Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, TTEC HOLDINGS INC
Denver Health Foundation Springboard Series - The Impact of Public Health - November 2021
Global business leader Kenneth Tuchman, Chairman and CEO of TTEC Holdings, joined Dr. Bill Burman, Executive Director of ...
About Kenneth Tuchman
Kenneth Tuchman, chairman and CEO of TTEC Holdings, has spoken about the company's public health and community engagement initiatives. During a Denver Health Foundation event in November 2021, Tuchman described TTEC's pandemic response, including moving roughly 60,000 computers to employees' homes and purchasing about $1.7 million worth of vaccines for the Philippines. He stated that companies have a responsibility to support employee health and that such efforts are good for business. Tuchman also discussed TTEC's philanthropy model, in which employees write grant proposals for their communities and pair funding with volunteerism, and he argued that the healthcare community should push for action against what he called "raw sewage of misinformation on social media." In a 2020 LinkedIn broadcast, Tuchman urged employees to vote, calling it a "civic duty" and describing the 2020 election as "one of the most important elections in history." He encouraged early voting and volunteering as poll workers. In earlier appearances, Tuchman praised the Colorado I Have A Dream Foundation for providing educational opportunities and said the program gave him "hope that the public school system can actually perform." He also outlined TTEC's corporate values in a 2014 video, stating the company's purpose is "to deliver humanity to business" and its vision is to help organizations create "emotionally connected valuable and lasting relationships."
Transcript (23 segments)
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Crystal Potter Rivera0:00
Thank you all to our viewing audience. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Crystal Potter Rivera, I'm Associate Executive Director of Denver Health Foundation, and we are pleased to host the Springboard Series, our way for donors to learn more about Denver Health's role as an anchor institution in our community, acting as a springboard for delivering health, social, and economic solutions. The Springboard Series brings together Denver Health CEO Dr. Robin Wittenstein with community leaders, philanthropists, and program experts to talk about important community issues and explore ways we can tackle those challenges together to create positive systemic change. Thank you so much for joining us for these vital discussions, and I will ask Dr. Wittenstein to introduce today's panelists.
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Robin Wittenstein0:44
Thank you, Crystal. So I'm Robin Wittenstein, I'm the CEO here at Denver Health, and I am really excited about today's topic. I want to say first, thank you to the Denver Health Foundation for the continued support of Denver Health and what we're trying to do in terms of our vision, our mission, our aspirations for both the institution, but more importantly, the people that we serve. I'm really excited about today's topic, and I'm very excited in particular about the two guests that we have. Mr. Ken Tuchman is the Chairman and CEO of TTEC, which is one of the largest global providers of technology and services managing customer experience for some of the world's largest companies, including Ford, Peloton, DoorDash, so names that are familiar to all of us. His expertise and his company really makes a difference for them. Mr. Tuchman founded TTEC in 1982, and he really focuses on how innovation can really change the customer experience journey through all of their interactions with organizations. Now employing more than 55,000 people in 82 countries, I think that the spirit of innovation and service has really helped grow the company. But he also has a very important philanthropic side. In 2007, Ken launched the TTEC Community Foundation, which is a corporate foundation that is really interested in building stronger communities through education. He also oversees his family foundation, the Tuchman Family Foundation, which is really committed to helping people build safe, healthy, and productive lives. The overlap between what Ken is interested in doing, he and his family and his corporation, and what Denver Health does is really quite amazing. He focuses on advancing education innovation, especially for K-5, breakthrough medical research, positive social change. He's the Chair of the Board of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and the Board of Trustees for Colorado Succeeds. I want to take just one second here to say thank you in particular for all the work that Ken and his family foundation did for Denver Health and for hospitals in the region through COVID. The delivery of over 200,000 meals to frontline workers, including emergency room nurses, on the floors, paramedics, ICU staff, was incredible and really made a difference and helped our frontline workers and those throughout the region know just how much the community was standing next to them. So I'm really thankful that you're here, and we're going to get to hear you pick your brain on some of these topics. Our other guest, and he's not really a guest, is our own Dr. Berman. Dr. Berman is the head of the Public Health Institute at Denver Health, has been with Denver Health for quite a number of years, and is recognized both regionally and nationally as an expert in public health. His work has advanced not just medical care provided to individual patients here at Denver Health, which of course is important, but really focuses on much larger macro issues of health in our community and how we can make changes to health status and health outcomes through concerted efforts across the community. He is a member of the Mile High Health Alliance and the Denver Metro Partnership, both of which are intended to be collaborations between healthcare experts and others to address the kinds of issues that are important to public health, from