Read this if you are a State Medicaid Director, State Medicaid Chief Information Officer, State Medicaid Project Manager, or State Procurement Officer—or if you work on a State Medicaid Enterprise System (MES) certification or modernization efforts.
The companion podcast to this article, Organization development: Preparing for Medicaid Enterprise Systems (MES) modernization, can be found in our virtual library.
What is organization development (OD)?
The purpose of OD is to improve organizational performance and outcomes. OD focuses on improving an organization’s capability through the alignment of strategy, structure, people, rewards, systems, metrics, and management processes.
OD is a science-backed, interdisciplinary field rooted in psychology, culture, innovation, social sciences, quality management, project management, adult learning, human resource management, change management, organization behavior, and research analysis and design, among others.
OD typically starts with a clear sense of mission, vision, and values that answers the question “what we are trying to be?” OD develops the culture and behaviors that reflect the organizational values.
OD facilitates the transformation of the workplace culture to become strategic, meaning: vision-driven, values-based, and goals-aligned. This may include talent development for leaders and staff and redesigning organizational infrastructure.
What is the scope of an OD effort?
OD efforts are most effective when they encompass the entire organization becoming the basis for a strategic plan. OD can be just as effective when applied to a MES modernization project. In this application of OD, we facilitate stakeholder engagement with the intent of person-centered service, concurrent design for operations, processes, and training side-by-side with the systems design and development. This approach is also referred to as human-centered design (HCD).
Regardless of the scope, OD reinforces benchmarks of high-performance organizations including:
- Transparent and data-informed decision making
- Developed leadership building connections with consistent expectations
- Culture of continuous improvement and innovation
- Team-based success and ownership for outcomes
- Person-centered service
What does OD look like in action?
We facilitate leaders to assess their organization through the eyes of stakeholders, particularly staff and people served. Collaboratively, with no blame or shame, the leaders articulate where they are today and where they need to be in the future, and build a roadmap or strategic plan to get there. In the assessment and roadmap we use the following six focal points of the organization:
- Excellent leadership
- Effective strategy
- A workforce that is confident, competent, consistent, and compassionate
- Quality operations and process improvement
- Person-centered service that results in a positive client experience
- Quality program outcomes for the communities served
The roadmap or strategic plan typically includes talent development, and redesign of the infrastructure, including structure, processes, communication mechanisms, performance management processes, deployment of resources, and job skills development approaches.
Talent development ensures that your leaders are aligned, prepared, and most importantly leading and inspiring their people toward that vision and the development of the workforce. Talent development provides staff with the skills, knowledge, and abilities needed, and reinforces positive attitudes, beliefs, and willingness to work together towards common goals. This might also include restructuring business process redesign, it might include expanding roles or shifting roles.
Principles of lean are an important component of organization development when redesigning processes and helps organizations, such as state Medicaid agencies, do more with the current resources. With so many constraints placed on organizations, the lean approach is a critical component of optimizing existing resources and finding cost savings through changing “what we do” and “how we do it”, as opposed to cutting “what we do” or “changing who does it”. Resource optimization is just one of the benefits of organization development.
Why is it important to redesign your organization and develop your staff when you're implementing a new technology system, such as a new Medicaid Enterprise System module?
For state Medicaid Agencies, the organization goal isn't to modernize a system, the goal is for competent and compassionate staff serving clients and providers to improve health and wellness in our communities. Our goal is streamlined processes that improve accuracy and timeliness. Look at the outcomes of the program, then design the systems that enable business processes and the people who make that process happen every single day. We go back to why we are doing anything in the first place. Why do we need this change? What are we trying to accomplish? If we're trying to accomplish better service, a healthier community, and streamline processes so we are cost effective, then it leads us to modernizing our enterprise system and making sure that our people are prepared to be successful in using that system. Aligning to the organizational goals, or what we call the North Star, sets us up for success with the enterprise efforts and the human efforts.
What can clients do to navigate some of the uncertainties of a modernization effort, and how can they prepare their staff for what's next?
First articulate the goals or why you want the modernization, and build a foundation with aligned, and effective leaders. Assess the needs of the organization from a “social” or people perspective and a technical or systems perspective (note: BerryDunn uses a socio-technical systems design approach). Then, engage staff to develop a high-performance, team-based culture to improve lean processes. Design and develop the system to enable lean business processes and concurrently have operations design standard operating procedures, and develop the training needed to optimize the new system.
Leaders must lead. If leaders are fragmented, if they are not effective communicators, if they do not have a sense of trust and connection with their workforce, then any change will be sub-optimized and probably will be a frustrating experience for all.
If the workforce is in a place where staff live with suspicion or a lack of trust, or maybe some dysfunctional interpersonal skills, then they are not in a place to learn a new system. If you try to build a system based on a fragmented organizational structure or inconsistent processes, you will not achieve the potential of the modernization efforts and will limit how people view your enterprise system. The worst thing you can do is invest millions of dollars in the system based on a flawed organizational design or trying to get that system to just do what we've always done.
By starting with building the foundation of engaging employees, not just to make people feel good, but also to help them understand how to improve their processes and build a positive workplace. Do we have the transparency in our data so that we understand what the actual problems are? Can employees articulate the North Star goals, the constraints, the reasons to update systems, then the organizations will have a pull for change as opposed to a push.
Medicaid agencies and other organizations can create a pull for change by engaging with their resources who can identify what gets in the way of serving the clients, i.e., what gets in the way of timeliness or adds redundancy or rework to the process. The first step is building that foundation, getting people leaning in, and understanding what's happening. By laying the foundation first, organizations help reduce the barriers between operations and systems, and ensure that they're working collaboratively toward organizational goals, always keeping the ‘why’ in mind and using measures to know when they are successful.
How does a state focus on organization development when they are facing budget and staffing constraints?
It is too easy to say, "invest in your people". In reality, the first thing that state Medicaid agencies or other organizations need do is redefine their sense of lean. Many inaccurately believe that lean means limited resources working really hard. Lean is tapping into the potential creativity and innovation of each staff member to look for ways to improve the process. Organizations should look at everything they do and ask “Does this add value to the end recipient of our service?” Even if I'm processing travel reimbursement requests, I still have a customer, I still have a need for timeliness and accuracy. If state Medicaid agencies can mobilize that type of focus with every single employee in their organization, they can achieve huge cost savings without the pain of cutting the workforce.
In one state where BerryDunn’s organization development team provided this level and type of organizational transformation, there was a very deliberate focus on building this foundation prior to a large-scale system modernization.
By developing the leaders and training the employees in how to improve their processes, improve teamwork and trust, and align to the goal of a positive client experience, they were able to effectively implement the new system and seamlessly move to remote pandemic conditions. Once the state Medicaid agency had aligned the technical systems and the people systems to the organizational goals, they were successful and more resilient for future changes.
If you have any questions, please contact our Medicaid consulting team. We're here to help.
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