audience, what, what's your approach today? Like, what, what specifically do you work on and what do you, what do you bring to the table now?

Geofrrey Smith: Yeah, so I, I still find myself in those rooms, but working on the more purposeful side than maybe some of the other sides of human capital management that are more administrative, um, than truly impacting people's lives. Um, one of the things and I'll give a shout out to your book, your guys' book, um, Love is a business strategy and and one of the correlations to something I evangelize every day, I'll quote the book because I enjoyed it so much. Um, one person can change a team, a team can change a department, and a department can change an organization. That is an idea that I teach, that I've learned through research and um, about engagement of people. Okay? There there is a, in healthcare, many groups view engagement as an organizational metric. They view it top down. And when they measure top down, they really find themselves in a place where they have too much information and really cannot take action on it. So when I find myself in those rooms now, what I teach is a bottom-up, team-based approach to employee engagement. Because when we measure team by team, and this could apply to any industry, but in healthcare it's unique because many times the teams are dynamic in nature. They don't necessarily tree up to a traditional org chart. You know, environmental services is working with food service, working with social work, nurse, doctor, all on one team to provide, as I mentioned, either that extraordinary human experience or not. So when we start measuring engagement team by team, bottom up, what we find is where our pockets of brilliance are inside an organization. Where are the teams that are five out of five, all in engaged, where the food service employee is singing to my wife, where the environmental services person comes in and and calls us by name, you know, where the nurse leader teaches everyone on that floor to lead with compassion. And when we find those pockets of brilliance, what we now have is actionable. Because what we've also found is our best team leaders. And when we find our best team leaders, then we answer one question and one question only, and this is really what I teach healthcare organizations, is how do we make more teams like our best teams? By observing and measuring and executing in bite-sized pieces where the work is happening. And then learning why that floor is so successful or that team is so successful. And then we can model it. You know, not exactly because every leader has different strengths and but we can we can see things that are happening where in the parts of the organization where it's being done right.

Jeff Ma: I love that focus on on that example of of good good behavior essentially in the organizations. I think it's easy for us to center our conversations around the bad behavior and that's where my head goes because I'm all on board with obviously finding the All-Star teams, finding out the formula that works, figuring out and modeling. What about the, how do I put it? I guess, you know, misbehaved uh individuals, maybe a doctor who's not necessarily, you know, in it for the same reason or motivated by the same things, bedside manner isn't the best. What is I guess accountability or transformation in this sense look like in your book?

Geofrrey Smith: Well, the one thing I always caution people, and I I do this with my wife often when she comes back upset after being at a doctor's visit and the doctor was 45 minutes late and you know, maybe wasn't truly present, you know, in that. and I don't make excuses for the physicians or the nurses or you know, the caregivers in healthcare organizations, but we also have to understand the healthcare system was really never really designed. It just kind of evolved. And the broken systems they deal with. No one got into the healing arts because they weren't purposeful, because they weren't compassionate, because they weren't loving. But the healthcare system has kind of ripped it out of them and made it very difficult to have those compassionate, loving conversations because many times when a doctor enters a room, a stopwatch starts and they're being timed. So I always tell people just understand, and I don't give them an okay for poor behavior. But one thing we teach leaders inside of healthcare organizations is every single person, whether the burnout and the systems and the the employee health records, which are a real pain in the neck for caregivers. Um, regardless of all those challenges, we all have a choice of who we want to be in this life. And one of the things I talk a lot about to leaders, to physician leaders, to nurse leaders, is it's not we all know when we originally connected to purpose, right? And you know, when they chose to go into that. But many times what I'm encouraging leadership and um healthcare administration to help with is that reconnection to purpose after the broken systems have kind of dragged it out of us. It's created cynicism, it's created burnout, um, exhaustion, and things along those lines. So I think really what we try to do in those cases is really help get them back to that place they were when they decided they wanted to help people.

