HR Corporate Award of Excellence Karin Mayhew Health Net, Inc., Woodland Hills When Karin Mayhew joined Health Net in 1999, the human resources department was not perceived as providing high value to the organization. “Managers saw it really as a transaction-based, sort of paper and rule-based operation that spent a lot of money and said ‘no’ a lot,” said Mayhew. To add more fuel to the fire, employees were just plain unhappy. To find out why, Mayhew instituted the annual associate survey. “When we did our first associate survey (in 2002) two-thirds of the people didn’t understand the goals of the organization. Half of them said they would have left the company for a job of same or similar pay,” said Mayhew. “By any measure, that’s a really scary kind of place.” Fixing all that was not an easy task in a company with 1,000 managers and 10,000 employees overall. One of the first steps was the introduction of a set of web-based tools that would allow the managers to do some of the simple, basic tasks themselves. “This really gave them a better feel for things like performance appraisals and compensation decisions,” said Mayhew. The department’s name was changed from Human Resources to Organization Effectiveness; a change Mayhew said was symbolic but also reflective of the work the company did to really transform the human resources function. Other changes involved teaching managers how to communicate the company’s mission to employees and making sure that people were rewarded in a way that aligned with the organizational goals. Improvement ensued. In recent associate surveys, Mayhew said, “Eighty-five to 95 percent of our people understand what the organization’s mission is and the same number understand how they contribute.” And less than 10 percent said they would leave for same or similar pay, she added. She gives all the credit to “the O.E. crew.” “I’m just so blown away by this award,” said Mayhew after learning of her win. “I think that while you single out one person, this work is done by an incredibly talented team and it really is an award about them because they do the work every day.” Attorney Linda Miller Savitt, who is outside counsel for Health Net, has worked with Mayhew for years. “My sense of her is she always wants to do what’s right, not just for the company, but for the employees too,” said Savitt. ” She added that Mayhew seems to understand when a difficult employee can be turned around and how to do it, but she also is able to make the determination to let someone go so as not to penalize existing employees by retaining one who may not be salvageable. “She manages things so well I don’t have much business from them,” said Savitt, laughing. “She has a huge workforce and a complex organizational structure and I find that her ability to navigate within all those layers of the organization and get it right is really impressive.”
