Home is Where the HEALTH is
Home is Where the HEALTH is
The Heart of Leadership — How Putting Teammates First Uplifts Everyone
In this episode of Home is Where the Health is, Chief People Officer Priscila Mattingly shares her journey to Compassus, insights on building a supportive culture and how teammate-focused initiatives are driving engagement and recognition as one of Newsweek’s Greatest Workplaces for 2025.
Ashton, Hi everyone. I'm Ashton Jones, and this is home. Is where the health is. This podcast brings you the latest news on progress and innovation in the home based healthcare space, in association with compasses. At the end of the day, every person deserves to be cared for with compassion, whether they're dealing with a serious illness, recovering from an injury, or nearing the end of life, and in the place they call home, no less. That's why this podcast features different subject matter experts as we dive deep into how their work is improving home based healthcare for patients. In today's episode, we're catching up with Priscilla Mattingly, Chief People Officer at compasses. We'll discuss what it means to support and uplift your teammates and how to integrate cultures across partnerships. We'll hear about Priscilla's journey to becoming Chief People Officer and what her motivation was for joining compasses. There's all that and more coming up on Home is where the health is. Hi everyone, welcome back to Home is where the health is. Thank you to everyone who's tuned in to our second season as we explore new topics, partnerships, products and more. Today, it's my pleasure to introduce our guest, Priscilla Mattingly, Chief People Officer at compasses. Priscilla, thank you so much for being here. Oh, thank you for having me. And Hello, beautiful people. Always love that. That's my favorite. Well, before we get into our topics, we want to start by sharing a little bit more about you our guest. So who are you, professionally and personally? Tell us, what should the audience know about you? Well, the first thing that I usually say about myself is the funny accents from Brazil, because I've heard all sorts of different things, and people ask me if I'm from Boston, Russia and anywhere else in between. I immigrated to the US 21 years ago, and when I did, I came to the United States to learn English. And so I started looking for alternatives for my career, and sort of stumble upon Hr through what I call the back door of HR, which is training. I started doing training early in my career in the food service industry, and that's how my love for HR started, and that's how I started my career. Wow, that's awesome. Well, that kind of intersected into my next question, which was about your professional journey, but I guess I'll ask, how did you end up at compasses? I started in the food industry. I actually worked for Pizza Hut, and then after that, I went to other food industry places. And then in 2020 I got a call to go lead a HR team in a healthcare organization, and it was actually in skilled nursing facilities, and it was a great opportunity, but it was also in the middle of covid So I was in a new industry, in a new city. I had to move to a different city at that time in the middle of covid, which was absolutely unprecedented. And so we had to create all sorts of new things, as we all know, from the HR perspective as well from the clinical perspective. And so to be a part of a team that's really trying to make a difference in the communities where we operate, it's amazing to me. And so that's why I joined. I thought it was really interesting how you were talking about how you didn't come from healthcare, but you were always kind of drawn to the space. So what was it about healthcare that was enticing to you, especially if you hadn't worked in healthcare yet, from a people perspective, which, by the way, people is how we call all things HR at campus, I always believe that if you are working in an organization where the mission and purpose, it's really connected to the core of being human, it is a lot easier to have a workforce that is engaged and connected to that. In HR, we talk a lot about connecting people to the mission and purpose. I always wanted to try that value proposition of engagement and connection to mission, vision and purpose in an industry that had a higher calling, and I was never going to be a doctor myself, so I thought getting to healthcare would be an interesting way to make that connection in the HR area. I want to go back to something you just mentioned, which was the HR versus people. So I do remember a few years back when you started, and we used to call it human resources, and then we made the switch to the people department, and that was an initiative that you really drove. So what was the motivation behind that decision? The first thing is, when you say people instead of HR, you cause the workforce to really think about what we do in a more human way when we really have the opportunity to implement the right to. Some of the right processes, the right practices, to have an HR organization that is really focused in the culture of the workforce and in making sure that we have the right environment so people can flourish in their careers, then it's much more than what people usually think about HR. And so I really want to help our caregivers, our team members everywhere, to understand that we are here to take care of them the same way that they care for our patients. And so it was a lot easier to make that connection by being the people team or the people department or the people people, as sometimes we say, than by being the HR. So how would you describe your people, team and your team's mission here at compasses? So our mission is to reproduce to our team members and caregivers what they do to their patients and their families and so if you think about just about every single thing we have in place to describe our relationship and the service we provide to patients and their families and to partners. For that matter, it is also applicable to our relationship with our team members. You know, think about our care delivery model, and we talk about right mad, right time. Well for us in the people team, the version of that is right training, right time, right we are trying to create the same level of culture and relationship and service that we are asking our team members to do out there, because if they can experience that for themselves in their careers, then they can reproduce that same feeling and that same level of service to their patients and their families. So that's really our mission is to be the internal driver of that same