By Gigi Wood
They have a Peeps show at Easter.
MediRevv, a Coralville-based company that uses friendly customer service to collect on unpaid patient bills for hospitals and other health-care related businesses, has a unique take on employee team building. The company’s approach recently landed it a major distinction: MediRevv was named as one of Modern Healthcare’s national Top 100 Places to work in 2011.
Modern Healthcare’s list was based on a survey of health-care employees across the country. The survey asked about companies’ leadership and planning, culture and communication, work environment, supervisor relationships, training and development, pay and benefits and overall satisfaction. So far, Modern Healthcare’s list is unranked. The ranked list will be released Oct. 18.
MediRevv, formerly known as Precision Revenue Strategies, attributes the award largely to its wellness committee. The company came in No. 1 on the Corridor Business Journal’s Fastest Growing Companies list in May.
“We really encourage a family atmosphere here,” said Brad Baldwin, MediRevv’s director of operations. “We want to create a culture here where people enjoy coming to work, that they can feel engaged, not only in what we do as an organization, but so they can feel engaged in the community.”
The company’s Ethos committee, made up of three employees, organizes events throughout the year that focus on six pillars of wellness: emotional, physical, values, intellectual, occupational and social. While that sometimes involves company-wide walks at lunch, it also includes many events for fun and to support coworkers.
“We want people to focus on a variety of aspects of wellness,” he said. “Our Ethos program really is what I consider a super-developed version of a wellness program. A lot of organizations have a wellness program. Wellness tends to be defined very narrowly and when people think of wellness, they think of physical health, exercising and eating right. We’ve expanded that to include social wellness, developing and fostering good relationships personally and professionally, personal growth and development, emotional wellness.”
Some of the activity ideas come from other sources, such as the pages of the book Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. But the program itself was built into MediRevv’s business plan.
“(Company President) Chris (Klitgaard), when he founded the company, he had strong conviction about how he wanted to do business. He also had strong conviction about how he wanted to treat employees,” Mr. Baldwin said. “It’s fundamental to creating the culture we want around here. Our work is difficult and we push people really hard to be successful. Our clients have really lofty expectations of us, so what we do is we hire really great people and have lofty expectations of them.”
The Ethos program is intended to ease burnout and retain employees.
“But what we recognize is, you can just run people into the ground if you’re not careful,” he said. “We recognize you’ve got to have a balance to that. The cliché of ‘work hard, play hard,’ the play component of that is our Ethos program. It definitely comes back to retention. If we didn’t do those things, the high expectations we have and the hard work that we do, people would burn out. We would lose that. And we haven’t had to deal with that.”
Each month, a different pillar of wellness is spotlighted.
“We focus on a specific topic within that pillar of wellness, so one month it may be exercise so we’ll focus on a 5K run or walks at lunch,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Sometimes it might be heart health, when we work in conjunction with the American Heart Association. We try to find an activity for people to engage in and sometimes a fundraiser to support an organization in the community and then we try to bring in speakers who are experts and can provide some education to our staff. We want employees to educate themselves about wellness.”
There are annual favorites of MediRevv’s 80 employees. For example, the company has a ‘pie-in-the-face’ event each spring, where employees throw pies at managers, who are outfitted with garbage sacks. Each pie costs money to buy and that money is donated to local charities. There is a blood drive in the summer and employees give to Toys for Tots in December. For Halloween, the company shuts down early so employees can go home, dress up themselves and their children and return to the office for a party. Then there’s the Peeps show at Easter, when employees construct dioramas using marshmallow Peeps and other supplies, which the company pays for. The winning team receives a rabbit trophy.
If the wellness activities seem diverse, that is the intention.
“We want to be doing activities in the community, we want to be doing activities here, trying to give our employees a bunch of different outlets,” he said. “Not everyone likes to run. Not everyone wants to focus on eating right, or that’s not a priority for them. So we want to provide a broader approach and a broader set of information so we can engage everyone in the organization.”
Different events take place each month, though. This week, employees will be dressing up every day for Spirit Week, which celebrates University of Iowa’s Homecoming. Staff is putting together a MediRevv cookbook and proceeds from sales will go to the UI Children’s Hospital. Each month, employees can pay $5 to wear jeans one day and the money goes to charity.
When the program first started three years ago, Mr. Baldwin led the committee. He has since stepped out of the committee and allows the employees – Heather Johnson, Jamie Noack and Amy Troll – to make the decisions. There are company guidelines they follow each month, such as focusing a pillar, hosting a lunch-and-learn and supporting a community organization.
