Thread regarding Elevance Health (Anthem) layoffs

The efficiency expert is here to make us more efficient. I lived through this before. In the end, more layoffs and firings will come out of this.

I would tell them I love the music of Michael Bolton.

I would tell the efficiency expert that doctors do not need an extractive middleman between them and their patients.

@en I don’t assume they are all right- (and never indicated this- that is why they weren’t called a list of facts or absolute truths) - they are ideas,suggestions to be discussed vetted and considered or not. But I do absolutely believe that one of the biggest problems with this organization is that there is no effective path for ideas to come from the front line people who are actually doing the work. Current state decisions are made by executives who are motivated by empire building and their own enrichment. Do you think any of them would propose doing the right thing for the organization if it went against their earning potential? Some of the new executives don’t even have any healthcare knowledge. Do you think there are really options for employees to give true feedback without fear of retaliation? People don’t even feel safe responding to “anonymous” surveys. Sadly, they will likely bring in an expert, spend more money, talk to the same inner circle, be fed the same manufactured BS, nothing will change, earnings will continue to drop and more people will get laid off. If they really want to improve; they should set up a truly safe and protected path for feedback.

@ek Why do you assume your ideas are “right”?

@ak - Not a VP, why would a VP ever call for eliminating 80% of the VPs? If the efficiency expert or their team of overpaid consultants ever checks this site, just want to point them in the right direction. Here are some more ideas..
Offshore- It doesn't save money if things come back multiple times; track how many times offshore work need to be cleaned up on shore.
Provider contract negotiations- How much are we spending on supporting provider contract negotiations to claim we saved money with Wanna be Wall street types who think they made a great deal. If you wiped the provider teams and support, could you just give the providers a better deal with regional zone pricing and have more good will?
Cost of Care- same thing with most of these initiatives. If we cut the staff for these mostly ineffective programs, could we cover Ozempic and Wegovy for all, and have better health outcomes for members.
Leadership cuts- This is the biggest opportunity for savings, did you know there is a VP just for security and a team to protect the bloated leadership team? Most people are pretty self-managing at this point as the leadership isn't supervising the work- there are too many overpaid people packaging the work that is done by others and focused on "telling the self-promotion story" because there are too many VPs trying to distinguish themselves from all the other VPs. Look at the org chart, look at how many VPs there are with no direct reports at all.
Action Items- You could probably have Sparky just look up action items and see who is actually doing the work verses just sitting in meetings.
Unlimited PTO- I would eliminate that right out of the gate, it is absolutely shameful that you can be riffing people at the rate Elevance is, overloading other people and still let others take unlimited time off.

@OP Easy. Focus on core mission as a health benefits administrator and later and execute on that to the delight of our clients/members. All the health of humanity etc is all just empty fluff that adds NO tangible value and actually siphons-off resources needed for our core mission. If something doesn’t directly make the provider-patient interaction better, then it’s a waste of $$$ and time.

I think we should stop answering to this post. Why give them free ideas? I feel like a SVP posted this because Spark gave them bad ideas. They must need a plan by the end of the day, do they are gonna take 2 -4 random bullet points and pass it off as their work. Most of the SVP su-k and get paid way too much. Not my job to help them.

Out of the blue call every SVP and above and ask for their multi-year plan. Do not give them time to prepare. They should already have one that their team is aligned to. If they don't have one, remove them. If they do, pull in their directs and ask how they are executing on it. If they do not have an answer, get rid of the SVP and them (unless they've never seen the plan).

This is a failure from Gail down. They have no ideas or direction other than...RIF and AI.

Do more AI is not a plan. It's an aspirational dream costing millions while reaping pennies.

Cutting Employees is just desperation or it demonstrates their bad leadership through bloat.

Unfortunately, they have nothing else.

1.) Cut down on the company-wide meetings. The town halls are at best just distracting tons of employees at this point. That's hundreds if not thousands of productive hours lost.

2.) Have directors get to know the people who are managed by their direct reports. There's a lot of ridiculous behavior that wastes time from some of these managers, chiefly not paying attention when reading emails or being endlessly hostile in every interaction.

3.) Ask employees about language gap issues. This problem is getting worse as time goes on.

4.) Start monitoring the start times of salaried employees. When 90% of your team does not show up on time, and is 30-60 minutes late, it creates a situation where employees who show up for their agreed upon hours end up being burdened with more work.

5.) Find out what's going on with employees who are idle most of the day. It's absolutely ridiculous that some of these people are idle 50% of the day and it has been this way for years.

6.) Get rid of RTO. The employees who actually carry their weight are now being hit with an additional burden.

• Look at the layers of roles start with Executive and down - find out the justification for so many levels of VP
• Look at the role of non people leaders - what do they do all day every day and why are they all needed. How can these roles support sales instead of asking managers to do exactly that.
• What do consultants do when there are not audits- why aren't they attending audits as the departments representative. Why are they allowing consultants to call the shots - learn to start saying NO. Do you think they will stop asking for audits so they have no billable hours. Not hardly. Why are the internal consultants not preparing for the audit, pulling calls, instead of asking a manager who manages over 20-25 people and has other deliverables doing it so that they can be further pulled in multiple directions.
• Look at the training process - ask why it is so difficult cumbersome, does not provide actual examples of "what a good call is" for example so people can learn
• Get systems that work - you spent over a year on developing a POS system called HIP it doesn't work, it is not intelligent and often loses your work or crashes then staff cannot work and you wonder why they can't meet targets
• Look at performance guarantees - and write language that makes sense - that actual measures what you intend to measure. Then do the actual math - if you need X% for whatever do you have the actual number of staff to get to the % number.

you may wonder who this all applies to - well since I left 3 months ago and have been waiting for this moment I will tell you - Case Management. Horrible group of "leaders" who never support staff or my manager. That person I hear left also.

What a complete waste of money. All they would need to do meet with a few front line workers to find ways to gain efficiencies. They don’t want to engage with front line workers do they waste money on “experts “

Review all the Staff VP and Regional VP’s….easy redirection of crucial funding as the Staff VP positions are very much baby sitting roles so the VP’s don’t have to interact with the staff at the Director level and below. The Regional VP’s in most roles need a flushing as they have worked in the same role for 30-40 years and have no forward thinking capabilities.