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The Secret to Great Teamwork

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Cross-functional teams are starting to make a difference in the patient and provider journey across UCSF Health. What makes them successful?

The Seeking Care Experience Prospect Patient (SCEPP) team, who collaborate to improve the patient’s experience journey, shares the secret to their success and great teamwork.

Composed of a diverse group of people and expertise, each cross-functional team is “self-sufficient” as it possesses all that it needs to complete its projects. And because of the diversity of the teams, the team members work together to find out what works and what doesn’t.

In 2012, Google studied hundreds of teams to understand the secret to productive, successful teams. Their research showed successful teams had something called high “social sensitivity.” In summary, successful teams promote psychological safety to each of its members. Psychological safety is a “sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.”

The highest value of the SCEPP team is psychological safety. The core team members work as an egalitarian team, where each voice is as valuable as the other. There is trust, support, honesty, candor, and kindness in every interaction. There is the ability to admit mistakes, ask for help, and say “I don’t know the answer.” And, there are frequent positive affirmations of “Job well done!”

What are the other elements that make the group successful? The SCEPP team is also structurally set up and supported to successfully exemplify the digital transformation model:

  • Lean, dedicated, core cross-functional team that allows for persistence in learnings and growth

  • Laser focus with frequent touchpoints (daily ‘Scrum’ standups; and biweekly Sprint planning, retrospectives, and outcome reviews)

  • ‘Agile’ flexibility allows the ability to swiftly shift and adjust to fluid, new enterprise partnerships and strategic prioritizations

  • Customer-centric commitment to deeply understanding and removing barriers for all prospective patients wanting to easily, quickly, and equitably engage with the UCSF Health system

  • Hypothesis-driven learnings and outcomes using data analytics and de-risked experiments to continuously learn more about customer behavior, identify friction points, and evolve solutions.

To learn more about the SCEPP team and how they work together, contact Brenda Rodgers.