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The VOE Podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Keep tuning in each month for more business insights from Daniels’ alumni voices of experience.
Transcript
Lorne Fultonberg:
Hello and welcome to the VOE Podcast,
Kristal Griffith:
An extension of Voices of Experience,
Nick Greenhalgh:
The signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.
Lorne Fultonberg:
We’re your hosts, Lorne Fultonberg
Kristal Griffith:
Kristal Griffith
Nick Greenhalgh:
And I’m Nick Greenhalgh from the Daniels Office of Communications and Marketing.
Lorne Fultonberg:
We’ll be unpacking topics at the intersection of business and the public good with CEOs and other business leaders from the Daniels community. Let’s dive in.
Lorne Fultonberg:
When COVID-19 first shuttered and hampered businesses across the country, Helen Drexler made a bold statement. She vowed that her company—Delta Dental of Colorado—would not lay off a single employee during the throes of the pandemic. And, she pledged to return tens of millions of dollars to the insurance company’s stakeholders. We invited Drexler to join the VOE Podcast to tell us the thinking behind that decision and how these sorts of actions are redefining corporate social responsibility. Plus, we asked her how she’s practicing CSR as the managing director of a new venture capital platform, Ensemble Innovation Ventures.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Helen, thank you so much for joining us.
Helen Drexler:
Glad to be here.
Lorne Fultonberg:
I want to start by talking a little bit about how you see yourself and see your role at Delta Dental of Colorado. I’ve heard you call yourself a community champion and an advocate for oral health equity. So, what does that term mean, oral health equity, and why is it important?
Helen Drexler:
Yeah. So, the word equity has come into our dialogue a lot more often in the last few years, I think. And when I first got to Delta Dental Colorado, our foundation had a mission to eradicate caries in children. Caries is the clinical diagnosis for tooth decay.
Helen Drexler:
After about a year, we decided to shift our focus to oral health equity, and what that means is that we know there are certain populations and certain segments of our community that do not have the same or equal access to oral healthcare as others.
Helen Drexler:
So, for instance, there are more children of color who don’t see a dentist at their first year of life or within their first couple of years of life than their counterparts. And so, oral health equity is really about making sure that everyone, regardless of background or life circumstances, or social demographics, that everyone has access to affordable and quality oral healthcare, so that everyone can have a healthy smile.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. What do strong healthy teeth have to do with strong local communities?
Helen Drexler:
Oh, that’s a great question. Actually, I think strong, healthy teeth lead to healthy smiles, which lead to overall wellbeing. And it’s a little bit of a two way street in my mind. We know that oral health and overall health are connected. There’s a lot of systemic diseases that have a strong correlation to good oral health. So, we want to do more to build those bridges between oral health and overall health.
Helen Drexler:
You can focus exclusively on oral health and making sure everyone has a healthy mouth, but if that mouth is in the body of a child who’s living in poverty and doesn’t have access to healthcare, or doesn’t even have access to a house, or a home, or a roof above their head, they might be sleeping in the car with their family who might be homeless, then it doesn’t really matter if I’m focused on oral healthcare if you can’t get that child into the basic needs that they have for all of their body. And so, that’s why healthy smiles are important to healthy communities.
Lorne Fultonberg:
And maybe that’s why you’ve made some commitments to other non-dental areas of community health, which I was surprised to read.
Helen Drexler:
Yeah. So, Delta Dental of Colorado has been serving this community for over 60 years. We’re a leading nonprofit dental insurance company. And when we embarked on a refresh of our strategic plan about four years ago, what we realized was that we were very successful as a dental insurance company, but we wanted to be able to grow beyond our core business in order to do more with our margin. No margin, no mission, as they like to say.
Helen Drexler:
And for us, because we care so deeply about our nonprofit status, we wanted to make sure that we were finding a variety of ways to grow and then be able to do even more for community health.
Helen Drexler:
So, in the creation of our holding company, Ensemble Innovation Ventures, we were able to start looking at diversification, and looking at community health in a larger context than just oral health. And that was what led to creating Ensemble Innovation Ventures.
