How Mark Baiada used a new branding initiative to join the past, present and future at Bayada Home Health Care

Mark Baiada
Mark Baiada, founder and president, Bayada Home Health Care Inc.

There was a little disappointment at first.
After 37 years operating as Bayada Nurses, company founder and President Mark Baiada stood before members of his nursing staff and relayed the news: The word “nurses” was to be eliminated from the company’s name. As of January 2012, the company would operate as Bayada Home Health Care Inc.
It wasn’t a decision taken lightly by Baiada or his management team. But it was a decision they felt compelled to make.
“My wife is a nurse, we’ve been a nursing company throughout, so to drop ‘nurses’ when it had been in there for so long, I think there was a little disappointment,” Baiada says. “We still have nurses, but it’s not part of our official name now.”
Baiada and his team made the change as part of a wider rebranding initiative, recognizing that the scope of in-home health care services offered by the company had grown beyond nursing to include services such as physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy.
The challenge for Baiada and his team was to unify employees in the many different disciplines around the company’s core mission and goals and to ensure that every employee, no matter the occupational field, felt accepted by and engaged with the rebranded organization.
“We created a new logo, with a larger dove icon, to symbolize the Bayada Way, a document which lists our guiding mission and values,” Baiada says.
“But we also wanted it to come to symbolize the extent of our services and the fact that we were doing more than nursing. The culture of excellence that had grown up around our nursing staff — we wanted to be sure our clients associated the same levels of compassion, excellence and reliability with all of our services.
“It was really a case of wanting to be fair to all parties.”
Communicate clearly
Baiada says the initial resistance to losing the word “nurses” in the company’s name was motivated by nostalgia more than anything else. Ultimately, the nursing staff wanted reassurance that the company still valued its nursing heritage and would preserve it alongside the effort to identify the Bayada name with a wider service offering.
Baiada took steps to reassure the nursing staff that the nursing practice would continue to be held in high esteem within the company. But with nurses seeking reassurance over their future role within the company and employees in other disciplines enjoying the recognition implied in the company’s new name, Baiada stepped back.
He surveyed the situation and saw the opportunity to use the rebranding initiative as a means of strengthening the connection between every employee and the mission of the company.
With a properly crafted message, he could renew the sense of purpose throughout the organization, re-energizing the entire workforce, regardless of role or background.
With more than 18,000 employees and operations in 26 states, Baiada encouraged a method of cascading communication that started at the company’s headquarters, eventually reaching all of the organization’s local offices with multiple forms of communication.
“We had a series of meetings, we rolled out a new website to let people know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and we also sent out some mailings,” Baiada says. “We had a lot of positives from the communications office, which handled the communication all the way down to the local offices, which then handed things out and supported the local nurses and field staff.
“If we had a meeting with 20 people, we’d have an introduction. If people couldn’t make it, they’d get something in the mail.”
Every move Baiada and his leadership team made had an eye toward rallying the workforce around the guiding company principles of compassion, excellence and reliability. That included altering the outward appearance of all employees by outfitting them with new uniforms. Bayada issued new scrubs to nurses and new uniforms to the other field employees, all bearing the company’s new logo.
“Everyone received new name tags and new uniforms with the new logo,” Baiada says. “It was another way to mark the change and another way to get it out in front of everyone. Almost everyone got something with the new logo on it.”
Ultimately, Baiada wanted to make the change real to everyone in the company. He wanted to immerse everyone in the new Bayada brand. If employees feel connected to the company’s future, they’ll be able to take more of a sense of ownership in the company’s mission and goals, which will strengthen the culture in turn.
“What you have to remember is, Enron had a beautiful mission statement, but they didn’t follow it,” Baiada says. “You need a sense of commitment that what you are putting down on paper and communicating to everyone is something that you are following continuously.
“If you aren’t following it, you don’t have integrity. And you want your people to agree to it, so you want to get a dialogue going and keep it going. What is in your heart also needs to be in their hearts.”
Start a dialogue
Baiada began to facilitate dialogue well before the rebranding initiative took effect.
If you want your employees to own the change, you have to let them buy in to the process.
“We conducted focus groups with our employees and additional focus groups with people outside the company,” Baiada says. “We conducted focus groups with clients and customers at-large and referral sources and also did surveys. What we really tried to determine was the key characteristics that are important.
“What we found was the research reiterated that the Bayada Way was pretty much on target as a set of guiding principles. When people needed help, they wanted compassion and reliability.”
But generating a renewed focus on the company’s guiding principles was only the first step toward fostering employee engagement. Baiada wanted to engage his people on a continuing basis, allowing employees throughout the Bayada organization to have a say in how the company embodies its foundational principles.