management of infectious diseases, which obviously has been a big part of what he has focused on in the last 18 months, but issues of healthy weight for children, gun violence, all of the issues that are endemic in our society and that impact the health and well-being of the people that we serve. So we couldn't have a more appropriate expert for the discussion in this case, and I am thrilled. So I just want to give just a couple of minutes background on why we're even having this conversation, because we're going to be talking today about public health and how the different components of our society can come together to address issues. The reason Denver Health is focused on it is because of our role as an anchor institution. In its simplest form, an anchor institution is one that exists in a community that has a mission and purpose, for us it's clinical care, research, and education, but that also recognizes that as a member of the community, there is an economic and social purpose that we exist for that impacts the lives of the people around us. So as we think about providing medical care to our patients, educating the next generation of healthcare professionals, or doing important social research, health research, we also think about how can we use every aspect of who we are to drive positive social and economic change for our patients and our community. We know that the work we do clinically is critical. Some of you have participated and have been patients and have seen what Denver Health can do, but we also know that there is so much more that impacts the health and well-being of the people we serve that goes far beyond that clinical care. So Denver Health is focusing on what we can do to improve the social and economic factors that impact the people that we serve. This requires us to put time and energy and resources into having conversations, into advancing initiatives that are designed to help improve the social and economic conditions of the people we serve. That includes being an active participant and advocate for public health, addressing those concerns that may not today impact an individual person but have an impact every single day on the people who live and work in the city and county of Denver. So it's critically important, and we know we can't do it by ourselves. It takes a village, it really truly takes a village to make changes in public health and to make sure that we have strong and healthy communities that we can all survive and thrive in. So I want to turn now to some of the questions I have. I will start out by saying there is no belief that we are going to solve these problems today. If we could, Dr. Berman would retire and would go off and never have to think about public health again, but it is certainly not possible. What I really want to get at today is what is the thinking and the approach that will allow us to make an impact and to really begin changing some of the challenges, addressing some of the challenges we face. So Ken, if you don't mind, I'm going to start with you. I'm really interested in your perspective as an employer, as a large global company. What do you think the role of business is in public health, and why is it important to you that you and your organization even be involved in these conversations?
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Kenneth Tuchman8:32
Thank you for having me, Robin. I really appreciate it. First of all, I think there's really two reasons. One is a moral and an ethical reason: the fact that people that work for a company spend the majority of their life working, more than they do actually with their family. So we feel like we have a sense of responsibility for making sure that our people are healthy and that they're able to do their job. So from just a social responsibility standpoint, I think it's something that all companies have a responsibility, since we consume the majority of their awake hours, so to speak. From a selfish standpoint, a shareholder standpoint, if you want to look at it that way, it's good for business. When employees get flu shots and they don't get the flu, that means there's continuity in them working. When employees get vaccinated and they don't come down with a severe illness, that's good for business. But more importantly, what I have found as a leader of a business for decades now is that if you create an environment that is an environment of caring, an environment of compassion, you can not only attract better employees but you can keep them. We live in a world right now with the Great Resignation where people are leaving companies at record rates. If your employees feel like you genuinely care about their health and that you're proactively doing things that are going to help them have a healthier life, stay healthier, and live longer, they become emotionally loyal to your company. When somebody becomes emotionally loyal to your company, they think not once, not twice, but multiple times before they leave the company. If they're intellectually loyal, meaning they only focus on the intellectual side of my base pay, what the benefits are, then the moment that somebody comes along with a better offer, they don't even second think it. So if you can get people to feel in an organization that you truly genuinely care about them, you actually go out of your way to participate in their well-being, you end up with employees that are happier. Then going back to the shareholder standpoint, we have a very basic simple philosophy in business: if you have happy employees and you have happy customers because you treat your customers in a certain way, the rest, profits follow, revenues grow, everything works out. If you have miserable employees, it's much harder to make customers happy. Because we're in the customer experience business, you can't take an unhappy customer, marry them with an unhappy employee, and expect to have a positive outcome. So I think it's really important. I think it builds true loyalty, and I think it actually helps us drive towards higher profits. I hope I answered your question.