Lorne Fultonberg:
You launched that last year?
Helen Drexler:
We were just filing for it around March of 2020.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Convenient. Yeah.
Helen Drexler:
As the world as we knew it turned on its head? I believe it was around August of 2020 that Ensemble Innovation Ventures came into existence, officially.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Okay.
Helen Drexler:
So, we spent our first year really developing our key performance indicators for the organization. It is just a holding company, we don’t intend to have a lot of employees at that level. We’re really using the holding company structure to administer our innovation fund.
Helen Drexler:
So, we do have a venture fund called Ensemble Innovation Ventures Fund, and it is specifically looking at investments in early stage startups that have a specific focus on our investment thesis, which is really orchestrating innovation towards healthier communities. And we’re really looking at companies that work in the, either InsurTech or Artificial Intelligence or even some consumer goods that are focused on really creating community health, so that everyone is empowered to achieve their best health.
Lorne Fultonberg:
What are some of the things that you are currently looking at backing through that fund? And what are some of your goals?
Helen Drexler:
Yeah. So, one of our goals is to remove barriers to care, improve access to care, and unleash the future potential of care. Those are our three theories of change as it relates to community health. So, unleashing the future of care one of the first companies we invested in is a company called KLOwen. KLOwen has developed bracket methodology for braces that are 3D printed and custom to the patient who needs orthodontia treatment.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Wow.
Helen Drexler:
And we invested in that because we actually believe that if you can create braces for treatment for mostly in younger people, but it could be for adults too, where the treatment plan could move from 18 months and maybe 20 visits down to 11 months and nine visits using tele dentistry components of that treatment plan, it actually allows the orthodontist to potentially take more insured patients.
Helen Drexler:
Or maybe even if they create a greater profit margin for the orthodontist, it might create an opportunity for that orthodontist to maybe see more Medicaid patients because Medicaid reimbursement is often the lowest reimbursement of all the insurance products. And it’s difficult for dentists to accept Medicaid reimbursement when it might not cover their cost.
Helen Drexler:
But if the product that they’re using allows them to have less chair time required for the treatment of braces treatment plan, it can be really beneficial. So, KLOwen was one of the first companies we invested in, and you can look at our website Ensemble Innovation Ventures to see the other companies that we’ve invested in.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Lots of happy high schoolers, too. I’m sure. Less time in the chair.
Helen Drexler:
And happy high schooler parents who don’t have to take them as often to the orthodontist.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. This all seems to fall in line with a term that I hear a lot these days, corporate social responsibility or CSR. I have a few questions for you about that, but wanted to start by asking how you define that term.
Helen Drexler:
So, I used to define corporate social responsibility as organizations responsibility to be good corporate citizens. And by that, I meant that corporations live their house and their people work in communities and they should be connected with those communities and be good corporate citizens, which maybe meant donating to certain nonprofits or being out in the community doing a volunteer project on Martin Luther King day.
Helen Drexler:
I think corporate responsibility has moved so much farther than that in the last few years. I think now I define corporate social responsibility as just table stakes for running your business. It isn’t just good for the community, it’s actually good for the community and good for your bottom line. Because we know that the generation of work force coming into our businesses today actually expect their organizations to be taking care of the planet and the people and the community.
Helen Drexler:
And so, that other term is ESG, environment social governance, and many for profit public companies are having to respond to pressure from shareholders to make sure they’re achieving goals around the environment or social needs or governance. And I think that those two terms are starting to come together.
Helen Drexler:
So, whether it’s a recycling program in your office or showing up to help clean up a park or be part of a community or supporting the causes that are important to your team members, these are all aspects of what a corporate social responsibility program looks like. And that really has to grow organically from, not only your mission of your organization and their business, but also from the needs of your team members and what they expect from you as an employer who’s committed to community.
Lorne Fultonberg:
One of those commitments that I think Delta Dental of Colorado made in March 2020 when you launched EIV, and also when the pandemic arrived here, you committed not to lay anyone off during the pandemic, and instead you were donating, I think, $30 million to customers and to stakeholders. So, that’s CSR too?