The engagement that employees feel in your brand, mission and values will show in the relationships they build with clients and customers.
“Happy employees and satisfied employees make for happier clients, which means we get more business,” Baiada says. “We’ve brought an analytic statistician on staff, and the research shows that when we compare our employee satisfaction, our client satisfaction and our business growth, they are highly correlated. They say it’s hard to find a good tomato, and it’s also hard to find a good nurse or therapist.
“So when we get them, we have to take care of them. We need to focus them, give them a voice, respect and honor them. If you respect them and engage your people, you’ll be able to build a team that can meet your clients’ needs.”
Engagement is about stimulating the thought process within your people. You want your employees to frequently think about the end users of your company’s product or service and how those people benefit from it.
“Knowing the stories of the people you serve helps employees put a human face on the work they do each day, and it also helps spur ideas around the subject of building better customer service.
“A success for us is when a client improves to the point that they don’t need our services anymore,” Baiada says. “We share those kinds of client stories, and we’re continually trying to put them in writing and record them on video. It’s all about getting that message out there, even in ways you might not immediately realize.
“For instance, all the photography on our website is images of actual clients and employees. We don’t use stock photos or actors.”
Though he can’t be everywhere at once, Baiada also recognizes the value of a visible, accessible organizational leader in maintaining a dialogue with employees and reinforcing the mission and values.
“You have to start out with an open door and a willingness to let people in,” he says. “If you have a story to share or an issue to address, here is my phone, here is my email. If you find something isn’t right around here or you feel something is going on that is disconnected from the Bayada Way, let me know.
“Hopefully, you’ll be able go to whoever is in charge of your area first, but if you need to contact me directly, I’m accessible.”
Hire for the culture
Achieving buy-in with existing employees is critical to the success of any effort to rebrand the company or refocus on your cultural values. But every bit as important as your existing employees is the employees you don’t have yet.
The reinforcement or erosion of your cultural values can hinge in large part on the quality of the hires you make and whether those people can align with the foundational principles of your organization.
As the leader of an organization that provides in-home care to clients who might be struggling to overcome disease or disability, Baiada believes his company’s culture of compassion is essential to success and is a critical pass/fail measurement in the hiring process.
Job candidates are presented with Bayada literature emphasizing compassion as a core value alongside operational excellence and reliability.
“We try to be clear in our materials about who we are and what we stand for,” Baiada says. “A lot of people take a job based on what they think it is or isn’t, and when they start working at the job, it’s not the same thing that they expected.
“For example, if a person is working primarily for money, this really isn’t the place for them. If you don’t like working for the clients and serving them, you’re probably not going to like the job.”
To develop a deep understanding of a job candidate’s behavior and thought patterns, you need to put the person in a work situation during the interview. Bayada’s team asks scenario-based questions and tries to uncover real-life examples of on-the-job situations in which the candidate demonstrated an adherence to Bayada’s core values.
Baiada says reliability is often the hardest to gauge, and if there is a hiring mistake to be made, it will often involve hiring a person who otherwise fits the mold of what you’re looking for but has reliability issues.
“Some of our care is on a one-on-one basis, so if someone doesn’t show up to work, we have a crisis on our hands in trying to find a replacement,” Baiada says. “You can get a feeling for compassion based on how someone behaves in the interview process. You can measure excellence in their performance.
“But the reliability factor can be harder to gauge.
“Ultimately, if you’re serving people, you want to find people who are motivated by serving people. That’s one of the biggest keys to continuing to strengthen our culture moving forward. It’s that focus on people. We like helping people, and the job can’t satisfy you if that doesn’t push your buttons.”
How to reach: Bayada Home Health Care Inc., (856) 231-1000 or www.bayada.com
 
The Baiada file
History: Founded Bayada Home Health Care Inc. in 1975 as RN Homecare. The company was subsequently renamed Bayada Nurses, and then rebranded as Bayada Home Health Care on Jan. 17, 2012 — the company’s 37th anniversary.
What is the best business lesson you’ve learned?
It is all about people. It is getting the right people connected and capable of serving our clients, and in making the Bayada Way come true as they carry out their responsibilities. We have a lot of people who make that happen each day.
What traits or skills are essential for a leader?
In our system, you have to be compassionate, excellent and reliable. If you can model that and make that come true, we’ll be in a great position to do what our clients require.

Baiada on keeping an eye open for small-scale factors that can make a big difference to the culture: I am a nut like that, personally. I hope we have enough people here like that, to keep things going forward. I am kind of a stickler for connecting the details to the bigger picture. And that takes constant attention. You are always trying to draw a connection. You’re always asking if everything is coherent and connected, if there are any disconnects. Is there any way we can be doing things better? It is a matter of being attentive, like coach, teacher or chef. You have to be attentive to it all, with an eye for improvement.