Imagine your business has a workforce equal to the populations of Dalton Gardens and Hayden Lake combined.

Your annual revenues are just shy of half a billion bucks. You’ve experienced 75 percent growth in the past six years, a boom starting roughly a year after your visionary new CEO came on board.

On top of all that, you go home at night knowing that your enterprise has literally saved lives that day and enhanced the quality of life of many other customers.

This business success story, of course, isn’t exactly a business success story. It’s the story of Kootenai Health, the community-owned hospital and medical service provider that has been on a massive growth mission under the leadership of CEO Jon Ness, who has watched similar hospitals nationwide being gobbled up by large corporations. Ness appears to be growing Kootenai Health so it becomes too big to swallow.

But the Kootenai Health story isn’t just one of quantity. It’s about quality, too, and it starts with the workforce because Ness, his board of directors and other hospital leaders understand that when you have quality people working for you, you’ll have quality products being produced.

Their way certainly isn’t the only way, they’ll tell you, but it works. There’s gigantic growth over half a dozen years as proof, and now there’s also Kootenai Health’s selection as a Gallup Great Workplace Award-winner in 2017. Your local hospital was one of just 37 organizations selected from thousands worldwide, enterprises representing millions of employees.

They’ve created a path to success they call the Kootenai Health Way.

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Culture shock came to Kootenai Health in 2011, perhaps not coincidentally mere months after Ness arrived from Montana and the Great Recession’s ill effects lingered like a stubborn infection.

“It was an organization in transition,” Sarah McManus, director of guest services for KH, told a group of three dozen business leaders at a Post Falls Chamber of Commerce luncheon in mid-November.

Against a national backdrop of seismic change in health care trends, KH was charting its own new direction with a new CEO, new executive team members, a new vision and a new strategic plan, McManus said.

McManus, whose mid-career MBA is just one indication of her personal and professional growth at KH over the past 15 years, said hospital leadership took a deep breath in the midst of all that chaos.

“We paused and looked at what was really important to us,” she said. “We redefined where Kootenai Health was, where it was headed.”

John Sporleder, who joined Kootenai Health in 2012 as director of organizational development, quickly concluded that many staffers were struggling with the concept that the old Kootenai Medical Center simply didn’t exist anymore. The hospital had changed its name as part of a rebranding campaign in 2007, but for many, real change was only now occurring.

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“Employees were nervous,” Sporleder said at the Chamber luncheon. “They wanted things that would just never happen again. They wanted to know everybody they passed in the hallways.”

While KH had revised its mission and vision statements in 2010, the overarching goal was not for employees to memorize 30 or 40 words, but to understand and embrace the organization’s culture.

“We really want that employee to be able to answer the question, ‘What is the Kootenai Health Way?’” Sporleder said.

Using a Gallup survey tool that’s available, at a cost, to any other business or organization, KH adopted an annual approach to instilling the Kootenai Health Way with every single employee.

According to McManus, an annual Gallup employee survey is done every September. In November, results are reviewed and refresher training is done. In January, employee engagement goals are set.

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All that effort is working, and not just in a feel-good way. The Gallup survey has been done every year since, and every year there’s been sizable, quantifiable improvement.

“Our initiatives, communication, and focus on engagement helped move our employees through the changes,” McManus said.

To generate great work throughout KH — to ensure the Kootenai Health Way doesn’t slip away — managers put in a lot of work themselves. Sporleder shared some of the basic ingredients of success, including a checklist that must be followed for every employee. Other essentials:

- Thorough new-employee orientation, which includes Kootenai Health Way training, resource fair and lunch with the manager.

- Meetings at the new employee’s 30-, 60- and 90-day marks.

The Kootenai Health Way also features what might sound like fisticuffs, but isn’t. It’s what McManus and Sporleder refer to as employee “rounding,” or one-on-ones. Managers meet regularly with employees to:

- Keep them informed about what’s going on in their group;

- Keep the relationships with their employees strong;

- Show that they care about their employees;

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- Ensure that employees are clear about their performance expectations;

- Make it easier to give employees feedback;

- Help sustain and improve employee engagement.

There’s much, much more to the Kootenai Health Way and its adoption leading to the organization’s Gallup Great Workplace selection, which McManus and Sporleder are happy to share with other businesses and institutions. But they also will tell you this isn’t all about them; it can be about you.

Kootenai Health has opened its Leadership Academy to public participation. To find out more about the classes offered, visit the course calendar at kh.org or call 208-625-6050.