You’ve asked.

At least a couple of you did!

Here are the basic principles of the HealthEquity approach to lunch and learns. This article is the super abbreviated version of a 10,000-word epic I’ve been writing for ages.

Why do I care? Why should you?

Folks outside HealthEquity might consider this part of the secret sauce of our organization. Any team/company in the world could take the same approach, and we wish they would. As an industry, everyone benefits from more engaged, better-educated teams.

I don’t remember the first time I saw the following set of questions, but they are deeply ingrained in my approach to leadership. What could be worse than an entire staff of expert beginners?

“What happens if we spend time, effort, and money growing and coaching our team members and they leave the company?”

“Isn’t it worse if we don’t make those investments and our team members stay with the company forever?”

-Someone I Paraphrased

I want to build on this micro-focused concept of individuals working for a single company and expand it to the macro level. Let’s be honest with ourselves, in this world where technology people are in perpetually high demand, folks often switch jobs every few years. Initially, my goal was that folks wouldn’t leave our team, or at least when they do, their new employers would take notice and see a pattern of excellent people coming from HealthEquity. Also, I wanted folks would have fond memories and recommend us as a place for their friends to work. I realize now, this was driven by ego, and it was too narrow a scope for the vision we really need.

We need to be thinking about the success of our industry as a whole. To that end, I propose the following:

Continuous Learning Manifesto
Focus on doing what is right for our team members, companies, and customers, by looking for ways to continuously measure and improve our learning and share our findings with the world at large.

Stepping off the soapbox now…

Preaching is not the point of this article. Let me share the cool stuff we’ve been doing.

Some of my co-workers love lists, so I’ll use a list to illustrate the cycle we’ve been through.

1. We realized we could improve and asked for feedback.
2. We used the feedback data to create a plan to improve.
3. We acted on the plan.
4. We built feedback into the program.
5. We continued to listen and act on feedback.

The short version is: we retrospected.

Here’s what we ended up with. A multi-track “lunch learning” program for seven out of every ten weeks 4 times yearly. 56 total days a year!

I’ll say it again. MULTI-TRACK SESSIONS SCHEDULED 2 DAYS A WEEK 28 WEEKS A YEAR.

You’re probably saying, “That’s crazy!” Originally, I might have agreed, but we’ve been doing this for 3 years running. We’ll kick off our 4th year this month (February 2019)!

Here’s the quick version of what we do (yeah, another list):

1. We pay for lunch.
2. We facilitate our educators.
3. We retrospect individual sessions and the program as a whole.

Where we started.

In the beginning, our lunch and learns were just like yours. Sparsely attended, often complained about soapboxes for management and the elite of our organization. We had to figure out how to democratize the process.

Several members of our teams responded to our early efforts to move from “all video, book, and preach” to something new. We were doing one thing a day three days a week, and everyone was expected to attend unless they had more important work. Anyway, the feedback was this: “Why not do something where there are different options for different people who want to learn different things? Multi-track-style!” I was floored. I once helped organize a small tech conference, and it was a ton of work! There was no way to make this happen, or so I thought.

Taking things one step at a time, we surveyed for interests and found that people wanted to learn about some specific things. Then we put out the word to everyone working in tech at HealthEquity. We had plenty of volunteers! For a time, I took on scheduling rooms, building a schedule for ten weeks, running retrospectives, helping presenters, and teaching a few things here and there.

From the beginning in 2015, we also opened up Intro to Coding in C# classes to the entire company, and even managed to promote several motivated individuals into our technology group as part of the effort!

If it seems like all of this was an epic amount of effort, you’d be right. But we spread it out over time and learned as we went, so it was never too much to handle at once. Eventually, as we retrospected, we found ways to streamline. As things streamlined, we expanded outside the technology group to the entire company in 2018 including plenty of non-technology topics!

What’s next?

We’re still evolving, and now we’re creating tools to assist with our practices. I’ve intentionally left a lot of detail out because I know not everyone is interested in it. Like I said in the beginning: no one wants to read a 10,000-word epic. I’m warming to the idea of calling this concept “Lean Learning”. What do you think of that?

If you have questions or want to hear more about HealthEquity’s Lean Lunch Learning program, hit me up on LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/williammunn/ ) or in the comment section below. I’m more than happy to help you get a similar program started, or tell you reasons why you should work at the greatest HSA company in the world!