Emotional Wellness: In addition to our mental wellness offerings, we make sure our employees emotional wellbeing is supported whenever they need it. All of our employees across the globe are given a free subscription to the mindfulness app Headspace and to the app Ginger, a chat-based option to speak real-time with online licensed therapists.
The pandemic pause brought us to a moment of collective reckoning about what it means to live well and to work well. As a result, employees are sending employers an urgent signal that they are no longer willing to choose one — life or work — at the cost of the other. Working from home brought life literally into our work. And as the world now goes hybrid, employees are drawing firmer boundaries about how much of their work comes into their life. Where does this leave employers? And which perspectives and programs contribute most to progress? In our newest interview series, Working Well: How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness, we are talking to successful executives, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, and thought leaders across all industries to share ideas about how to shift company cultures in light of this new expectation. We’re discovering strategies and steps employers and employees can take together to live well and to work well.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Alison Lindland.
Alison Lindland is the Senior Vice President of Strategy at Movable Ink. Alison is passionate about helping Movable Ink clients leverage technology to help achieve their business goals. She’s developed a team of vertical specific strategists, primarily composed of former clients and partners who are marketers themselves, to bring this service to clients and leads them across industries and regions.
Thank you for making time to visit with us about the topic of our time. Our readers would like to get to know you better. Tell us about a formative experience that prompted you to change your relationship with work and how work shows up in your life.
One of my most formative experiences is actually completely unrelated to my current career. I was a consummate liberal arts major in that I always knew I wanted to work in tech and had internships to prepare me for that, so I majored in something that was purely an academic passion. My focus was on the business side of the industry and producing. After graduation, my unemployed actor friends convinced me to start an Off-Off Broadway Theater company with them which I led on nights and weekends while beginning my career in tech. It was a really foundational experience; It taught me a ton about running a small business, motivating and leading a team under pressure, and what it takes to make great art on a shoestring budget. Many of the artists that I worked with became household names and remain great friends. I often joke that I learned just as much about business by running that theater company as I did from my MBA.
Harvard Business Review predicts that wellness will become the newest metric employers will use to analyze and to assess their employees’ mental, physical and financial health. How does your organization define wellness, and how does your organization measure wellness?
At Movable Ink, wellness means a lot, so defining it is crucial. Having benefits, support, culture programs, and initiatives that our employees are not only interested in, but active in. This means building a culture that focuses on more meaningful activities, such as growth and development opportunities, giving back to local communities, hosting team-building activities, or encouraging health and wellness activities.
A strong culture starts from the ground up — that’s why our teams are integral to building and maintaining our culture. With an emphasis on support and career development, work-life balance, and health and wellness, we take pride in creating a people-first environment where everyone can flourish. The past few years of living in a pandemic certainly changed the way we work, but it has not affected the priority we place as a company on our people. If anything, it’s heightened it.
Based on your experience or research, how do you correlate and quantify the impact of a well workforce on your organization’s productivity and profitability?
We’re a very people-driven organization. From collaborating internally and cross-functionally to hosting brainstorms at clients’ offices. Regardless of the setting or format, our employees’ wellbeing and happiness is what helps us excel — as a team and for our clients. We all, of course, have good days and bad days; It’s human nature. But, as an employee, knowing your company has your back, supports you, and has the resources at the ready speaks volumes. Ultimately, it’s about feeling supported across your whole life, not just between when you clock in and out. Lip service, however, won’t cut it. Instead, companies must devote time and resources to finding ways to drive up happiness (and then productivity).
Even though most leaders have good intentions when it comes to employee wellness, programs that require funding are beholden to business cases like any other initiative. The World Health Organization estimates for every $1 invested into treatment for common mental health disorders, there is a return of $4 in improved health and productivity. That sounds like a great ROI. And, yet many employers struggle to fund wellness programs that seem to come “at the cost of the business.” What advice do you have to offer to other organizations and leaders who feel stuck between intention and impact?
With the massive tech-powered wellness programs and products boom in the last decade, companies can access tons of cost-effective resources. Beyond external resources, Movable Ink, for example, has created rich homegrown programs to help employees tackle challenging issues and equip them with the tools to succeed. An open-door policy also helps. In addition to what you (as a company) provide, leaders are critical in fostering an environment where employees feel and know they can seek help when they need it.
Speaking of money matters, a recent Gallup study reveals employees of all generations rank wellbeing as one of their top three employer search criteria. How are you incorporating wellness programs into your talent recruitment and hiring processes?
