Employee Well-being: What We Learned in the Pandemic

BY Angelica Frey | June 26, 2021

Dr. Hemalee Patel, an internal-medicine physician at One Medical, has noticed that some people take issue with the phrase “holistic approach to health,” dismissing it as slightly woo-woo. “When people hear holistic, they make light of it, but regarding holistic lifestyle practices, you can't address one without the other," Patel said. Taking the word holistic seriously, she continued, "[is] an opportunity for people to become a little bit in tune with the fact that there's a ripple effect in everything that you do. If you're feeling mental fatigue and stress, at some point that can lead to a cardiac condition–and might also stem into diabetes."

Patel spoke in a panel discussion exploring the concept of a new definition for employee well-being, part of From Day One’s June virtual conference, “The New Benefits that Employees Need and Want Today.” Patel’s words rang especially true now that employers find themselves reassessing their benefits packages and their underlying company culture in the wake of the pandemic’s unprecedented disruption of work life. It's an area with a lot of opportunity for growth, since only 21% of organizations reported in a Deloitte survey that their well-being strategy is “both comprehensive and integrated into the way that they design work and develop workforce experience.” By definition, a holistic philosophy about employee well-being calls for a multi-pronged approach. More insights from the panel:

Burnout Is the Basso Continuo of Post-Covid Workplace Culture

While productivity increased during Covid-19, especially among knowledge workers doing their jobs from home, the resulting lack of work-life boundaries has been blamed for another kind of epidemic: burnout. Essential workers, meanwhile, suffered their own kind of exhaustion. Jim McMurtray, director of the Shared Services Contact Center at Piedmont Healthcare, said that the company had a notable number of employee departures in the past month. “When there was talk of another surge, that was the tipping point for a lot of people,” he said.

Jeanne Walsh, manager of global benefits at Boston Scientific, said that within the company’s HR team, there is a separate focus that exclusively deals with the burnout of HR employees, who handled furloughs, shutdowns, and other crises. “We had different parts of our workforce impacted with different challenges, but all of it in an incredibly dynamic and stressful environment,” Walsh said. “We're not back to normal, but now it's like trying to get ready to jump back into what the new normal looks like.”

Exploring new approaches to employee well-being, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Jeanne Walsh of Boston Scientific, and Dr. Hemalee Patel of One Medical. Bottom row, from left: Jim McMurtray of Piedmont Healthcare and Davida Rivens of E4E Relief (Image by From Day One)

The matter is dicier than it might sound. Alongside burnout, people have now settled into a precise set of habits. “Transition back is a primary worry,” said Davida Rivens, VP of product management and sales at E4E Relief, which administers employee financial-relief funds. Workers are saying, “I've gotten used to this, don't force me back if I don't have to,” she said, advising: “Allow them to find the time to find the child care to make sure that life works.”

Well-being Is Not Just Physical or Mental. It’s Also About Finances

When corporate HR leaders hear more about employee financial relief, “they run in droves to try to set it up,” said Rivens. “Interestingly, relief programs have not been seen as a traditional benefit program in the past,” she said. “Over the years we've seen that change.” The purpose of such programs is to provide cash grants to workers facing a financial emergency, but E4E Relief tries to bring a holistic approach to financial well-being too. “We know that with relief, $500 dollars in emergency relief, most people don't have that in their savings,” Rivens continued. “So when we give these grants out, are we preventing other negative things from happening? We want to bridge the gap, but is there something else that could have been preventable?”

Student-loan debt is another threat to well-being. Piedmont Healthcare’s McMurtray said the company’s student-loan repayment program is a more effective tool than, say, sign-up bonuses, because helping with the burden of student-loan debt affects employee retention more directly. “What we hear about how it affects turnover is unbelievable,” he said. “If people can take advantage, they will stay. I hear from many sources that student-loan forgiveness results in a 25% reduction [in turnover]," he said. “Fidelity has a really nice platform, with monthly reminders [showing] the trajectory for the loan. It’s a very visible tool that's also quite easy to set up. The ROI will pay for itself.”