Helen Drexler:
It is, Lorne, in a lot of ways. And I want to speak to that a little bit because I want to put that 28 million into context for your listeners. So, on average, we might make, a year in profit or operating gain, between four and eight million dollars for our insurance company. And we commit that half of that goes back to our community. We typically give that back through grants to our foundation or through our corporate social responsibility programs. And we need to do that because we’re a nonprofit. But this year, if you think about the context of insurance, for about two months in 2020, there really weren’t many claims other than emergencies because dental offices were closed as we figured out what we were going to do with this pandemic and whether it was safe.
Helen Drexler:
So, for all intents and purposes, we were taking in premium, but not paying claims. And that meant if we did nothing and just let the year run out. We would’ve had a tremendously profitable year, but we also knew that our stakeholders, the providers, the dentists, our customers who paid the premium, the individual member who took a deduction from their paycheck to have their oral health benefit through their employer, and even our team members were facing significant challenges during the pandemic, this time of uncertainty.
Helen Drexler:
There were no claims to be paid. I had claims processors worried that they were going to get laid off. And so, what I said was, “We’re going to get through this. So, we’re not going to worry about layoffs, because we know there’s going to be this lull and then it’ll come back and we’ll have a lot more claims to pay in the future.”
Helen Drexler:
But we also said to our employers, “We’re going to give you one month credit on your premium. We’re going to either refund it or give it back to you or give you a credit.” Because we knew that it was really their money that they were paying for premiums that weren’t going to give them a service. And then we also provided extra payments for a few months to help dentists with the increased costs of masks and gloves, personal protection equipment. And even for our employees, we launched a grant program for any of our team members who might have had a family member get laid off or a family member had to move in with them or things that they had to purchase to remote work or managed kids at home.
Helen Drexler:
And together that package was $28 million. And even at the end of 2020, we still made a very modest profit from that year. And I’m extremely proud of that decision because I really felt strongly that you shouldn’t profit from a pandemic. And many businesses did, based on the type of business they were in. But I just felt really strongly that our obligation to the community took priority as we made those decisions
Lorne Fultonberg:
Was that a difficult decision at all? I mean, it was such a time of uncertainty, unprecedented circumstances.
Helen Drexler:
I’m not going to lie to you. It wasn’t an easy decision.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah.
Helen Drexler:
My board was with me in making that decision as we made that recommendation to them. We talked about the risk of getting it wrong. We could have gotten it wrong, but we were a strong company with a strong balance sheet, and the data indicated that it was the right decision.
Helen Drexler:
And sometimes one of our core values is, do what’s right even if no one’s looking. And in this case, it was the right thing to do and we had the reserves to survive it if the decision maybe wasn’t… Maybe if we overstated the amount, but in the end, it turned out to be the right decision and really the right amount.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. I’m wondering what lessons that circumstance, or COVID in general, either reinforced for you or taught you as a leader?
Helen Drexler:
That’s a great question, Lorne. I learned so much as a leader through COVID and I am using those lessons learned now. A few months in, I’ll admit to you, I was really struggling. I was so worried that we were going to get things wrong. I was so worried about my team members. Every day was a different crisis, a different issue. We were all Zoom fatigued and we were all home. We were essentially, 94% of our office was working fully remote by late March. Well, into the following January. And I printed off the poem, The Man In The Arena, by Roosevelt, I believe.
Helen Drexler:
Because I wanted to remind myself every morning about that notion that it’s the person in the arena who scarred and marred and is in there fighting. It’s the one who’s learning. And I just wanted to remind myself that when you are in the arena, it’s hard and you’re going to make mistakes and it’s going to be difficult. But that is what creates strength and leadership. And I also wanted to remind myself that no one had ever done this before, other than maybe a hundred years ago. And business was very different a hundred years ago when the Spanish flu was going through the country.
Lorne Fultonberg:
No one alive now had gone through that.