Jeff Ma: Is there a... okay, I'm not directly in the healthcare system. My my wife works in healthcare, so I have a window in as we discuss and talk about the stories. But I love the way you just framed it where the the system itself, the healthcare system has really beat the the passion out of people in a sense where it's difficult to still remain kind of altruistic at all times about everything. I get the sense at least that that's more common today than it's ever been after the pandemic, after where we're at today with just how insurance works, all this stuff. Um, put it together and you just have like this job that is more kind of overbearing than it's ever been and less about the actual care and and human element, more about the money and all these other processes. So that's my perspective. That's at least my like, you know, outside-in perspective. Um, so combine that, I guess, I guess make it make sense for me, I guess because how do we, yes, we want I'm 100% obviously with you on making sure every individual, every team, every, you know, there's an opportunity to make everything better at every level starting small, bottom up. But in your opinion, what where's the big picture lead as well? Where do we get out of this um systemically or just at a larger scale? Because that's that's a genuine concern of mine, right? Like where where do we go from here to bring humanity back to healthcare?

Geofrrey Smith: Yeah, that that is kind of the million-dollar question, isn't it? Um, it it's difficult because if you think about it, you know, me with my workforce background, um, I have a significant, I do speaking on, um, the demographic shift in the workforce. If we think about it, our largest generation, the baby boomers are rapidly retiring at a rate when we're having trouble getting people to come into the healthcare... so we have all of our baby boomer nurses retiring at the exact same time just because of age, they are going to need more care. And a lot of people talk about a nursing shortage. I will, I will correct that. We don't have a nursing shortage. We have a retention problem. 50% of nurses leave the bedside within two years of graduating nursing school. The younger generation has options, the younger generation views things differently. And how we do this is by modernizing how we view employee engagement, how we modernize getting our arms around the most critical workforce on the planet by looking at things differently. I to a healthcare system the other day and I I said to them, I said, do you take the pulse of your patients once a year? Then why are we viewing employee engagement as a once-a-year event or survey versus a living, breathing, real-time organism that can change shift to shift, patient to patient, team leader to team leader. So the idea is how do we engage our people? How do we turn a healthcare term is span of control. A lot of times a nurse leader will have 90 nurses under her. What I teach through that bottom-up approach through a strength-based lens is how do we turn a span of control into a span of attention? In employee engagement, the simple formula to employee engagement is do your employees feel seen, heard, valued? And I'll correlate that now to the patient. Does the patient feel seen, heard, cared for? That's patient engagement. And the other side is the employee engagement. If we can do that, if we can allow leaders to in a way, whether it's through technology or it's face-to-face, make all their employees feel seen, heard, valued, you will bring that humanity back to the system. But it's not it's no easy task and I'm not a um, I'm not a person that just blindly, I'm scared, quite frankly, for where healthcare is. Um, it is difficult to navigate. I have 20 I have over 25 years in employee benefits. Um, I work in healthcare, uh, I understand, you know, the healthcare benefits, I understand everything, I understand how to consume them. and I struggle like you mentioned, fighting for, you know, um, the insurance company and the healthcare organization and approvals and this and it's like, it's scary to me because I'm like, I understand all this stuff and I'm sometimes getting run over in both directions. What happens to the people that don't have 25 years of knowledge in this industry that I do? So that is very scary to me and I and I won't paint this with a completely glass half full, um, we got a lot of work to do and and we have to start looking at ways to innovate that aren't quote-unquote the way we've always done it. You know, and I'll quote the book again, Love is a business strategy. When you're willing to abandon old ways of working, you are ready for innovation. That was in the book talking about why change fails. You have to be willing to abandon the way you've always done it and that's where healthcare is lagging behind right now. And I'm trying every day to get them to innovate and think differently.

