Learning from the Best: Redbrick Health (#25)
Finding the right answers to making a small business work is not always easy. Good thing there are leaders making it work whom we can learn from.
From the annual Best Companies to Work For survey by the Great Place to Work Institute and SHRM, we have 25 Best Small Companies and 25 Best Medium Companies.
Here’s a snippet about the 25th Best Small Company, Redbrick Health.
RedBrick Health, an entirely new kind of health company headquartered in Minneapolis, was founded in 2006 to provide a unique, smart and fair solution to the challenge of rising health care costs. We combine behavior-based health financing with personalized programs and independent advocates, helping self-insured, Fortune 1000 companies and their employees experience all the rewards of better health.
Hmm, only 3 years old and already in the top 25 Best Small Companies.
So what do they provide?
RedBrick’s Health EarningsTM System reverses the continuing spiral of escalating costs and decreased health status. First, we work with employers to create and administer a financing framework where an individual’s share of health care cost depends on how they engage in their health. Second, we make it easy for those individuals to engage. Through behavior-based financing, personalized health and wellness programs and independent advocates we help everyone experience the rewards of better health.
There’s something interesting here. RH is focusing on a critical need in today’s business and social environment (health care) and doing it in a way that requires their customer and the customer’s employees to be actively engaged in the issue, where it counts (the pocketbook).
But how did they get onto the “Best” List?
According to the report in HR Magazine,”…managers’ adherence to core values, including financial accountability and employee empowerment, keeps staff energized.”
So what’s to learn? A few key things:
- Anyone can create a great workplace.
- A focus on a critical need will get people more excited about working for you. This is about tapping into the deeper aspect of what people want to achieve. We all want to be part of something meaningful. It may seem like some people are just “working at a job;” more likely than not, the job does not engage their hearts (or perhaps more accurately, their hearts are focused elsewhere, and maybe they should be somewhere else…).
- Defining and focusing on core values is critical. If you don’t have a set of core values for what your organization is, figure them out. And I’m not talking about “delivering the best widget.” Core values are things like quality, innovation, speed, and trust, or as in the case with RH – employee empowerment. If you think you have core values, and your people aren’t engaged, perhaps those core values aren’t truly influencing the organization. Or the people you have onboard have different core values.
While every business cannot be in the Best 25 list, every business can be a Best Place to Work.
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