Helen Drexler:
No one alive at the time that I was making these decisions had gone through this. And so, I had to give myself grace to do the best that I could do. And then recognize that if it wasn’t the right decision, we could correct, course correct. But that I didn’t have to place myself against this sort of, “Well, what if I get it wrong?” Or “What if somebody else does it better?”
Helen Drexler:
None of us knew, really, what the right answers were. And we were making the best decisions at the time with the best thinking and the best leaders around us. And we just tried to make sure that the human being, the patient, the doctor, the community, was at the center of our decisions. And once you make that commitment to your mission and your core values, you really are okay.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Is there any possible way to prepare for making those decisions? We might have some people listening in who aspire to be leaders, or are newer leaders.
Helen Drexler:
So, in business, there’s an opportunity to always look at things through a risk management lens, right. And you can artificially create crises to see what you would do in the moment, and those simulations are really important. I think all leaders should carve out time to think and reflect and maybe consider the aspect of risk with whatever project or decision they’re making.
Helen Drexler:
But I think when you’re really in a crisis, the one thing I would say to your listeners is, be courageous and take some risk. Lean in, raise your hand, volunteer to be part of the planning, have good dialogue about the decision before you make it, and then once you’ve made it as a team, everyone gets behind it to move it forward.
Helen Drexler:
You’re not going to get all of them right. But if you have a strong foundation of trust and you’re authentic in your leadership and your contributions to the team, and you’re doing it with a level of respect and trust and honoring the process, you’re going to learn. And then the other thing is, just keep a journal. Write it down. I actually did a lot of journaling in those early days, early months of the pandemic. And someday I’ll go back and look at it, maybe laugh. But it was such a crazy time.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. I am a diary writer or a diary typer also and it’s wild to look back. I want to jump back to something that you said a little bit earlier about corporate social responsibility kind of becoming an expectation now. And it goes with something that I read in Forbes that said it’s an important competitive advantage for companies, I think both for hiring employees and both for being loyal to their shareholders, their stakeholders. Do you see CSR as a must right now, for companies?
Helen Drexler:
I do. I think we’re even seeing it in impact investing, which is getting a lot of traction, I think. We’ve talked a lot over the about, are there certain products that we should filter out of our portfolio, because they’re not aligned with our mission?
Helen Drexler:
That was sort of the early days of how you thought about impact investing, but now impact investing is also, what are you thinking about as it relates to sustainability and the environment and making sure that we’re addressing climate change? What are you doing to invest in companies that are diverse in terms of their senior leadership or their boards?
Helen Drexler:
And so, there’s many aspects of thinking about corporate social responsibility throughout your entire organization, from your investment to your hiring practices, to your diversity and inclusion strategies, to even how you do business with other companies that are looking and making similar decisions.
Helen Drexler:
And so, I think it is a differentiator. I think it is becoming an expectation. And again, I don’t think that there’s necessarily one answer for every company because if you’re in insurance or you’re in banking or you’re in education, I mean, your industry will dictate the areas that you are committed to, right.
Helen Drexler:
If your DEI strategy for a bank is a commitment to ensuring access to wealth or home ownership for communities of color, you might do something differently inside the context of that strategy than what I do in the context of oral health equity. But I do think it is going to become, to a large degree, table stakes. I think shareholders will eventually demand it. And I know our employees and our team members are beginning to demand it.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. I feel like it’s everywhere now. DEI is in the lexicon for pretty much all companies now. I don’t feel like though that every company has mastered how to do it and how to do it in a way that seems authentic, is authentic.
Helen Drexler:
Yeah.
Lorne Fultonberg:
What’s the key to doing that?
Helen Drexler:
So, first of all, this is a journey and the thing is we have to accelerate our pace. I’ve been an advocate of diversity and inclusion my entire career. But I will be honest with you, 20 years ago, I think I might have been talking the talk and not walking the talk. And even today I still have to challenge myself every day to say, could we be moving faster? What do we need to do more of? Who do we align with in terms of partnerships to really move our DE & I strategies forward.