Smart Platforms Can Boost Engagement 

There's often a disconnect between the health benefits that employers feel they're providing and what employees feel they're getting, since it can be challenging for workers to wade through a whole list of benefits. A benefit hub with a well-oiled algorithm can make the daunting benefit-navigation process less frustrating. “The biggest game changer for us has been Castlight. It's a hub for all benefits,” said McMurtray, adding that the platform also allows workers to log in across different services without having to remember every single password they’ve set up. “The biggest thing it's done is for the health-plan navigation.”

Similarly, Boston Scientific’s Walsh praises Quantum Health for “being the conduit of what we know as a really complex health care system and really taking on the back-and-forth between providers and insurance companies. We've gotten tremendously positive feedback,” she said.

Help Employees Set Boundaries, Especially in Remote Work

“I teach our sleep classes at One Medical as well. And I've never seen a more well-attended group class,” said Patel, the physician. “I am very aware of how much our personal and professional lives bleed in. And it was the case pre-pandemic, but definitely during the pandemic–and that really affected people's quality of sleep, their ability to turn off. And it was fun for me and really satisfying as a provider to start to have my patients create boundaries around what is personal, what is professional, and start to bring more awareness to the fact that they are at home. The effects from a health standpoint have been very impressive.”

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

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Prescription for Well-Being: Getting Workers More Engaged With Their Benefits

Thanks to the pandemic, employers have now made the connection between employee well-being, both in and outside the office, and strong business. “A healthier well-being leads to more productivity, which ultimately affects the bottom line,” said Tim Massey, CEO at Penmac Staffing Services, a temp agency that helps job seekers and businesses with employment needs and HR services. The challenge for many companies is keeping their staff engaged with their health benefits. “We’ve had to develop a stronger level of empathy with the employee base that we didn’t have prior to two years ago,” Massey said. “It allows us to resonate with employees that Penmac isn’t just a place to go to work, but has a level of care about your work-life balance, and also your well-being.” I moderated a conversation with Massey and Kim Tabac, chief people officer at League, a digital health care platform platform designed to enable and accelerate care transformation. That webinar, titled “Benefits Engagement: A Tangible Indicator of a Happier & Healthier Workforce,” and hosted by From Day One, addressed the connection between employee wellness and the bottom line, and how employers can encourage employees to take full advantage of the benefits available to them. Health Benefits Are Top of Mind Now In the past, employees didn’t care much about health coverage until they or one of their family members got sick, said Tabac, but the Covid-19 pandemic spurred new interest in healthcare benefits. “With Covid, we’ve actually seen employees accessing their benefits more so than ever before, asking a lot more questions and becoming a lot more educated as consumers of benefits and their wellness and health care coverages.” And employees are more confident about using those benefits, too, Massey said. “I think the level of comfort over the last two years of our employees to actually engage and ask about their health benefits, as well as their mental wellbeing, has increased a lot.” So, if there’s more interest in health, is there room for employers to increase use of benefits? Getting employees to use their benefits before they get sick is a big opportunity, according to Tabac and Massey.  