“You'll probably hear me speak a lot about the collaborative efforts,” said Heather Sheldon, a senior sales executive at Blackbaud, a company that makes software for nonprofits and organizations oriented toward social impact. “Because that's a really important piece of understanding a holistic approach to supporting your employees. It’s not just one area.”

Employers had been increasingly using technology to promote worker health and wellness before Covid-19 came along, but the pandemic provided a new sense of urgency. Choosing those tech tools, as well as deciding how they’ll be used, needs to be a collaborative process, said Sheldon, whose company invites a host of stakeholders into the conversation, including representatives from HR, IT, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). “It’s really important that when you're thinking about the technologies to support your employees, that you’re looking at it from that multidimensional or multi-departmental approach.”

At Zoom Video Communications, where Sheila Krueger leads global benefits, the company uses focus groups and surveys to understand what employees feel is missing from their health and wellness options. “We’re making sure that everybody that's on our payroll is represented as we bring on these new decisions and new programs,” said Krueger, who joined Sheldon and three other corporate leaders to talk about making the most of digital health tools, a panel discussion I moderated at From Day One’s October virtual conference, “Promoting Employee Mental Health, Wellness and Stress Reduction.” Among the group’s insights:

Ensuring Health and Wellness Tools Are Trustworthy

Especially important is the security of these tools, which can be loaded with personally identifiable information. Marni McDowell, global director of health and well-being at Micron Technology, said she regularly hears this concern. “Employees are very cautious and concerned and I think often perceive it as a barrier to whether they would choose to participate or not. We certainly don’t want that to stand in the way, but it takes an ongoing effort,” McDowell said. The questions are so common that she now trains her team on how to address the apprehension.

Krueger said that at Zoom, all vendors of digital health and wellness tools go through the same privacy and security screenings that any vendor would, which means two separate teams–the security section of their IT team and the privacy section of their legal team–look at how data is stored and handled, which includes SOC 2 compliance.

Encouraging Workers to Sample the Benefits

Even after you’ve ensured these tools are safe, secure, and representative of the needs of your workforce, these measures are wasted if the tools aren’t used. I put this question to the panel: Should use of wellness tools and resources be incentivized, or might that undermine their value?

Simone Martins, regional head of HR for Alcon, the global eye-care technology company, provides incentives for leaders to encourage their teams to use what’s available to them. Her philosophy is to lead by example–and it’s working, she said. “​​We know that it's been successful, but I believe that we would not have been that successful if we did not engage the leaders." Krueger feels a bit differently. “Incentivizing may increase participation in those, but I kind of feel like you’re forcing the issue when you do that,” she said. Zoom has nonetheless incentivized the use of some of their fitness programs, like the Tour de Zoom, a virtual bike race that encouraged participants by linking the hours they biked with contributions to charity.

If you’re having trouble getting employees to use your health and wellness resources, it may not be that the programs need to be incentivized, but rather sampled. McDowell said that the services offered by Micron’s employee-assistance program (EAP) are typically under-utilized, but that during the racial-justice movements born in 2020, she knew there were people who needed the support their EAP could offer. “We sensed that people were at a challenging time in their life and maybe hadn’t been there before.” But, she added, “How do you kind of get them to start dipping their toe into things they don’t really think they have a need for?” So her team organized a counseling pop-up: 30-minute, mini-counseling sessions. Employees could sign up for individual or group sessions, and more if they felt they benefited from the program.

Where the Technology Goes From Here

Rachel Boyd, VP of enterprise marketing at Ovia Health, a family health benefits platform, noted two kinds of support in particular that could mark the future of digital health and wellness tools: mental health screening and decision support.

As the pandemic fades from consciousness, some employers may be tempted to deprioritize acute care. To ensure no one falls through the cracks as focus shifts, Ovia offers continuous mental health screenings. Said Boyd: “We support families from as early as preconception on through those parenting years. And we know that the standard of care today is that six-week postpartum check. That’s a vulnerable time for many women and families, and they may not make the connection to a mental health provider after that, or even know how to access their EAP,” she said. “We're able to continuously screen on a daily basis for those mental health concerns, because we find that often those symptoms are happening much earlier than postpartum.”

Boyd said Ovia users are asking for an additional service called “decision support,” which is access to information and coaching that they need to make choices about health-care issues like vaccines and lactation.

Even as workers return to offices and companies consider which tools they will use and which they will phase out, social well-being should not be neglected, panelists said. For the share of employees who still work remotely, isolation remains a considerable risk.

Sheldon said Blackbaud’s “Wellbeing Wednesday,” which offers virtual sessions about topics like reiki, physical well-being, and mental well-being, have been a valuable means of social contact. The company also introduced “Engagement Labs,” in which workers participate in virtual crisis-training sessions.

Sheldon noted a new standard for human connection born out of the pandemic–that leaders must “support their employees through crisis, pre-crisis, and post-crisis,” which means “really providing outside of what might be a performance check-in or a work meeting, really connecting with people more on that human level.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.