Author: hc1

April 28, 2021

Editor’s note:  Who we are as a company has been on our minds lately here at hc1. It’s just as important as what we do, because each individual on our team contributes something of themselves to the solutions we deliver. So we asked Lori Smith, PHR our SVP of Talent, to share her perspectives on the team and talent that are hc1. 

A Moral Imperative

As a Talent Executive in a data-driven tech organization, my purpose and vision are to nurture an environment where our team members are able to thrive in a values-based culture focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and holistic wellbeing. Early on, my team and I recognized the connection between holistic wellbeing and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) but were overwhelmed with how to even begin embedding DE&I into our culture. We didn’t want to overpromise and underdeliver on such an important priority. 

What we did know is that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are no longer a set of proactive initiatives managed by “HR” but rather a moral imperative and a competitive response to the shifting expectations of the current workforce. The next challenge was deciding where to start.  

Traditional Metrics Don’t Work—We Needed Our Own

My background in finance taught me how important metrics are when charting a path forward, promoting transparency, enhancing employee wellbeing and holding each other accountable—but what I learned is just because something is an easy measure, doesn’t mean it’s the right measure. 

The tech industry has historically been white and male-dominated, and our company is no exception. On the surface, traditional metrics focus on representation. We didn’t want to lose sight of how we viewed diversity—the breadth of our experiences, backgrounds and visions of the future. It felt counterproductive to rely on metrics and risk an “us vs. them” mentality. Each white male new hire would only add to the denominator of our diversity goals.

Keeping It “CACE”

Committing to diversity for the sake of meeting business goals wasn’t going to be the answer, so we used our core values to refine our approach. When an inclusive culture exists, employees are much more likely to see themselves as part of a high-performing organization that embraces collaboration. 

hc1’s core values:

• We are Curious. We ask why things work the way they do. We ask what people need. We ask how can we make things better.
• We are Accountable. We have fun, but we work hard, too. We do our best, and we stand behind our work.
• We are Collaborative. We’re not just coworkers. We’re family. We succeed together. We celebrate together.
• We are Ethical. We do our work with honesty and integrity. We set a high standard, and we meet it.

Deepening our team’s sense of belonging and fostering more opportunities for an inclusive workplace aligned with our objectives and felt like the right strategy for our team. We also discovered belonging is the strongest and most consistent driver of engagement; diversity is not.

hc“1” Team

Our first initiative was to restructure our engagement survey platform by removing all the departments and putting everyone into a single group. We realized this structure was a more inclusive and equitable approach, and “One Team” was born. 

Through “One Team” we all get the opportunity to truly live our core values. Our Talent Team is curious to hear everyone’s insights and accountable for taking appropriate action on the team’s feedback. Being collaborative, we can work together to uncover issues and find prescriptive solutions. It is only ethical that we do all we can to enhance an inclusive and equitable environment and ensure each and every voice across hc1 is heard. Because at hc1, we truly are  “One Team”!

The spread of COVID-19 forced everyone to reset their Summer 2020 expectations. I spoke with hc1’s five summer interns and Talent Acquisition Manager Keegan Jiles about the lessons they learned from this unusual internship season.

The biggest difference this year for the interns, and the rest of the hc1 staff, is that we all were (and still are) working from home instead of the office. Although the hc1 culture was evident in the banter during Google Meet department meetings and in Slack channel memes and photos, the usual in-office hc1 camaraderie was a casualty of COVID-19. Comparing last year’s experience to this year’s, returning intern Jake Baker missed things like hanging out working with others in the hc1 warehouse or talking about non-work stuff while grabbing lunch from food trucks in the office park. Product marketing intern Bonnie Bostic noted, “I wasn’t able to develop relationships with as many hc1 employees as I may have had the situation been normal.” 

TechPoint Xtern Daniel Knopf, who worked from his home in New York instead of living in downtown Indianapolis for the summer, said that although there were not many opportunities to make personal connections, he felt the learning experience was similar to how it would have been otherwise.  First-time intern Alissa Honingford agreed with Daniel’s assessment, “For me, it was still a great learning experience.”

Key to that learning experience was the fact that each intern had their own hc1 mentor/manager who met with them daily to discuss progress.  Keegan felt it was important for the interns to know they could come to him or the mentors with concerns and questions and for the mentors to have regular one-on-one meetings with the interns for feedback. 

