BIDMC’s CEO Paul Levy: The Standard-Bearer for Support Services

Much acclaim has come to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (“BIDMC”) CEO Paul Levy as standard-bearer for all lower-wage earners facing cutbacks for healthcare, especially the support people who care for his two million-square-foot facility. Facing budget cuts head on takes courage, but it helps when the people are on your side. When Levy stood before a town hall meeting and appealed to higher-wage earners to help him find ways to save money without having to hand out pink slips to the lower-paid workers, he didn’t know what to expect. The audience responded with overwhelming numbers of ideas, offering to give up raises, contributions to 401(k)s, taking early retirements, or working fewer hours. As a result, Paul Levy was able to act on the mandate to exempt his grade 1-4 workers from the cost cutting, even guaranteeing annual increases for these support associates.

In reponse, BIDMC’s towering CEO was heralded in the Boston Globe, on Yahoo! News, and in Paul Schuster’s column on Dateline MSNBC. According to Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen’s piece on March 12, 2009,

Levy had been working around the hospital, noticing little things. He stood at the nurses’ stations, watching the transporters, the people who push the patients around in wheelchairs. He saw them talk to the patients, put them at ease, make them laugh. He saw that the people who push the wheelchairs were practicing medicine. . . . He watched the people who polish the corridors, who strip the sheets, who empty the trash cans, and he realized that a lot of them are immigrants, many of them had second jobs, most of them were just scraping by.

The above column has reached legend status as, according to Yahoo!, over 14,000 readers read and forwarded the story to others, making it the most emailed story in recent history.

For the Crothall Environmental Services and Patient Transportation associates who clean the hospital, the real miracle lay in Levy’s recognition of the staff’s worth and the hard times many of them faced. The CEO realized that some had to work 2 or 3 jobs just to get by because spouses had already lost jobs. “Our people know that the hourly support folks have as much if not more contact with our patients and are valuable to the organization,” said Levy. And that’s why the response to his town hall meeting request, including cheers and a standing ovation, touched him beyond comprehension. “I knew people would agree with me,” he said, “but I never expected that show of support. It was a sweet moment.”

The Role of Transparency

Many have asked why the story created such a tidal wave of emotion, one that swept away fear and feelings of entitlement. Senior Vice President Lisa Zankman claims it’s Paul’s practice of transparency that opened the floodgates. “People respond to him because he is open and available. They try to emulate his style.”

“Our people know that their future doesn’t lie behind closed doors at the mercy of cloak and dagger strategies,” EVS Director Mike Kennedy explained. Hundreds of emails later, each and every idea for savings contributed to a plan to save jobs for the hourly people at BIDMC.

With an arsenal of communication venues (blogs and Facebook included) at his command, the popular CEO counts on all of his people to guide him in the right direction. “The associates on the floors have the wisdom of the people,” said Levy, “and if you don’t feel you can trust or listen to the people you work with, either they are in the wrong place or you are in the wrong place!”