Helen Drexler:
And the thing is, the more we talk about it, the more we’re going to make some mistakes or be challenged that we didn’t do enough, or we aren’t moving fast enough. And I’m learning, as a leader, I have to be ready for that feedback because it is probably true to some extent. I’m going to move as fast as I think I can, I’m going to try to do it right, but I’m not always going to get it right. And part of this is just being able to have the dialogue, begin the journey, make sure you are true to your word. And when you’re communicating, you’re communicating in an authentic way. Your team members will likely hold you accountable the fastest and that’s okay too.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. Yeah. How do you keep a pulse on what’s important to your community as something that Delta Dental of Colorado should stand up for?
Helen Drexler:
Yeah. So, today I do a net promoter score with four stakeholder groups. The employers who pay me a premium, the members who hold the policy and go to the dentist to get their coverage, the dentists who provide the services and my team members. And I do a net promoter score monthly for those first three stakeholder groups and quarterly for my team members.
Helen Drexler:
But I don’t do a net promoter score for the community. And I think we should think about, how do we measure whether we have the reputation and the value in our community that we want to have and how does our community feel about us? I don’t know what’s the right measure to do that. And I think that’s something we need to peel back the onion and explore a little further.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Helen, you are a guest here on The Voices of Experience podcasts. So, we view you as a voice of experience and as a voice of experience, what is something that you would want to pass on to the people listening?
Helen Drexler:
So, I’m at the end of my career, not like the tail end-
Lorne Fultonberg:
Big announcement to make here.
Helen Drexler:
No, I’m not making an announcement. But I’m at the last chapter of my career, probably. And I would say to your audience, my voice of experience and recommendation would be, don’t wait to take risks or to find your authentic self in your voice. It took me too long before I was willing to be true to my essence and really be authentic in the workplace.
Helen Drexler:
My generation of female counterparts working, starting their career in the ’80s, I think we put up with a lot of stuff that maybe now today our younger counterparts would not put up with, which is good. But what I do know is the longer you wait to be true to yourself and your job, the more you’re taking away from your opportunity to really flourish as a leader.
Helen Drexler:
So, take risks, lean in, challenge respectfully and in a collaborative way, choose where you work, with a company that you value and share their values, and don’t be afraid to raise your hand, to take on a new project. Even if you don’t have the experience.
Helen Drexler:
You don’t have to check all the boxes before you apply for a job that says you need to have 10 things. You can have five, you can have transferable skills, know what you want to do, go after it and take risks and be bold, be authentic.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about today that you wanted to touch on or may mention?
Helen Drexler:
I think the one thing I’d like to mention is, if there are employers listening to this podcast or leaders who have responsibility for budget and salaries is, be willing to break the mold a little bit on payroll and benefits and compensation. When you really think about who does the work of your company that creates the value that allows you to profit, you really have to be aware of the challenges that your team members, especially entry level team members are facing.
Helen Drexler:
And so, we just don’t live by the 80/20 rule anymore. You can’t have a benefit that you think is going to work for most, and it’ll be good enough. We have four generations in the workforce, those generations have different needs. Young families have different needs than older adults who are getting close to retirement and really thinking about how you meet your team members, where they are with the programs and services that help them the most, so that they can and have that balance between work and life.
Helen Drexler:
I just think it’s really important to always be thinking about, are my benefits current? Are my benefits attracting the right talent? And then how do we build the kind of team where we’re all working together to achieve a common goal?
Lorne Fultonberg:
That’s Helen Drexler, the CEO of Delta Dental of Colorado and managing director of Ensemble Innovation Ventures. Helen. Thank you so much, this was fun.
Helen Drexler:
It was fun, Lorne. Thank you.
Lorne Fultonberg:
This has been the VOE Podcast,
Kristal Griffith:
Produced by the Daniels College of Business and sponsored by U.S. Bank.
Nick Greenhalgh:
Music by Joshua Metzel, music composition graduate student at the Lamont School of Music.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Join us next time for more business insights from our community.
Kristal Griffith:
In the meantime, visit daniels.du.edu/VOEpodcast
Nick Greenhalgh:
And please remember to like, follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.