At the beginning of the summer, Alissa was “introduced to a bunch of things I’d never heard of before.” By the end of July, she was able to apply her new knowledge with minimal input from her mentor to build a user interface to simplify hc1’s development work with Amazon EventBridge rules. Jake also focused on front-end work, building a user interface for work hc1 is doing with the FHIR electronic health record standard. “I’d never really worked with UIs before, but I really enjoyed it. And it’s meant to replace a tool that I had to work a lot with last year, that I did not like using, so I kind of saw a direct application for it, which was nice.” Bonnie’s favorite project was a graphic displaying the problems that hc1 customers face that will be used in future product marketing efforts.

Daniel and Ryan Klinedinst, also an Xtern,  both expanded existing skills. Daniel was able to see a code project through from start to finish plus do parallelization, which he had never done before. Ryan was productive right away, completing several small projects for the software engineering team before moving on to the data engineering team to work on a lab test matching model. He found that project to be the biggest challenge and also the most interesting concept to work on. All of the technology interns commented that going through the process of putting code into production was a valuable learning experience.

I asked the interns what else they learned or found surprising about the professional environment as opposed to an academic one. “A lot of meetings—that surprised me,” Daniel said with a smile. “How everything ties in, how all the teams work together, was something I found pretty interesting,” Ryan said. Bonnie discovered that work, “can actually be incredibly motivating and inspiring. I found myself wanting to complete each new project.”

What did this year’s crop of interns take away from their 2020 summer experience? “I personally had no idea that there was an Indiana tech scene at all before the Xtern program,” Daniel said. “I’d never considered coming anywhere in the Midwest to do technology, but I say that now with the Xtern program and all, it’s definitely something that’s on my radar.” Alissa said, “This summer will help me choose classes that I’m actually interested in, rather than kind of going random. I can actually understand what I’m trying to choose and where I want to go with them.” For Ryan, who has a dual-track major in software engineering and machine intelligence, “Getting both experiences during the internship with the dev team and the data team was definitely super helpful for me. Before this, I was more leaning toward data science-type careers, and I think this definitely solidified, more or less, my interest in that.” 

“The point of an internship is so you can get a dope job, right?” Keegan said. Before the interns’ last day, he helped them write recruiter-ready resumes. “You’ve got to be able to help me read between the lines. Talk about your technologies. Don’t be so humble about it. You cannot assume that I [as the recruiter] know what you’re trying to say. So here’s how you take everything you did this summer and make it sexy,” he said. “That’s something that’s unique with hc1 is really setting them up for success after they finish their internship.” Keegan’s goal for every hc1 intern was “You’ve got to know what you did, and you’ve got to know what people care about that you did.” 

To learn more about hc1 opportunities, visit our Careers page.

As today marks National Intern Day, we are taking a moment to showcase and thank our talented group of hc1 interns including Evan Klein, (Butler University), Benjamin Huang (Purdue University) and Srikar Namburi (Rose-Hulman) who all took part in hc1’s summer internship program.

Exploring is a vital part of the college experience. While the overarching goal of higher education is to prepare students to achieve success in their future careers, the purpose of an internship is to provide real-world experience and use that opportunity by putting what has been learned into action.  More importantly, it helps them decide whether or not it’s a path they can picture spending their career doing.

hc1 recognizes internships are a great way for students to acquaint themselves with the field they are interested in. Gaining important life skills can be considered crucial aspects of career preparedness, the hands-on work experience interns receive is invaluable. 

“hc1 is an incredible company and gave me a lot of insight as to how tasks are assigned, different teams communicate, and how a successful software company operates. Not only that, but I felt that hc1 provided valuable experience and familiarity with popular industry-tools like AWS Lambda. I couldn’t ask for a better way to learn and apply my skills in a constructive way.”  Srikar Namburi Software Engineer Intern

Our interns contribute by utilizing exposure to the latest technological trends to provide innovative ways to solve problems. We encourage them to try innovative ideas and find new ways to overcome challenges. We like to think of it as a fresh pair of eyes reviewing and finding kinks within our existing processes. 

Learning the specialized skills of a particular field, as well as transferable skills such as communication, teamwork, and industry knowledge, gives them a leading edge as they enter the workforce. 