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Robin Wittenstein12:00
No, you did. I think the philosophy that you espouse there really is one that I would love to say that many more business people have, but I'm not sure they do. When we talk about issues around public health, it often seems as if the time frame, the time horizon for these issues is pretty long. The impact on obesity in our community or things like that, these are just not things that change overnight. So I think your approach is amazing. How do you bring that to life for your employees? What are the kinds of things that you do that help them see that commitment to these issues on a day-to-day basis?
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Kenneth Tuchman12:43
Back in the day of people working in our bricks and mortar in 2019, over 60,000 employees, we would do everything from analyzing the food that we would serve in our cafeteria. I would do everything I could to raise prices of soda pop because employees still wanted it there, and lower prices of water and lower prices of organic juices and things like that. Doing things like teaching cooking classes, having walking groups, and then rewarding them based on their steps, having leaderboards at each of your locations as to what the competition is of the steps, but doing it where it becomes a group thing so that ultimately it's not just singling out one particular person that may or may not be obese, but making it so that everybody participates in it. Making gyms accessible, providing yoga classes, providing mindfulness classes, really extending the whole concept of mental health. We have a lot of mental health offerings, making it available for free, encouraging people, telling people that we all have our issues and taking advantage of mental health doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you, you're normal, so take advantage of it. All of these things lead to not only happier employees but higher productivity. So as much as it might cost more in particular different areas, the payback I think is ultimately significant in lower attrition, higher quality, better product productivity.
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Robin Wittenstein14:47
Can you not hear me? You're on mute. I muted myself because a fire engine was going by and I didn't want to... I found that I wasn't allowed to unmute myself, so thank you. I will say that some of what you just said I have got to imagine is music to Dr. Berman's ears, because I think as I've gotten to know him and the work that he's done here at Denver Health, a lot of that is really the thrust of some of the very practical things that he has tried to do, even here at Denver Health. Speaking about pre-COVID when people were in the offices, I know that TTEC has really shifted to a work-at-home model during COVID-19, as have many businesses of course. What kind of implications do you think this might have for public health? Certainly the kinds of things you've talked about, which are phenomenal, are not really possible when people are all working from home. How have you adjusted your approach, and how do you think going forward you'll bring this mission to life?