culture that we are asking our team members to represent out there. You really can think of our team as a six pillar sort of a team. We do everything from the recruitment process to training onboarding, and we have a lot of initiatives that are around retention of the workforce and listening strategies, understanding what the workforce needs and wants, all the way to benefits and compensation, sort of the back of the house. And then we also have a Systems team. So our function is really divided into six pillars that really help the full life cycle of the team member, from the things that they see, like recruitment and training to lots of things that they don't see that are happening behind the scenes, like selecting and designing their benefits every year. So next, I want to shift our conversation to our second topic, which is around pulse surveys and employee engagement. So as a company, compasses just wrapped up the annual your voice survey, and I thought you could walk us through what that survey is and the intent of it. So this is a super exciting time of the year for us at compasses, we have a robust listening strategy with lots of different surveys and focus groups, and there are lots of different points throughout the year and the employment time of our team members, where we are asking very specific questions in order to improve their experience as a team member. But this is the one time a year where we survey just about everyone. If you have been here for more than 90 days, you get the survey, and it's a comprehensive survey, and it really creates our map for the following year. It is with the results of this survey that we do all of our planning for benefits, for compensation, for new programs, and so the feedback that we received from our team members is super important in creating that map. Sometimes people think, well, one more survey, but really, if you think about that survey being the starter of the blueprint for what we'll do in the following year, that couldn't be more important to what we do. So I actually have a sneak peek of some of the your voice survey results, and I wanted to bring a few of these up, the first one being overall engagement, which is in the mid 80s. So that's awesome. 86.1% we also have intent to stay at least one year at the company, climbing to 83.7% that's also amazing. And then personal accomplishment has been improving as well. So those are three areas that I think are really key. But what stands out to you the most? Yeah, this is super exciting. Those results are really impressive, and they reflect the hard work we have been doing over the last 18 months. What I am really excited is the fact that for the last few years, really, since covid, our team members have been talking about work life balance as a point of dissatisfaction, and I think that that has been the post pandemic epidemic in the healthcare workforce, right, not feeling like they can achieve some level of work life balance. Well, this year, for the first. First time our work life balance scores have improved, and so we did a lot of work over the last 18 months on evaluating the different jobs and what they are doing and how they doing, using technology to make the jobs of our team members easier and to get them to do really what puts them at the top of their license right, which is spend more time with patients and their families and less time doing administrative, burdensome tasks, and so that we are just in the beginning of that journey, but you can see how the very early stages of using technology to make our jobs easier has really helped, and so it's a great early indication that we are on the right path. I'm glad that you brought up the work life balance, because I did have that on my list as one of the key points to go over. But then in tandem, also wanted to talk about benefit satisfaction, which jumped 4.7 points. So that is very significant. Can you talk about some of the investments that we made, like you said, in benefits, flexibility, well being that are really driving those improvements. It's been a great journey. Last year we saw a massive improvement of over 10 points. So you can see that we are really on the upswing here with our benefits and what really made a difference? If there's one thing I can say about how our people team has developed and put things into action over the last two years, is about being very targeted, about our approach. We did a lot of analysis on Who are we serving, what is important for the population we are serving. People need different things, right? So if you are just a single person, you need something that's different than a single mom with three kids, and you may need something different than a family of seven that they're two working parents and they both have insurance, and you get to choose which one your kids are going to go in. So there's a lot of different needs, and we had the ability to look at our data and figure out how we could create plans that really help that and so we are really trying to create value for each one of our team members. We're going to take a quick break from our main discussion to share a story with you. And the reason we want to spend time on a single story is because when you're looking at the big picture, you can forget about all the people who are impacted by this work, and at the end of the day, it's all about touching lives. So I asked Priscilla to come prepared with a story to share with all of you, something that's impacted her, both professionally and personally. And so Priscilla, as I understand, your story is really about leadership and how everybody needs that one person who's going to believe in them and their potential before even they do. So can you tell us a little bit more about this story and your experience? Yeah, sure. Happy to you know that story we talked a little bit earlier about my background and how I came to the US, and I was an immigrant, I didn't speak English, and was very much stripped off my professional identity, because I wasn't good at the main thing that was my profession in Brazil, and so I did a lot of odd jobs in the beginning of my career here, and it was really because of one person, a great leader, but also a great mentor who saw some potential in me and took me under his wings to learn more about the business while I was still learning English. So, you know, someone who was willing to work with someone that needed a dictionary for most of the conversations, and really taught me the business I was back then in the food business, and believed that I could be a great trainer, and then after that, a great manager of multi million dollar