Jeff Ma: Yeah. And that's amazing work you're doing. And I'll tell you what, you you say 30 years behind, but that may be either giving other industries too much credit or or something. Because believe me, we wouldn't have wrote the book if um, you know, we were kind of on pace uh as an as a as a as a society because everything you just said, while it does have its unique trials and tribulations within healthcare, I mean, this is, this is, this is the work for for everyone right now. I think, you know, while there may not be patients, there's always that care and compassion that matters from employee engagement to just customer engagement and experiences in every industry that desperately need this kind of shift, um, this similarly. And so I think while your story center around healthcare, I really saw it as as as really a problem statement and and a solution and a goal for for everything because we're all sitting in this transformation right now. We're all working towards a similar goal. And so I think that's really, really relevant. It got me, it got me thinking as we talked about it.

Geofrrey Smith: And and I'll say you're right, it's not just healthcare. Um that's through the lens I view things today, but I've been in every industry. And I think you'll appreciate this. I'll tell you a system I built 25 years ago when I got into this business. It's called Red Light, Green Light. And what I do, the second I meet with an organization, whether it's manufacturing, advertising, healthcare, whatever the case may be, when I sit down with the decision maker, the people that truly drive the culture inside the organization, I get to the bottom of one question within the first 15 to 20 minutes. Do they view their people as their greatest asset or their largest expense? And what I can tell you in 25 years of bringing various human capital management, HR, technology, consulting, people projects, services, I have never successfully deployed any project with someone I deemed a red light after 15 minutes. So for all those people trying to make an impact in in culture and employee engagement or just any sort of people strategy inside of whatever industry you're in, don't beat your head against the wall and just find the green lights because they are out there. And that's what I do now is I don't spend my time on the people I already know I can't get through to because I have 25 years of research on it. You either get it or you don't. Your people are your greatest asset or they're your largest expense and there's not a lot of in between.

Jeff Ma: I love that. I didn't call it red light, green light, but similar lessons learned over the last decade for my side. So absolutely. Um, I used to, we used to have a chip on our shoulder as a team and be like, man, we got to, we got to get these, we'll just call them red lights for this situation. We got to get these red lights to see the light. We got to get them to turn around and we realized, you know what, let's help, let's help the green lights first. Let's get them going and we'll come we'll loop back around one day on these red lights.

Geofrrey Smith: Someone asked me one time, 'Have you ever changed a red light?' And I and I said, no. Um, what I have done is I have changed yellow lights. And how I view yellow lights are people that think like a green light but inside their organization are not empowered to innovate and make change. So there have been times I've worked with some yellow lights that aspired to be green lights and helped them build the business case to then flip some people that were holding them back.

Jeff Ma: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for the time you spent today, the stories you shared and just this perspective. It's been really awesome uh peering into healthcare with you, but also how that connects with really everything going on right now. It's very, very relatable. So thank you so much for sharing today.

Geofrrey Smith: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Jeff Ma: How can the audience get a hold of you, learn more, read more, maybe check out your podcast?

Geofrrey Smith: Yeah, so my website is www.mo-mentsofexperience.com. So moments of experience. Um the reason there's a dash between the um MO and the ments is my podcast is named after my 14-year-old Beagle Mo, who during a very difficult time um during for our family gave us moments of love, compassion and just brilliance that helped give us hope when we truly had none none for our own at that time. Uh so the podcast is really about inspiring stories of moments um from world's leading innovators on employee experience, which is my work, um patient experience, caregiver experience, and just plain human experience, which is all of our work. uh certainly at softway as well as what I do. So, um, they're really inspiring stories of the moments that shape us, move us and inspire us to pursue purposeful outcomes in healthcare and beyond, uh healthcare and in life.

Jeff Ma: So you can check out the website, you'll see pictures of my gorgeous Beagle Mo and uh you'll hear some inspiring stories of of people really finding their lane in life and meaning. Awesome. So be sure to check that out, moments of experience.com and if you haven't already, please check out Love as a business strategy, the book and please rate the book, rate the podcast and I'm sure rate Jeff's podcast as well, Moments of Experience. I'm sure you'd appreciate that. So with that, we hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll see you all again in two weeks. Hope you have a good one. Take care.