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Kenneth Tuchman15:57
On March 13th or something like that, the world came to a stop. Our clients were shut down, they had no ability to interact with their customers, their bricks and mortar got shut down. We immediately reversed all of our technology and moved it so that it became virtual and was accessible to our employees at home. We shifted some 60,000 computers to people's houses, made sure they had proper internet, and it was a very significant undertaking. That said, we've gotten through it, and we still have probably 90 plus percent of our workforce still working from home. Obviously now, many employees have gotten used to this lifestyle of working in their pajamas. There are many benefits: safety benefits, lower carbon footprint benefits, flexibility, more time with your family, no commute. But there are also some real cons. It's really hard to maintain a culture when you never get together. You tend to lose some of the strategy that you're trying to instill in people. It's a huge problem for Gen Zers. We're really trying to hire a lot of younger people right now just to make sure that our population is diverse, and those people learn through shadowing, they learn through example, they learn through player coaches that they're with. If it's all being done virtual, they really are very disadvantaged. I would argue that if this younger generation doesn't get back into an environment where they have mentors, it's going to be somewhat problematic as to the impact that it's going to have on their skill set. Then there's a lack of relationship building, which is really problematic, and then isolation kicks off mental health issues, sleep related issues, anxiety issues. So there is a pro, but there are also some pretty extreme cons. What we're doing is we are now re-architecting our entire business. We've been working on this for quite some time. We're building technology that, for a lack of a better way of explaining it, allows our employees to operate at home while still getting water cooler conversations, coffee breaks, lunchroom conversations. Imagine a very virtual reality type of world. We'll be introducing some software roughly first quarter of next year that will hopefully help create some of this connective tissue and allow for people to build more or less virtual type relationships. That said, it's not perfect. Part of what we'll also be doing is creating a hub and spoke model, and depending upon the employee, asking them to come to work from one to three days per week. That's where they'll get their up training, that's where they'll have their group meetings, and then they can go back and have their flexibility at home. So there'll be a balance of in-person and at home. We'll go out of our way to create these get-togethers, and we will continue to advance our mental health support services. We are hugely focused on constant communication with emails reminding people of our smoking cessation, our mental health offerings, trying to provoke them and encourage them to take us up on this stuff because it's not easy to get people, especially when they're remote, to take it up versus bringing them in a conference room, doing a brown bag lunch, and having people go around the table and talk about how they started using some of the mental health stuff and it's really great. You can still do it remotely, but it's not the same. Last night, believe it or not, we did one of our first get-togethers at a ballpark with our IT department, and it was unbelievable. People almost didn't know what to do, like should they shake hands, could they give them a hug. People were saying things to me like, 'Ken, do you realize this is the first time I've seen my group in almost two years?' They were extremely emotional. So this whole concept that people don't really want to come back to the office, I think that's a mixed bag. I don't think that's totally accurate. I feel very sorry for the younger generation because at the end of the day, the amount of relationships, both friendship relationships and long-term romantic relationships, because the majority of the time is spent working, is created through that network that you build in an office environment. So I think that is clearly a challenge. But look, the bottom line is it is what it is. The pandemic is where it is. This is a bit of a non-sequitur from your question, but it's something that I just learned of last night. We get our stats on COVID deaths and infection rate across the globe every single week. I was so pleased to hear that in the Philippines, we purchased about $1.7 million worth of vaccines because the government wasn't providing them in Metro Manila. We're at 98% vaccination in all of our outskirt smaller village locations, we're at 93% vaccination. So that's the difference between people that are taking a political position and people who actually are realizing that this is a life-and-death situation. It is possible to vaccinate an entire population, and a company can have an impact. By the way, we've had to do all kinds of education on why this is positive for them. We're seeing the same uptake in India and in some other countries. It's so tragic to see how difficult it is and how hard we're having to work to get people to become vaccinated. Sorry that I went off on that tangent.
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Robin Wittenstein22:52
No, I appreciate that. I'm sure that Bill will have comments on that also, because Bill and the entire Public Health Institute really have been a big part of the thrust of Denver Health for trying to get vaccinations going. It's obviously much more politicized here than it may be in other places. Just having community leaders and businessmen stand up and say this is something we need to do, I think can make a real difference. I'll share, talking about people coming back into the office, my daughter is one of those, I don't know what generation she is anymore, but she was one of those people who started a new job in the middle of COVID and never went into the office. She had the job for about eight months and then left, having never gone into her office and sat down and had conversations. Talking with her, just the lack of connection that exists there. I think one of the things we wrestle with a lot is that balance of how do you help people come into the office and be able to connect and have that support from each other, against what do we do to make sure people are safe in the face of COVID. Dr. Berman is certainly one of the people that I count on a lot and frequently go to him and say, 'Okay Bill, tell me please when the light is, when there's going to be a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not just another train coming at us.' So I'm sure we'll hear some comment there. But Ken, one of the questions is, the work you described and the approach that you take, the benefit and the value of focusing on public health and improvements in public health both from a moral and ethical perspective but just being good for business, being good for the people that work for you and the customers, but from a philanthropic perspective, when you think about a company like TTEC, what does it look like to support public health? Is it things like buying vaccines and getting them where they need to be?