When meeting with recruits or during orientation with new hires, our People Team does a fantastic job of stressing the robust wellness program we offer. In addition to the products and services we provide as part of the benefits package, they also cover the different events and seminars they offer in-house. For example, Wellness Wednesdays (where we host virtual fitness classes or in-person massages) or cooking sessions (led by our very own Inkers), or learning and development programs. Between COVID-19 and the neverending news cycle, life can get overwhelming. We want to ensure every recruit or new hire knows that Movable Ink is here to support them every step of the way and host fun, stress-releasing activities that help employees connect. We also offer employees once a month “Take a Break” days so employees can log off and get some downtime when they need it!
We’ve all heard of the four-day work week, unlimited PTO, mental health days, and on demand mental health services. What innovative new programs and pilots are you launching to address employee wellness? And, what are you discovering? We would benefit from an example in each of these areas.
- Mental Wellness: For our employees based in the US, we offer multiple different options to support the mental health of those who need it. One example is ResourceAdvisor, which provides toll-free, 24/7 telephone consultation, counseling, legal, and financial planning resources and referral services from anywhere in the United States. Each employee, as well as their family members, have access counseling sessions if needed. Another option we offer is through Guardian’s service Uprise Health which connects employees with therapists.
- Emotional Wellness: In addition to our mental wellness offerings, we make sure our employees emotional wellbeing is supported whenever they need it. All of our employees across the globe are given a free subscription to the mindfulness app Headspace and to the app Ginger, a chat-based option to speak real-time with online licensed therapists.
- Social Wellness: Just like we personalize content for our clients, Movable Ink knows that our employees deserve personalized perks themselves. We work with PerkSpot to offer personalized discounts and rewards targeted for our U.S. employees, such as gym memberships, rental cars, travel discounts and more. Movable Ink also recognizes that our employees are human with very active, spontaneous lives. Things come up. That’s why we also provide our full-time U.S. employees with Care.com memberships, where they are reimbursed or offered backup care for childcare, pet-care, housekeeping or adult-care services, in case any issues ever arise in their personal lives.
- Physical Wellness: We recognize that increasing physical activity increases mental, emotional and social health. That’s why we offer our full-time global employees access to Aaptiv, a platform that offers thousands of guided workouts, training programs and fitness classes, so our employees can find their preferred physical activity — whether it’s a meditative yoga class or a quick HIIT workout!
- Financial Wellness: The financial wellbeing of our employees is deeply important. For our full-time U.S. employees, Movable Ink provides free access to SoFi, one of the leading financial planning and advising services. We want to support our employees to take control of their financial futures during their time at Movable Ink and beyond.
We also offer time off for mental health and, with unlimited PTO, we encourage employees to take the time to unwind and decompress. It’s so important to put employees first and give them the resources they need to be successful.
Can you please tell us more about a couple of specific ways workplaces would benefit from investing in your ideas above to improve employee wellness?
As a global company, the past few years working in a pandemic that has ebbed and flowed drastically throughout the world, having one set working model was not only impossible with the various different country and state restrictions, but unrealistic. That’s why we have a Director of Workplace Experience at Movable Ink who has transitioned our cultural experiences from in person to hybrid around the world, and a new Senior People Programs Manager to ensure the employee experience is optimized for success.
How are you reskilling leaders in your organization to support a “Work Well” culture?
After the hardships Covid-19 brought on, we wanted to lower the burden our employees face and allow a lot more flexibility in work-style. We found it’s easier to give people the choice on how they integrate work with personal lives when everyone shares the same vision and objectives. We started working with employees to understand their changing needs, by opening many of these various wellness activities to support people physically and mentally, including virtual therapy apps and at-home workouts, employee assistance programs involving mental health support, legal counseling and financial planning. We pushed for frequent no-work breaks and hosted speakers who spoke about managing through adversity.
Rather than simply rolling out extracurricular activities to satisfy traditional wellbeing requirements, we shifted our training and learning strategy away from emotional intelligence training, which was the original 2020 goal, to focus on more urgent concepts like managing a team remotely, motivating a team digitally, time management skills and unconscious bias.
Ideas take time to implement. What is one small step every individual, team or organization can take to get started on these ideas — to get well?
At Movable Ink, it’s all about encouraging employees to lead themselves and to represent, support and empower each other. It’s allowed our C-suite to not only hear our employees, but to step back and let them lead the activities and strategies that are vital to an employee-driven culture and a culture-led organization. We know that anyone has the potential to lead, even if they are not a manager. Employees have stepped up to lead BCC (our culture committee) and our DEI Committee (diversity, equity, inclusion), and have organized and galvanized several employee resource groups including Movable Pink (women at the company), Inklusive (LGBTQ+), MIA (employees of Asian descent), and Black Ink (Black employees).
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Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and wellness.