By MARTY LEVINE
Two years ago, when UPMC once again sent its annual employee satisfaction survey to its many workers who are also Pitt employees, Nichole Lakic realized that Pitt does not do anything similar.
UPMC asks its employees to “address your deficiencies, capitalize on your strengths,” said Lakic, executive administrator in the School of Medicine’s Department of Medicine — and come up with future plans and programs.
So Lakic, with the department’s chair and other leaders, got together to start People First, which aims to accomplish the above for the departments of Medicine, Dermatology and Family Medicine — and, eventually, become a model for others to duplicate the program within Pitt.
Lakic realized that a leaders-only group would not serve this purpose: “We needed to come up with some type of organization that is grassroots,” devise their own employee satisfaction survey and refine the group’s focus to a few areas.
The group formed a steering committee and chose five focus areas: career pathing and mentorship; communications; employee wellness; onboarding; and organizational culture, with teams of 12 to 20 volunteers tackling each subject.
It is vital that the survey and the group’s volunteers all come from within People First, rather than from, say, Human Resources, Lakic said: “If HR were doing it, the results wouldn't be as impactful. You have the people living it, creating it — they own it and when they try something and it doesn't work, it's, ‘Hey guys, what do you think we ought to do?’” — rather than looking back to HR for a solution.
Broad employee representation on the committees — different genders, leadership levels, job types — “really allows us to capture what we need to,” she said.
“What this team has been able to accomplish over the past two years has been unbelievable,” Lakic added.
The career pathing and mentorship group, for instance, has devised a program that solicits potential mentors, “with the goal in mind that everybody deserves a mentor,” Lakic said. It matches mentor and mentee and offers mentors basic rules and helpful tips for effective coaching, with the goal of creating more formal mentor training in the future.
The communications group publicizes events to bring employees together and is in charge of the People First website and each year’s survey, while the wellness group organizes a weekly wellness walk on campus for a varied group to get out of the office and talk with new colleagues, among other activities.
The onboarding team directs new hires to useful documents and tools and aims to help employees fit into both Pitt and UPMC, which has required the creation of organizational charts, as well as guides to “where to go to get things and what are the basic things that everybody needs to know,” Lakic said. New employee retention has increased as a result, she added.
The organizational culture team has “taken charge of service (projects) and creating the sense of pride in the place you work. What can we do collectively to come together and feel good about what we do?”
Co-leader of the organizational culture team is Wendy Romeo, executive administrator in the Division of Medicine (overseeing the Division of Geriatric Medicine and the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition).
“We are seeing relationships made that most likely would never have been made” without People First, Romeo said. “When there is an issue to be solved or problem to be managed ... because there is a relationship that has been built, people are coming together who would never come together before, who are looking to make the experiences better at the University and at UPMC.
“Two years ago, when we started,” she said, “this remote work concept was new to everyone — everyone was just working so fast to adapt that there really were no guidelines in place about what is acceptable and what is not.”
So the occupational culture put those guidelines together for employes of the three departments in the organization. “People didn't know what was going on at all times and why decisions were being made. Our transparency group really helps team members to understand the ‘why’” about departmental and Pitt practices.
Why get involved with People First’s organizational culture team?
“When one person thinks about whether I fit or not into that organization, really what they are thinking about is the organizational culture, one that has the same characteristics and values that align with their own,” Romeo said.
“In any organization there are people that want to make change,” she added. “The hard part is empowering people to really lean in and want to be a part of actively creating what the change would look like and implementing that change. This was an attempt to bring people out of their silos and realize we can learn a lot from each other and make changes across both organizations.”
The service projects her team has led have really brought employees together, Romeo said. They include last year’s Snuggles for Seniors, for which volunteers made more than 160 blankets to deliver to local nursing homes — getting to network and do good for others at the same time.
This year’s projects include Hugs for the Unhoused, another blanket-making project to benefit local shelters, particularly a street medicine program run by a Pitt physician with participants from across many medical school positions. Caps for a Cause also has People First members competing to collect the most recyclable bottle caps that will be turned into everything from benches to raised planting bed — thanks to an Indiana factory — to be placed at local facilities.
“Really engaging people at every level of the organization can create lasting and meaningful change,” Romeo said. “This has gone from a committee to almost a movement.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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