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Kenneth Tuchman25:03
I think it's several things, and I'll try to be quick with this. One is, sorry my lights just went out, excuse me. I think it's a combination of trying to create a community of well-being and really communicating to people and getting them to believe that you're going to put people over profits, and that the profits are going to naturally take place from people just doing a great job, being passionate about their work, going the extra mile because they care. Our philanthropy approach is really very simple: how do we be entrepreneurial with it, how do we really leverage philanthropy and then partner with TTEC to get more done with less, how do we get people involved. One of the things that we do with the TTEC Foundation as an example is the employees write for a grant and they get to choose where the money goes in their communities. Then there's a board that selects which grants get funded, and then they have to trade the dollars that we're going to give with volunteerism. They'll have to recruit people that are going to be involved in volunteering, so it's not just us writing checks, but it's also them becoming very active. If we're going to build a library or computerize a school, then let's say it's our network operations department that wants that done, then they physically need to be involved. We'll buy the equipment, but they need to hook it up, set it up, train the teachers on how to use it. When you do that, what we're trying to do is teach people philanthropy. When they participate in that, what we find is the majority of employees have never really participated in philanthropy, and when they do, they are overwhelmed by the feeling that they get from their participation. Now they're hooked, now they're addicted, and now they want to do more. They're asking, 'How can we do this project or can we do that project?' So it becomes a flywheel situation. I think it's all about introducing training wheels to people and then letting them get a bit of a high off of it, so to speak, and then maybe they decide to do their own volunteerism that has nothing to do with what TTEC funds out of the foundation. That's been our approach. We've done projects all over the world. What that does by the way, we hire a lot of young people in all these sites all over the world. Nothing is better than when their parents learn about what the company is doing. In other countries, more so outside the United States, when they hear that we're helping build a community center or that we're involved in a library, they're reinforcing to our employee, 'Wow, what a great place that you're working at, look at the impact they're having on our local community.' That just creates that much more emotional connection, and that's what we try to do consistently because retention of our employees is vitally important. The longer an employee stays at something, the better they get at it, the more institutionalized knowledge they have, and you're not in this constant cycle of training.
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Robin Wittenstein28:49
Sounds great. Dr. Berman, one of the things we've talked about is how do we really bring in and engage everybody in issues of public health. You've heard from Ken both the moral and ethical responsibility that TTEC feels towards public health, but the kinds of things they do in order to make sure that they can recruit, retain workers, and make a contribution. Do you think that this is an approach that could address some of how do we get everybody to the table and get involved? We need healthy employees across all of the organizations and businesses in our community, but we also need to have more involvement in basic issues of public health. Is this one possible approach that could advance that?
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Bill Berman29:33
Yeah, I think so. Ken, it was really great to hear you talk. I just used a lot of my lines, that's great, I'd love to have my lines taken from me. I think there should be a natural alliance between business and public health because we have this core shared idea of the both ethical and moral and business good that comes from prevention and health promotion. Unfortunately, our system is more of a sick care system than it is a health promotion system. We all obviously need to retain the ability to diagnose and treat infections and other health problems, but we also need to build something we haven't had, which is this focus on prevention and health promotion, not just diagnosing and managing illnesses. You went over many of the elements of that. I think sometimes we make prevention way too complicated. I don't think it is that complicated. The basic elements of prevention for which we have excellent evidence are a support for families with young children. There's just very solid evidence that investing at that key part of life for that child and the family is critically important in everything that happens later on. Investing in early childhood, you mentioned tobacco, you mentioned fostering exercise, mental health. Those are the keys to an overall focus on prevention and health promotion. I think with concerted work, we can build that alliance between public health and business to a much greater degree than we have now.
