At the Deutsche Bank Healthcare Summit, Sarah London was asked about morale following Centene's restructuring and whether the company still had enough of the right people to execute.
Her answer was remarkable.
“The organization has really rallied around that.”
And:
“There’s an excitement about where we’re going.”
Really? Because from where a lot of employees were sitting, rallied around looked an awful lot like:
Layoffs
Voluntary separations
Reorganizations
Teams dismantled
Institutional knowledge walking out the door
Work shifted to consultants and vendors.
And thousands of people wondering whether they were next.
But apparently everyone was excited. That's quite a trick and it's yet more false truths Sarah bandied about in that speech in New York. When employees are afraid of losing their jobs, continuing to show up isn't necessarily enthusiasm. When the survivors absorb the work of the people who disappeared, that's not necessarily engagement. And when people smile on a Teams call while wondering whether they'll still have a paycheck next month, that's definitely not proof they've “rallied around” anything. It's almost like Sarah forgets that we can also read. Sometimes people are simply trying to survive the transformation being done to them.
London also said:
“The thing that isn't changing is our mission.” And THAT may be the most important sentence of all. Because if the mission hasn't changed, perhaps someone should explain why the people who spent years carrying out that mission became expendable while consulting transformation became the strategy. I certainly wasted more than 5 YEARS of time believing in something that was cast aside in favor of margin, sweet margin. You don't get to measure employee enthusiasm by the fact that the employees who survived haven't quit yet. And you certainly shouldn't confuse compliance with enthusiasm.
So I'd genuinely love to know:
Who exactly “rallied around” this?
Because there's a pretty significant difference between the story being told to investors and the experience of the people who actually lived through it. Maybe the organization rallied. Or maybe the remaining employees just rallied around their mortgages. There's your excitement.
But hey, maybe I'm completely wrong... it happens from time to time. Perhaps hundreds of millions in severance really is what employee excitement looks like.
Rally on, Sarah. We're all totally excited!