businesses that I never thought I would do in my 20s, and then that was what gave me my path into HR. So as we talk about our leadership programs and our mentorship programs and preceptors, they are so important to someone's career, way beyond our years together in any one particular employment. To this day, I think about how that leader changed the trajectory of my career and really put me in a path that changed my life. And so I know that as a business, we are taking care of people in critical times of their lives, and that is so meaningful, and we talk about those stories often, well, behind the scenes, the leaders of our organization are also impacting people's lives, but our team members, right? They have the ability to really help their team members grow over time and have amazing careers if they dedicate the time to it. You know, leadership is about dedicating the right amount of time to lead your people where you need to go, where they want to go, where they have the ability to go. And so I think about that often. I think about that when we are developing leadership programs, and I think about the humongous responsibility of leaders. To help their people through their career path. So this mentor that you're talking about who really believed in you and changed the trajectory of your career, did you ever get the opportunity to go back and talk to them about that experience and how impactful they were for you? Yes, I did at some point almost 10 years later from when that mentor really helped me, someone told me that person was having a real hard time personally, and I thought this would be a great time for him to know what a difference he made in my life. And so, yeah, I wrote him a very long letter talking about what a difference and what an impact he had made in my life 10 years later. And I think that that's important. I think that too many times life goes on and we fail to reflect and thank the people who have helped us, and even sometimes correct some of the records right. Because during the path, you're going to make some mistakes too. And so I think going back and having that opportunity to thank people and to set some records straight, it's a great opportunity. So I want to return to our main discussion and talk more about employee investment, because there's so much growth happening at compasses right now, and the organization was actually recognized recently as one of Newsweek's greatest workplaces for 2025 really exciting news. This was based on some different company reviews, employee interviews, publicly accessible data, and an analysis of over 120 key performance indicators. So what are some of the factors that you believe led to us getting that recognition? Everything leads back to our listening strategies, right? Our ability to ask the workforce, in a very genuine way, how do you feel about working here? What can be better and what's working too? That is one question that oftentimes companies and team members forget to talk about enough, because if we don't know what's working, we won't continue investing in those things, and so having the ability to have so many of our team members participating in our surveys, giving us genuine feedback, and not just surveys. Look this year, even our CEO started a forum, meeting with leaders from every single one of our programs and asking, then, what can we do to make your lives easier. What is working? What's not working? So many actions came out of that, but it also opened a big avenue for communication that we didn't have before, so knowing exactly where the pain points were, hearing from our team members directly via compass conversations, how we called that forum with leaders, or our surveys or our town halls, and then taking action on those things, having action plans that we are holding ourselves accountable to, has really made a difference in employee satisfaction, in our retention and just how engaged our team members are, because there is a new level of trust that if I give feedback on something, either things will change, or if they won't change, at least I'll have an answer. We also created an advisory board this year with members of our front lines, and they are having conversations with our coos and also giving direct feedback. So there's many ways in which we are listening to our team members and taking action on those things and things that that has contributed tremendously for our success last year. I think there's also this other area that we can talk about as well, which is professional development and some of the pathways that you've been working on. I know we have career ladders that are big drivers of retention, and also these new leadership trainings for some of the field leaders out there. So is there anything that you can tell us about those programs and how successful they've been? Yeah, so it's no secret that everyone wants to work at a place where they have a great leader, great team members that they connect with the mission, vision and value and that they are receiving development. I'll start with the career ladder. It is an amazing program, and kudos to our clinical excellence team, who really conceived this program, thought about every single detail and created a program that our team members are so happy with. They have activities, they can do projects, they can sign up for external education that they could take in order to continue growing in their career. And as they achieve those things, they accumulate points, and they move from level one to two to three and four according to how many points they accumulate, and that also translates in some difference in pay. It has really been a great point of satisfaction to our workforce. And so we knew that we needed to revamp our leadership program, and so we now have a new leadership program that's called leading with heart and. That leadership program has different levels. So the first level of that leadership program is called guiding with heart, and it's a 12 module program that happens over the course of a year. So every month, we have a new class, and people can join at any point. So we have nothing keeping people from being a part of the leadership program. But the real secret of that program, and why it's being so well received is that, yes, we are talking about big leadership concepts like understanding your team, understanding yourself, building trust, but we are making that very applicable to our business, because what we heard before, and then we go against that, you know, listening strategy thing. So what we heard from listening our team members from previous leadership programs is that they love the experience of