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Robin Wittenstein31:17
One of the things when Ken was describing the vaccine program to bring vaccine to the Philippines, and we've talked about this before, this pandemic has been incredibly stressful and we clearly were not as prepared as we thought we would be for a pandemic. One of the outcomes, and I hope that this remains with people, is the inequities and disparities and the unequal impact that it has had on people in our communities. Obviously one of the things that TTEC did is buy vaccine to bring it to people in need. How do we begin thinking about the inequities that exist, the lack of preparation for public health emergencies, and the role that business can play in helping us to bring this to the forefront so that we get through COVID by March, maybe February, I'm waiting for you to say January, but we get through this and we're in a better place for the next pandemic when it comes? What can we do?
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Bill Berman32:20
I think in COVID you saw tremendous failures and tremendous successes, and it's interesting to look at both. The tremendous success I think we would all point to is the development of highly effective vaccines in less than a year. That was completely unprecedented, and importantly, that represented the outcome of a multi-decade investment in precisely being able to make vaccines in a way we've never made them before, using techniques we've never used before. That didn't come out of nowhere at all. It came out of several decades of focused work on how do we have the ability to identify a pathogen quickly, understand the immune response to it quickly, and be able to build an effective vaccine quickly. So a tremendous success, and importantly the lesson for this discussion is it didn't come out of nowhere, it was the product of at least 20 years of carefully focused work. How about the failures? They're huge, and I would point to a lot of them being really due to lack of community engagement. We thought, 'Gosh, we make a vaccine, we're done.' Well, we're not done at all. We have to get that vaccine out effectively, equitably to the populations that need it. We hadn't made investment there. We hadn't said what are the elements that allow you to work effectively with a community such that when a tool becomes available, highly effective testing for COVID, a highly effective vaccine for COVID, we can actually get that into that community and make it work. I couldn't be more complimentary about Ken's work in buying vaccine when needed, and that's a great thing to do. I think businesses in many ways have led in the vaccine work in our own country. I think a lot of the progress that's been made has been because of both support and clear messaging from businesses. But I think this part that we really need to invest in is the recognition that science alone does not do it. We need effective ongoing relationships with key communities that then let us use the product of scientific investigation effectively.
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Kenneth Tuchman34:40
I was going to say that I think there's an elephant in the room that is not being discussed, maybe not per se to today's conversation but just in general. You have best of intentions and science is ultimately on the side of doing the right thing. The problem that I don't think there's enough focus on, that I believe our government has just epically failed at, is the social media situation. In my opinion, when you have good doctors like Dr. Berman and yourself and other people that are throwing all their life's energy and their money at trying to do the right thing, but you have this raw sewage coming out of social media and misinformation, we're wasting not millions, hundreds of billions of dollars right now trying to counteract what is consistently being pushed on Facebook, consistently being pushed on YouTube, consistently being pushed on Twitter. In my opinion, until the healthcare community rises up and brings this to a presidential level, to a congressional level, and says this has to stop, if this doesn't stop, we're going to lose all of our healthcare workers. They're going to be fried, they're going to be burnt out, and they're not going to be able to continue to work at this pace of trying to save people's lives. The fact of the matter is we would be at 85 or 90% vaccination right now if we didn't have this misinformation and if certain people weren't utilizing it to capitalize off of it politically. I'm not trying to turn this into a political conversation, but I think it's absolutely critical that the government is just sitting on the sidelines and watching society disintegrate from allowing social media to influence people's lives in a very dangerous way, mental health-wise, science-wise, global warming, I could go on and on. The second thing is that companies have the ability to do what the CEO of United Airlines did, which is to say, 'Hey guys, I know it's not popular, but effective on this date, if you want to work for this airline, you will be vaccinated.' Everyone said, 'Oh my god, they're going to lose 30% of their employees,' and guess what, they didn't. They lost the lunatic fringe, and I would argue that wasn't the end of the world. A lot of hospitals hardlined the same thing. So my point is there's a role for companies too to take a line on some of these things that are caused by misinformation. The last point I'll make is that consumers need to now start to speak up about social media and the harm that it's doing to their kids, their mental health. In my opinion, if we don't address these types of things, with due respect, the science can get better and better and we can keep creating magical pills, but we're fighting an uphill battle that shouldn't be an uphill battle. That to me is what's incredibly frustrating. Think of the billions of dollars that are being pumped into this economy that could be going to Denver Health and other great institutions. We could be providing free healthcare to everybody.