“My time at hc1 has been a great learning experience that has allowed me to expand on the current knowledge that I have gained from pharmacy school and apply it to the technology that hc1 has developed to improve many areas within healthcare. Seeing the way that different teams collaborate throughout hc1 shows the unity that everyone has towards each other and really makes for an enjoyable work environment. I’m very grateful to have had this opportunity to work with an awesome group of people who have passion for what they do.”  Evan Klein PRx Intern

Mentoring and guiding others has always been an incredibly rewarding and motivating experience for the interns and hc1 managers. The relationship that is cultivated over the summer has a lasting impact long after the internship ends. 

“My mentor, Scott, inspires me to do my best work every day. During the onboarding process, I had to configure and install a lot of stuff and I ran into a lot of errors, but Scott was very understanding and helped me work through them. He’s also extremely knowledgeable and I invariably get an answer when I go to him with a question.”  Benjamin Huang Software Engineer Intern 

As members of our next generation of leaders, these summer interns brought the same energy and determination to hc1 that led to their selection in the first place. Their energy could be felt by the team and greatly enhanced our company culture.

Thank you for all of your efforts, commitment and dedication! We are all honored to be at the start of your professional journey! 

May 27, 2021

Editor’s note:  Who we are as a company has been on our minds lately here at hc1. It’s just as important as what we do, because each individual on our team contributes something of themselves to the solutions we deliver. So we asked Lori Smith, PHR our SVP of Talent, to share her perspectives on the team and talent that are hc1.

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, and as hc1’s Talent leader, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the impact of the past year – both personally and professionally. I feel effective role modeling from leadership is one of the most powerful drivers in ensuring people take care of their mental health. The shame of talking openly about mental health is finally diminishing, but it’s no secret mental health has historically had a negative stigma associated with it. 

I can say that from an HR perspective, the increased awareness around mental health is an invaluable outcome of 2020. As a human, I also recognize there is a crucial difference between May 2020 and May 2021 – we have all lived through 14 months of pandemic life. 

Work. Sleep. Repeat.

When the office first shut down, we were all isolated but with purpose. My team and I went into overdrive, reaching out to our people and making sure they felt supported and connected. The escalated focus on employee wellbeing that erupted during that time helped remove some of the awkwardness as we were asking people how they were feeling. There was mutual value being exchanged between me/my team and our team members. 

Before we knew it, the two-week office shut down quickly turned into ten months. On many levels, self-care was missing and/or severely lacking. For me, I couldn’t pinpoint on just one or two things. It wasn’t just work, personal or hearing about COVID nonstop – every day felt like it was groundhogs day and frequently felt varying degrees of “feeling off” – just in a different hc1 shirt. Enter Phase Burnout…

Clear as mud. 

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), mental health is “a state of wellbeing in which the individual realizes his or her abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.” 

What is considered “normal” stresses of life? A pandemic isn’t “normal”. What does “work productively” mean exactly? I’ve had many days when I showed up physically and made contributions to my work/team, but mentally, I was exhausted and ended the day feeling incredibly unproductive. How about “can cope”? If that can be defined by putting on a clean hc1 sweatshirt and almost clean jeans, then I had been killing it – right? 

Reconnecting with Purpose

So what is the difference between “normal” mental health and mental disorders? Sometimes it’s clear – and well, sometimes it’s just not. If someone feels bad and it affects their day-to-day life, it’s a mental health concern. 

We can’t expect people to go through 14 months (and counting) and assume everyone will come out the other side being fine. Those effects should be considered, even if we’re walking around maskless and vaccinated. 

Many will recover uneventfully; for others, the pandemic was a disruptive inconvenience, but it has been unexpectedly punishing for a lot of us. Key takeaway – not only is mental health hard to measure, but it is also even easier to ignore. 

Making sure that you are meeting your mental health needs is critical. Like I said before, the past 14 months haven’t been easy, and recognizing that you are struggling is okay. The below resources can help you learn more about how you can support Mental Health Awareness Month and your own wellbeing. 

• Mental Health 101 – Tests 
• Mental Illness and Precision Prescribing
• Yale’s Coursera Course “The Science of Wellbeing”
• Mental Health in the Workplace Webinar 
• Feeling Off?