The speakers, clockwise from top right: moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Kim Tabac of League, and Tim Massey of Penmac Staffing Services (Image by From Day One) Both encouraged companies to promote preventative healthcare. “[Provide] better benefits that are really about prevention, really about wellness, helping employees to really engage and think about their health every day in order to stay healthy, instead of thinking about benefits as insurance coverage for when you get sick,” Tabac said. Additionally, awareness should always be a priority, a strategy that has worked for Penmac. By making staff aware of the benefits of telehealth, they cut down on expensive urgent care visits. “A lot of our employees didn't even know that telehealth was an option for them. So when they got ill or sick, they would run to urgent care. And in a lot of those instances, telehealth was a better option for them. So just engaging with them and helping them understand the proper way that they could utilize their benefits has been very important.” Giving Workers Ample and Diverse Opportunities   Massey said Penmac also created more opportunities for employees to participate in their own wellness. “In the beginning, when we started kicking off [our wellness program], we had about 50% participation,” Massey said. “But that was mainly because the majority of it was weighted toward fitness—in steps and activity. What we found is that, really, the people who were already exercising were the 50% that were participating in the wellness program.” In response, Penmac redesigned the program to include things like wellness checks, community and volunteer involvement, and financial education, and more employees jumped on board. “We have to make sure that we’re providing lots of education and lots of outlets for our employees to get the type of wellness that works for them.” Penmac also remade incentive programs. For years, their smoking cessation program rewarded participants with lower premiums, but Massey found the money wasn’t a big enough incentive to get smokers to quit. They tried something new: To incentivize employees to get a health risk assessment, they offered a paid day off, and it worked. “Our approach has become targeted, maybe more of a customized-per-employee type to personalize the situation, even hyper-personalize it,” Massey said. League did similar customizing of wellness benefits and perks when the company went remote. For example, since 30% of employees no longer report to an office, League converted its in-office wellness programs into dollars and reimbursement programs remote employees can use. League also instituted quarterly wellness days. “We saw a huge uptake,” Tabac said. “Seventy percent of all employees last year took some of their wellness days. That’s huge for us.” The reason employees were so eager to take those wellness days was because they required no prior planning, like vacation days do. “It wasn’t about taking a whole week off or ten days, it was really about waking up in the morning and saying, ‘Today’s not the day, I’m not going to be able to be my best,’ and allowing employees to activate on their own personal needs to be their best selves when they came into the office.” The Employer Responsibility for Employee Wellness What the pandemic showed us about the relationship between work life and personal life, Tabac said, we can’t unsee. “I believe that we are now responsible to ensure that the level of care that we have provided during this trying time continues, because we can never go back and pretend that Suzy shows up to the office every day and forgets that she has three kids hanging off of her or a puppy that was sick.” It’s a responsibility that ultimately benefits the company’s health. “It’s very difficult to be 100% productive when you don’t have the support you need, and it is incumbent upon employers to be providing appropriate benefits and appropriate perks to allow their employees to be fully productive and fully present,” Tabac said. “It pays off in spades. It pays off in the amount of days that people take off of work. It pays off in the amount of time that they’re at work and they’re able to be fully productive.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance writer based in Richmond, Va. She writes about the workplace, DEI, hiring, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza November 19, 2022