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Robin Wittenstein38:13
I don't disagree. Putting aside the politics, although it's hard in this day and age to put aside politics, my question would be, you're right, healthcare organizations across this country, across the world frankly, do need to stand up and say this is harmful. The impact of social media is as harmful as any other public health issue out there when it's full of misinformation and getting people to not believe the science. But one of the questions I have for you, Ken, is it feels to me as if healthcare organizations and leaders, respected clinicians like Dr. Berman, have stood up and have repeatedly said over and over and over again what needs to happen. At the beginning of COVID, everybody was cheering, 'That's wonderful, we've got healthcare heroes.' But as time went by, that wasn't the story anymore, and the reception is not the same. My question is, how do we get enough of the grown-ups in the room, whether they are healthcare leaders or business leaders or community leaders, to stand up as a united front for this? I'm concerned frankly that healthcare organizations standing up and talking to the government is just not helping. It feels like things are falling on deaf ears. Your company is an example of a business that is really engaged and trying to do the right thing, but it feels to me as if what we need is truly let's just identify the people who can cut through a lot of the nonsense and really step forward. How do we develop those coalitions where it's not just Denver Health, it's not just TTEC, but it's us coming together, it's others who are thinking the same? Because it feels to me as if otherwise we're all lone voices saying things, and it's just too easy to ignore. Bill, you're the one who's been out there talking about this for months and months. I'm not sure if it's helpful to point to any one portion of our society and say this is where the change has to happen.
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Bill Berman40:32
Well, I agree that one of the big problems is that the few who are very vocal can dominate a discussion. My colleague from Jefferson County, which is the suburban county to the west of us, gets lots of incredibly vile social media. She shared some of it with me. But she makes the point that look, almost 80% of the people in my county have been vaccinated. They have made a very clear choice, but they are often pretty silent. I guess it's that question of how do we make sure that we're hearing from what I think is truly the majority, demonstrably the majority, because they can easily be drowned out by a very vocal minority.
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Kenneth Tuchman41:20
A hundred percent. I think you're asking a question that I'm not sure that there is a pat answer, but I think it's a combination of things. I think a group of healthcare executives from the leading institutions do need to request a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and try to express what's taking place and how this is tearing us apart. I think that you folks need to be meeting with Google at a national level, with the media there and present to what you're actually saying and why this needs help. I think that social media and the political side have done a brilliant job of turning this into a liberty thing, which is rather interesting because there are so many other aspects of people's lives like driving speed limits, wearing seat belts, not smoking in a restaurant that didn't become a liberty thing, but this has now become a political flashpoint. I'm just simply saying that at some point in time, everybody needs to understand that this is bad for our nation, this is bad for our people, this is bad for mental health, this is bad for business, and that it's time to stop playing. There's no elephant in the room when there really is an elephant in the room, and dealing with it. I can't tell you how many doctors I've talked to that have said they've tried to convince patients that are convinced that getting a vaccine is going to allow the government to track them. I don't want this to be political, but what I say to people when they say that to me is, 'Are you aware that Google is tracking every move that you make? Are you aware that they literally can calculate when you're going to go to the restroom? Are you aware that they know when you go to bed, they know where you eat? You're worried about the government? Facebook is doing the same thing.'
