Staff Award for Excellence - Laura Gerker

Laura Gerker and husband

Business Manager - Division of Hospital Medicine

Nominators, Fiona Linn and Dr. Chang -  "Laura has played a pivotal role in the Division of Hospital Medicine since she joined. Her commitment, hard work, and organizational skills, as well as her forward-thinking, positive and professional approach, have led to countless improvements. Through this past year, Laura has provided exemplary leadership and sheer hard work to enable the division to keep functioning smoothly while navigating the challenging transition of being without a division administrator, division chief, and APP manager simultaneously." 

Work Performance

Laura has played a key role in our division since she joined. Her commitment and hard work have allowed the division to continue to function at a high level despite being down a division administrator, division chief, and APP manager. She has been able partner with the other leaders in the division to keep things running as smoothly as possible despite these open high level positions. Laura has played a key role in bringing on an interim division admin and in preparing for our new division admin.

Laura’s commitment to excellence shines through on a consistent basis. She is open to challenges, big or small, and identifying ways to steer Hospital Medicine forward in a positive and value added direction. One example of Laura’s exemplary work has been through her work to improve the faculty recruitment process from a diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective. Her work and collaboration with division and department stakeholders has really made an impact on recruitment and has served as a model for other areas to learn from.

Laura is constantly looking for ways to streamline, organize, and expedite projects within our division. For example, our recruitment process now runs like clockwork:

  • Pre-meetings bringing the division chief/recruitment director together with all the necessary staffing FTE, hiring status and future recruits together
  • Multiple meetings with the division chief and our department DEI vice chair to PDSA recruitment committee meetings
  • Tightly organized recruitment committee meetings with prepared packets for every candidate
  • Debrief meetings to ensure we continue to make consistent decisions that comport with our highest values

Leadership

Laura is one of the most proactive and organized people I’ve had the opportunity to work with. While many will focus on the daily priorities at hand, Laura is skilled in also looking ahead. Her forward planning diligence enables the division and its leaders to be more prepared and more thoughtful as a team. Laura’s ability to look and plan ahead is a strong and unique leadership skill that makes her effective as the division’s business manager. Laura’s leadership has also been on display during the pandemic and attending to the division’s various needs.
 
Most recently, Laura stepped into the enormous gap left behind when our division administrator left, without a hitch in her gait. While she had no interest in the division administrator role (we talked about it!), she handled the vast majority of the role, even though she was not interim, with aplomb, passionate energy and her quintessential organizational approach. She handled this transition and all the other transitions in the division with foresight and detail. Our division could not have survived the gap without her! She did this without burdening the other staff and led from the front.

Customer Service

Laura’s customer service is first and foremost displayed through her communication style. She communicates in a way that is consistently professional both within and outside our division. Her responses are extremely expedient, especially to tasks that she recognizes are time sensitive, and she keeps track of literally hundreds of tasks per week, prompting the right person to take the next needed step.

Laura’s commitment to customer service is demonstrated in her consistent desire to solicit feedback. Each time she works to improve a process she will solicit feedback and incorporate the feedback to ultimately make continuous improvements.

She has refined many processes outlining clear and concise steps for staff and faculty to follow which allows staff to be more efficient and provides better customer service to the faculty. She has also created several tracking spreadsheets which allow stakeholders to be able to view the process in real time.

Process Improvement

Laura consistently looks for ways to improve processes. She’s been extremely effective in collaborating with faculty and staff members to improve multiple processes during her tenure in Hospital Medicine. Examples include the annual faculty performance evaluation process, onboarding program for staff, credentialing process for faculty at affiliate locations, and improvements to the entire faculty recruitment process (starting from the very launch of recruitment to the orientation and on-boarding of faculty on their first day). Laura’s drive to improve processes have added immense value to a busy division, ultimately helping us all work more efficient, reduce waste, create clarity around roles, and make capacity for other priorities. Laura’s leadership, commitment, talent, and contributions have certainly made a difference in making Hospital Medicine the strong division it is today.

Laura has streamlined and organized our seasonally recurring events within our division: faculty recruitment, end of the year evaluations, orientation/onboarding, to name only a few. She has brought organization and process to each of these roles, encompassing project management skills – e.g. she brought our DEI principles to life by narrowing our decision-making within the recruitment committee, has an established timeline and written-out-to-the-minute workflow that supports our incredibly robust evaluation process (85+ faculty /year) and has detailed our orientation working backwards from our start date.