Planner Shifts Mtg. Program To Reflect Company Growth

When a 50-year-old nonprofit regional healthcare provider decides to reinvent itself as a for-profit company with a nationwide presence, what does that mean for the person in charge of meetings?

For Jan Hennessey, manager of corporate meeting services at Kaiser Permanente, it has meant a personal reinvention. Hired nine years ago to consolidate Kaiser's meetings, most of which centered around its operations in Northern California, Hennessey now plays a vital role in helping establish a national brand identity and weather the growing pains of mergers and acquisitions.

"We're a very different company than we were just a few years ago, and my job has changed right along with it," said Hennessey, whose focus has shifted from regional to national meetings. "Now Kaiser is competing on a national basis and is establishing itself in new markets by acquiring smaller healthcare organizations. A lot of our meetings center around this growth. They're designed to help smooth the transitions."

Typical of the new challenges she faces is one that occurred when Kaiser recently acquired Community Health Plan based in Albany, N.Y. Shortly after the deal was sealed, Hennessey was charged with organizing a meeting that would bring together salespeople from Kaiser's northeast sales offices and CHP.

"We had two very different cultures coming together--it was kind of like a wedding where the two families are getting to know each other," said Hennessey. "Even though Kaiser is a household word in California, it's not well known in the Northeast, and so the CHP people had little knowledge of who their new company is."

Hennessey decided the best approach would be to plan an event that was lighthearted and fun and yet accomplish the serious objective of introducing the smaller company to its new parent. Using a rock-and-roll theme, the meeting allowed both organizations to share their histories through videos and oral presentations by top managers.

"The meeting was designed to give the people from CHP a sense that they were involved in something exciting and important," she said. "Many had never been to a company meeting on this scale before, so that was a message right there."

Kaiser's rapid expansion also has brought a new dimension to its planning operations: the need to develop its first-ever incentive program.

"We've been hiring a lot of salespeople away from companies like Health-Net and Blue Shield, companies where the employees were used to having an incentive program," she said. "It's caused a real turnaround in thinking for us in regard to sales and motivation."

Hennessey wants her first incentive program to achieve a double objective: to motivate salespeople to bring in more health-plan accounts and also to help Kaiser move into its next target market: Florida. "The site for the incentive is in Florida, and that's partly a way to focus people on our next step," she said.

But helping with merger transitions and developing an incentive program are not necessarily the biggest challenges that Kaiser's rapid expansion is posing for its chief planner. As health maintenance organizations come under increasing scrutiny by politicians and the media, Kaiser, the emerging giant among HMOs, is frequently in the headlines.

"I have to be very careful these days to plan low-profile meetings that won't call any undue media attention to us," said Hennessey. "HMOs are controversial these days, and Kaiser's a target that keeps getting bigger."

Of particular importance is to avoid meeting sites that Kaiser health-plan customers may consider too lavish for what many still perceive as a nonprofit organization. "We have to be very mindful of our image so that customers won't get the idea that lavish spending is going to drive their rates up," said Hennessey. "It's all a matter of perception--so it may mean choosing Sheraton over Ritz-Carlton even if Ritz is actually giving us the better rate."

While getting involved in the content and purpose of meetings has become a bigger part of her job, Hennessey said it varies widely by department and she is mindful of the differences. "I operate very much like an independent planner within the organization. Some departments want me to get very involved in the meeting, others want to handle it themselves," she said.

As Kaiser meetings grow larger and more complex in nature, Hennessey's priority has been to shift the burden of smaller meetings to others in the company. "I've had the problem of my workload growing beyond endurance," she said. "A big problem is that planners are the kind of people who are asked to do different things all the time and always say yes. We take on more than we should and we get burned out."

As a solution, Hennessey now is training administrative assistants to handle their departments' smaller meetings. "I can help choose the site and provide guidance, but they can handle many details for themselves," she said.

While the nature of Hennessey's job has changed dramatically in a short time, she notes that she is hardly alone. "Corporate planners at many companies are faced with the challenges of reengineering," she said. "Planners are the ones who can read the mood and the energy of the organization. We can sense what's going to happen.