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Robin Wittenstein43:24
It is interesting. The memes that have come out about everything, I've seen the ones where 'I don't want to be tracked' from the same person who's looking at their cell phone, or folks who are concerned about facial recognition, and you know what a driver's license is? It's really quite amazing how people can have head coaches finders on. We sometimes look back at moments in history and we see a tipping point, a change that happens because of something. I don't know whether COVID-19 will be that or not. When we think about the way the vaccine and mandates and everything have become so politicized, and yet as Dr. Berman said, the vast majority of people actually are getting their vaccines and they're moving forward. Do you think either one of you, do you think that we will look back at some time and see that we actually have been able to become rational about this, that we've been able to see that it's the majority who rule and that it's not the lunatic fringe? I'll say here, not everybody who objects to a vaccine has medical reasons, those are perfectly logical, but that is an extreme minority. Is this going to be a turning point where we finally recognize that we're letting these few strident voices try to overtake a rational conversation about what is good for the whole of us, or are we going to face the same thing in the next pandemic?
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Bill Berman45:00
I think we'll face similar things, but I hope we can learn from this and do some of the things that Ken and others have talked about to try to reverse the misinformation, or decrease it, we're not going to get rid of it, but decrease the frequency and the power that it has. I'll also come back to, to improve health, to improve communities, to work on a pandemic, to work on heat emergencies, to work on a reaction to floods, to almost anything I can think of, whether it's an acute or a chronic health threat, we need to connect more closely with communities as well. I think whatever we do in that regard will be helpful in any of that list above. It'll be helpful immediately in COVID, but it'll be helpful in working on any chronic health problem that I can think of, as well as whatever follows COVID, whether that's an environmental emergency or a medical emergency. So I think we need to work on those core issues like better support for families with young children, truly access to healthcare for all. One of the reasons that there's distrust in vaccination is that we've denied healthcare to parts of our population for the entire time of being America. We've made it very difficult to access social services. If you've ever been involved in that, the barriers we put in front of people to access nutritional assistance, emergency economic assistance, we would never put up with them, and yet we allow that to happen. So we need to invest in communities, and when we do that, much in the way that Ken described investing in employees, the benefits will come.
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Kenneth Tuchman47:05
Yeah, I agree with you.
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Robin Wittenstein47:08
So I'm trying to be cognizant of the time. Going back to our original points we were making just before we got started, Ken, there is no way we could have a conversation like this and even begin to touch on all of the complexities and the questions we'd like to ask, never mind get to the solutions. But I do think, and I don't think I'm being Pollyanna on this, one of the things I will take away from this is there are many more people who are out there who are thinking in this way. We may not have the right exact solution, but there are ways for us to work together to make things better, both now and in the future. I certainly hope we have the opportunity to continue to build on this discussion, to look at ways that the approach that TTEC has taken, and I'm sure you're having conversations with many of your colleagues, and the work that Dr. Berman has done and others in our Public Health Institute and across the entire organization, how can we come together and be more effective in driving some of that positive change and approach moving forward. So I want to say thank you to both of you. I have a whole list of questions that I would have liked to get to, and I promise I will follow up with each of you on this. For those of you who have been listening, the Springboard Series really is intended to take what are complicated topics and conversations, sometimes difficult issues, and just dive into those and begin to bring different perspectives on. So I really appreciate this. If you'd like to learn more about the kinds of things we've talked about in the past, please feel free to go to the Denver Health Foundation website. We record all of these sessions, so you can listen to any of them. I can only imagine, Ken, that we're going to be coming back to you and asking you to participate again, because I think part of what we need is for everybody to be part of the solution and to bring innovation and different ways of thinking into the conversation. So thank you so much, I really appreciate you taking the time today. And Bill, as always, as our leading public health expert, you never fail to amaze me with how quickly you can take really complicated subjects and in a few words make it into something that really is a pretty common sense approach. If only we could work together and do these things, we could make a huge difference. So I really appreciate that. Thank you to all of you who have participated, and I hope to see you in the next Springboard Series. So thank you so much.
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Kenneth Tuchman49:44
Thank you, Robin, for all the incredible work that Denver Health does for our community. It's truly an amazing establishment, and we feel honored to be able to support you guys. So thank you.
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Robin Wittenstein49:56
Thank you very much. Thanks. Bye-bye.