How to Enhance Mental Health and Wellness Benefits

A few years ago, Pammi Bhullar, now the director of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at Edelman Financial Engines, had a colleague who was grappling with anxiety and not given a welcoming space or enough mental-health resources to deal with it. Bhullar’s friend found a new workplace that not only allowed her to talk about her anxiety, but by giving her tangible mental-health resources, allowed her to be a more productive and overall better employee. Plus, she created a support system within the inner circle of her colleagues. “If she thought she was going to get a panic attack, she had a support system who recognized the early signs,” Bhullar told moderator Patia Braithwaite, the health director at Well+Good, during a From Day One webinar titled, “Enhancing Employee Mental Health and Wellness Benefits.” This anecdote goes to show that investing in employee mental-health and wellness resources is not just an act of care, but it also has tangible benefits, such as employee retention, reduced absenteeism, and higher productivity. This is especially true in the late Covid era, when employees find themselves reprioritizing their relationship to work and questioning their identification with their own line of work. A Challenge, Exacerbated  With the pandemic, a lot of challenges came to a head. The trend toward remote work had been increasing in recent years “... and the pandemic gave us a leap off the cliff,” said Anastasia Norton, who until recently was director of total-rewards management at USAA, which mainly serves the military community. “It was an entirely new environment in which to operate. The traditional means of connecting were no longer relevant,” she said. With such a paradigm shift, how could leaders reach out to employees, and find ways to connect with them now that everyone was essentially a hermit? “We had to rapidly shift our paradigm, figuring out how to connect with them and how to support them,” she said. In this context, going to work stopped being the central part of people’s routines. With work-from-home policies, people started spending their whole days with their families, partners, and their kids, so that the idea of work being central got pushed to the side. Yet this shift also led to depression: Christine Celio, Ph.D., the national clinical director for mental health integration in primary care at One Medical, observed that her own psychotherapy patients went from asking, “How do I progress in my career and life?” to “What am I even doing?” Managers Stepping Up Focusing on mental-health benefits, from row from left: Christine Celio of One Medical and Marni McDowell of Micron Technology. Middle row: Patia Braithwaite of Well+Good, Jake Spiegel of the Employee Benefits Research Council, and Pammi Bhullar of Edelman Financial Engines. Bottom row: Anastasia Norton, until recently with USAA (Image by From Day One) In this shift, the ideal benefits package should put therapy and wellness front and center. “You can’t understate the managers’ roles, to make sure they liberate their teams by checking in on them,” said Bhullar. “Do you have the resources you need? Do you have the accommodation you need? Are you set up appropriately?” are some of the questions that should be asked she said. It’s crucial for managers to know people well enough to gauge when something is not right. “Prioritizing the relationship with direct reports is the most important thing,” said Marni McDowell, senior director of global well-being at Micron Technology. “We all heard the data that people don’t leave bad work, they leave bad leaders.” Celio, a licensed clinical psychologist, has some tips for managers to detect early signs of distress. They’re usually behavioral. “People make themselves and their lives a little smaller. They binge-watch TV instead of reaching out to friends, they tend to have trouble sleeping or they sleep too much. “How we behave correlates to how we feel, how we feel influences what we want to do,” Celio said. She recommends managers do weekly check-ins to get a sense of whether people aren’t doing as well as they used to do. This relationship is not one-sided. “One thing to keep in mind is that workers look to their employers,” said Jake Spiegel, a research associate at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. “Employees really trust employers are going to pick a suitable suite [of benefits] for them, helping them improve the quality of being. Employers have a role to play, but employees trust them.” Towards a Better Understanding of Mental-Health Challenges  More mental-health and wellness awareness also means getting rid of stereotypes. In the first place, stress is not to always be considered an inconvenience. “A stress-free work environment is not an ideal place to work,” said Celio. “We need our deadlines, we need structure.” In addition, burnout and structure-related stress are not necessarily related. “What has been coming up in the pandemic is that burnout creeps in when people feel overwhelmed, when they feel that what they do doesn't matter, that there’s lack of fairness and lack of control,” Celio continued. “We’re not all in the same boat, but we’re all in the same storm.” Not being in the same boat especially pertains to the intersection between mental health and DEI. In certain underrepresented communities, Bhullar noted, there’s a lot of stigma around mental health, so people might not seek help nor openly talk about trauma, anxiety, and depression. “There’s the triggering of highly visible or invisible aggressions. Often those individuals become the educators, to someone who’s an ally,” she continued, indicating that educating allies can also be a burden. Harnessing Data and the Potential of Digital “When it comes to mental health benefits, there’s not a lot of data: it’s the Wild West,” said Spiegel. “What we found, though, as doctors’ offices closed, is that there's a pretty enthusiastic take on telemedicine. You’d think digital natives would be more likely to embrace it, but we found that the average age of a telemedicine user is higher than the average age of a person preferring an in-person appointment.” “It’s such a time commitment to go to therapy,” echoed Celio. “Going to the office, parking, checking in and out. The convenience of a telehealth appointment, the ability just to log on  and then log off, has been so helpful for so many people.” Sure, cost remains a hindrance, but there are ways to mitigate the expense. “One of the ways we tied it together is a program where people earn points, so premiums are lower,” said Norton. “Usually it’s healthy activities, or virtual seminars, prerecorded resources on stress, anxiety. We incentivized that behavior so they could lower the premiums. We get info out there and it makes sense for them.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey June 12, 2022

Persuading Workers to Use Their Health and Wellness Apps

“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. Speaking on tech and health, top row from left: moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Heather Sheldon of Blackbaud, and Rachel Boyd of Ovia Health. Bottom row, from left: Sheila Krueger of Zoom Video Communications, Marni McDowell of Micron Technology, and Simone Martins of Alcon (Image by From Day One) 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.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza November 08, 2021