Human Resources
Rules of engagement
How Mark Baiada formalized his culture to drive growth at Bayada Nurses
By Erik Cassano
Smart Business | August 2009
Page 1 of 4
In the 30-plus years since its founding, Mark Baiada’s company, Bayada Nurses, has always had a culture — a set of values by which the company’s administrators, office staff and home care specialists lived and worked.
But the culture was mostly passed along by word-of-mouth, which made communicating and sustaining the culture an increasing challenge as the company grew. By the time Bayada Nurses neared its fourth decade of business, Baiada had come to the conclusion that his company’s culture needed a definite outline in written form. It needed cultural principles that could be easily communicated to employees in multiple locations and easily taught to new employees entering the company.
“When we started in Philadelphia back in the ’70s, there were just three of us,” says Baiada, the company’s founder and president. “But as we’ve built up over time to more than 10,000 employees across the U.S., I realized that I might have a lot of personal connections to these people, but as we brought even more people into more locations, we needed a way to connect with them other than a one-to-one, personal basis. We needed to get things into writing so it could be communicated more effectively.”
Through months of work by people both inside and outside the organization, Baiada and his leadership team formed a cultural template they called “The Bayada Way.” Baiada began rolling out the newly defined culture in 2002, focusing all employees on the basics of compassion, excellence and reliability in their work.
Since then, Baiada has focused on keeping The Bayada Way in front of all of his employees, whether they work in the field or in the company’s home office.
