Benchmarking

At Change Healthcare, our customer focus means we maintain a healthy dose of humility and constantly ask our customers how we can serve them better and improve our products and services. We also continually seek to find other organizations that are similarly customer-focused and see if we can learn from them. One such organization that is particularly relevant to our Technology-Enabled Services’ business is Accenture, one of the world’s largest professional services firms with 624,000 employees worldwide. Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO, as well as Jimmy Etheredge, CEO – North America agreed to let us benchmark against them in 2022. Earlier this month, I met with Julie. I thought some of her strategic insights from leading Accenture were very applicable to our company and business leadership in general, especially post-pandemic.

She noted that Accenture focuses on “relevance” and “results” – ensuring what they are doing is aligned with their customers’ needs and that their gains are aligned with their customer’s benefits. This reminded me of our practice of ensuring the customer ROI from all of our product and service offerings is clear, validated and compelling – and if it isn’t, we don’t bother them with that offering given we typically have many other reasons to invest in a long-term customer relationship, given our broad services and product portfolio and our ambition.?

Over the past year or so, in the midst of a global pandemic, Accenture hired over 100,000 new employees. Julie and her team focus on hiring as a core competency, as we do at Change Healthcare. The key attributes they look for in job candidates is a thirst for learning (and “learning agility”, given the topics to learn about over the next couple of decades of anyone’s career may not even by identified today) underpinned by a general curiosity. This reminded me of the curiosity and thirst for learning among Change Healthcare employees. Virtually everyone in our company has completed our Innovation Framework Level 1 skills curriculum. Now people are engaged in our Statistical Thinking curriculum and some have decided to progress to Level 2 for some of the skills within the Innovation Framework. I am sure some will further progress to Level 3 (“mastery”) for some of the Innovation Framework skills.

As a public company like Change Healthcare, Accenture has to balance many constituencies and priorities. We talked about how we both strive to lead by example and given our companies’ customer focus, how we try to spend as much time as possible with customers and partners – where Julie spends 50% of her time. I told her that I was particularly proud of our senior leadership team in this regard both for how they have sought to do this in the past and do so now (even if it is by Teams or Zoom). I noted that one of our senior leaders leveraged his own OKRs to ensure he logged a minimum number of customer meetings/videoconferences every week, as a way of using our performance management system to support his own improvement. Much like each Change Healthcare senior leadership team member shares their OKR “scorecard” each quarter with their teams and (for the executive leadership team) with the company, Julie shares the results of how she spends her time each quarter with her partners – she calls it the “proximity imperative.”

I’m sure we’ll learn more when we engage with Accenture next year, as well as the other companies we benchmark with, but it was great to get this preview.