being in that two or three day class, but they went back home and they really didn't know how to apply that. And so I truly believe that leadership development happens over time. And so that's another reason, too, why we have this being a 12 month program with one module a month, so people have the opportunity to learn something go back, apply, come back, have discussions about it, learn something else, apply again. You know this notion that you can learn leadership in two days and go back and be like a better leader for it? It's just very difficult to achieve, so we are working really hard on that leadership program. There's a lot more to come. I think it's also really important that we bring up all of these new cultures and teammates that we're integrating. So compasses has all these joint venture partnerships going on right now. We just welcome some new teammates from Providence, and you have different people, different thoughts, ideas, cultures. How do you go about blending those cultures and their values and work styles while making sure that we keep the compass culture strong and inclusive? Well, I mean, think about it. When I started in 2023 we were a little under 5000 team members, and today, here we are past half point of 2025, and we have more than double our team member count. That's been an interesting experience. Yeah, for sure, most of the growth through partnerships. And so we had large groups of team members joining us, and they had with them this other identity, right? They came from a hospital system with their own set of mission, vision, values and ways to operate. And so, yeah, it's been tricky, but the way we have encountered some success. What we found through doing this process a few times is that one the more you communicate early in the process, the easier it gets. People want to feel, especially when they are going through change, they want to feel like they are in the know. And having that total loss of control to what is happening in your life by your employment. Changing from one employer to another can be a very scary place, and so it's really important to communicate often and early. And we learn that very early in our joint venture process. We also learn that having a strategy that's more about CO creating what is the culture of the future works much better than just trying to teach everybody that can pass this way. When you put together two big groups of people, the result will never be just one culture or the other. And so it's important to understand and accept that the new culture will be a co creation process. They have so much to contribute to what we do and how we do but also creates more points of connection for us. And so that has been really important in that process of creating a new culture through the process of joint venture and growing so much so fast. It's been an interesting process, and we're just at the beginning, but we are by no means perfect at it, but there's a lot of work ahead. What do you think makes compasses a really uniquely rewarding place to work compared to other organizations, maybe in healthcare or maybe specifically in the home based care space? Well, I think it starts with our name. We you know, compassion is at the core of what we do and how we do and I think about compassion, being not just feeling for others, but feeling for others with the desire to take action. So I think our team members really feel a calling to do just that, to go into action when people are in some of the hardest times of their lives and they really just don't know what to expect or what you do, and having this clarity to be that person in such a difficult moment of people's lives, I think, gives purpose to so many of us, even if you were not directly taking care of a patient. He. Are the home office. We know we are here to support people who are doing this work every day, and that really gives a ton of meaning to how we do and what we do. And I think that that does make us a different employer than not only companies outside of healthcare, but also companies in healthcare, because we never lose sight of how important that is. You know, the fact that we have our care stories that we talk about in almost every single one of our calls, right? We started calls with a moment of reflection, and oftentimes a moment of reflection also brings back what we do and how we do and so keeping that ahead of us and top of mind, has been a big differentiator to how we go about doing what we do. Yeah? And as someone behind the scenes, I definitely see that working on those care stories and getting to see the amazing work that other people do, you feel very grateful to be a part of that. Yeah, and it's a must have to work here waterproof mascara. So if you could leave our audience with one major takeaway from today's conversation, what would it be? Well, that's a good one. I would say that one major takeaway is what has guided me and my career, that when you are doing something that you really love and you are truly connected with, life is much better. Yeah, it's not perfect. It's never perfect. But I see being in HR or in the people team a lot of times, people spend way too many years of their careers doing things that they are not passionate about, and life is so much harder when that's the path we take. We spend a lot of time at work. We dedicate the vast majority of our waking hours to this thing that we call work. And so it better be something that truly brings you satisfaction. And so I would encourage everyone to often do a little gut check. Am I doing something that I'm passionate enough about? And yes, we all have things that we're going to do that we don't love that much, but the more you can infuse of what you love and what you do, the better your life will be, and it will make the lives of your team members much better too, because you're a much better team member by being a happier one. So that's my big takeaway for my entire career. Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Home is where the health is. Priscilla, thank you again for joining us and for sharing your insights and your heart with our listeners, to everyone tuning in, we hope this episode gave you a closer look at the kind of Compassionate Leadership and people focused work that define compasses. If you liked today's episode and you're listening on a streaming service, go ahead and give us a like and a follow, and be sure to tune in next time for another in depth discussion on progress and innovation in the home based healthcare space with one of our experts. Until then. This is Ashton Jones with Home is where the health is. Thanks for listening. Ashton.