The Year of Substance: Finding Success During 2020 and Beyond
Published January 22nd, 2021 | 3 Minute Read
By Olivier Chateau
Co-founder and CEO, Health Union
For years to come, CEOs and business leaders will use many different words to describe 2020, some not fit to print in an article like this.
While I will likely agree with many of them (especially those of the not-fit-to-print variety), I choose to view 2020 as a year of substance. That is, of course, in addition to being substantial by every definition of the word: weighty, burdensome, difficult and never-ending (while somehow also going by too quick?).
What I mean, though, is that, for a company to succeed or simply stay afloat in 2020, substance mattered. For a long time, there had been a misguided entrepreneurial focus, especially in the health space, on “the shiny new object,” a product or service that might look or sound exciting or exactly what a potential client might want to hear.
Unfortunately, all shiny new objects lose their luster after a while. This past year just happened to be a nonstop hail, snow, rain, thunder and s***storm that washed away all remaining shine and exposed whether there was any substance beneath the sheen.
Substance can materialize in many forms. But one thing that seems to ring true for many companies that have survived the coronavirus pandemic so far is the desire and commitment to do the right thing for the people they serve, which often requires an inward look and focus on priorities that reinforce that commitment.
For Health Union, that substance and desire can be attributed to three significant qualities that have long been cornerstones of the company. These were continuously reinforced and strengthened throughout the year: a continued dedication to and resilience of our mission and core values, a strong people-first culture and the willingness and ability to adapt.
Health Union’s mission to help improve the lives of people with chronic health conditions is pervasive throughout everything we do. From the start of the company, we have always been dedicated to providing equal resources across all of our condition-specific communities, even as the number of those communities has grown considerably. This dedication proved even more important throughout 2020 as people with various conditions experienced COVID-19 and were impacted by it in different ways.
It was important for us to listen and provide the resources, validation and support our communities needed during a time that was, and remains, filled with so much uncertainty. In short, we were filling a basic human need for many of the people who participate in our communities. Doing so also provided our biopharma partners with invaluable insight during a moment when they, themselves, also rediscovered the importance of, and value in, engaging with the people who use their treatments and therapies.
The effects of COVID-19, as well as the social justice movements sparked by the many tragedies that occurred in 2020, reignited the passion we already had for our core values. Specifically, we followed through on our dedication to Community and Inclusion by providing the resources our community participants and team members needed during these difficult times, and re-committed ourselves to diversity in all areas of the company, from the conditions we serve to the people we hire to the local charities we support.
In doing so, Health Union continued to provide and maintain a culture that puts people first. We know that modeling our culture throughout this pandemic for the people we serve in our communities and our partners begins and ends with acknowledging and addressing how the events of 2020 have impacted our team members.
Throughout the year, we encouraged our people to take time off when they needed it, even if that meant staying in their homes and not looking at their computers for a day. We started our summer Fridays, well, in the spring, to give our team members – many of whom, like me, are parents who have helped their kids navigate online schooling – time to balance their work and home lives.
And our dedication to our mission and our culture has allowed us the ability to adapt to such a difficult time period and set of circumstances. Health Union has adapted in many of the same ways as a lot of other companies. Everybody is working remotely, in-person meetings are now done via video and Slack conversations, and social events are now virtual and BYOB.
That ability to adapt can be difficult to maintain as a company grows the way Health Union has over the past few years and is made even harder during a global pandemic that has impacted all of our audiences in some way.
But we continue to thrive. Throughout 2020, Health Union continued to hire people to fill important roles (and look forward to hopefully being together with them in-person at some point this year). And we maintained our plan to launch five new online health communities, bringing our total portfolio to 30 by the end of the year.
We even identified a need during this time, to provide information and support to specific rare condition communities, and began executing a plan to further address the needs of people living with those conditions throughout and beyond 2021.
To be clear, none of these things are easy, and they take a lot of hard work. And some companies – due to a mixture of bad luck, the industries they’re in and other extenuating circumstances – may have been impacted negatively or been forced to shut down despite adhering to a lot of the same principles. Many will continue to face untenable constraints going forward.
But the events of the past year have shown that the substance of a company that has worked hard to develop and maintain a strong mission, culture and dedication to people can go a long way in not just making it through – but succeeding during – a global pandemic.
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