Four Day Workweeks, or extended long weekends are becoming more commonplace.
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 Stacy Parker.
Stacy Parker is the co-founder and Managing Director of Blu Ivy Group, an Employer Brand and Culture Consulting agency. Stacy has over 15 years experience in employer brand research, strategy, culture and creative activation for many of the largest global employers and most recognized brands.
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.
Many years ago, prior to founding Blu Ivy Group, I found myself at a bit of a crossroads while working as a Brand and Communications executive at a global HR Consulting firm. At the time, I had observed a major disconnect between many organizations’ recruitment advertising messages and the actual employee experience. It was very early days in the Glassdoor, Indeed and employer review site emergence, however it was apparent to me that a new level of transparency for leadership behaviors and workplace cultures was in the near horizon. What I was observing back then was that the disconnect between great branding and employee experience was becoming obvious and that soon, employers were going to struggle to manage reputation, storytelling and engagement. It was at that moment that my business partner, who had a long and successful history building award winning cultures, started to discuss what we believed employer brand strategy could do for business, and for the way employees felt personally connected to their workplace.
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 Blu Ivy we measure our employee wellness through our quarterly happiness and belonging surveys. As our organization is both a global consultancy and agency, workload and turnaround demands are a constant pressure point. Early in the pandemic we made Fridays half days to allow for longer weekends. We give birthdays off and have quarterly wellness weeks. This year we implemented the right to disconnect after 5pm each day, and offer personal wellness budgets for our team to find programs and apps that best align to individual wellness needs. We recently revamped our benefits plan to further support our employees. We have also started to modify project timelines, client support teams and coaching solutions to better support our teams workload management.
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 know that employee engagement, and loyalty is largely dependent on workload management and flexibility. In fact, our most recent survey indicated that it is a top three reason that people join and stay with an employer today. There are plenty of correlations to retention, including LTD costs, time off, customer net promoter score, and engagement that quantify workforce 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?
My advice for organizations is to look very closely at workplace wellness, burnout, turnover and engagement on a quarterly basis at the present. The truth is that there are 5 million more jobs than there are job seekers at present and talent will not stay with, nor accept a job with an organization that does not respect the wellness of the individual.
This problem of lack of available talent for new projects is severe enough that organizations are now finding challenges in fulfilling their customer and growth commitments. Employee wellbeing is no longer an HR problem, but a business performance issue.
The pace with which employees are working, the sheer increase in daily online meetings, the demand on talent to work on multiple project deliverables well into the evening has increased significantly over the last two years and become commonplace. Our research consistently points to lack of management support and excessive workload or flexibility as the top three reasons talent are leaving employers. These are also the key attributes they are looking for in new employers. Investment in programs, time and support are critical for retention, and for reshaping the employee experience.
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?
We talk to talent very openly about our challenges with workload and customer expectations but also share with them the programs we offer, the coaching and support we offer and the pilots we are running to help manage time. As a 100% remote work organization, we incorporate a lot of moments every day to help our team set boundaries, and to live life to the fullest. Whether it is workload, flexibility, mental health, fitness or social connections our goals is to be continuously evolving and ensuring that we work towards setting the ideal standard in our industry for employee wellness.
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.
We do mental health weeks, offer half day Fridays and more recently, have been surprising our team with unplanned days off, and office shut downs. For our talent, we strive to offer more time away from the computer, to rejuvenate and disconnect.
Again the right to disconnect and not email each other for requests or updates after 5pm is also essential to maintaining personal wellbeing.
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?
We are not a workplace wellness organization so I do not wish to advise on that. We are an employer brand and culture consultancy and what we know is that there is a very concerning level of talent that identify mental health, burnout, workload balance as the reasons they are leaving, are seeking increased benefits, and struggling in their personal lives. This is without question one of the top reasons for the great resignation as many who are leaving indicate that they are not interested in going back into full time corporate jobs to enable better work life balance.
Management and Director level talent seem to have the most significant challenges with engagement and burnout and are the most likely to turnover in the next six months.
We strongly recommend that employers are conducting monthly or quarterly wellness pulse surveys to better hear the challenges their employees are facing. But don’t stop there. Respond to the results with short term solutions, pilots, one time recognitions, or longer term investments. They need to know you are making strides to further support them.
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?
Every month have employees vote on something that can be done to help them live better.
What are your “Top 5 Trends To Track In the Future of Workplace Wellness?”
- Chief Mental Health Officers in leadership. We are seeing an increased trend towards having leadership oversight on wellbeing. Take for example KPMGs Chief Mental-Health Officer Dennis Trottier.
- Mental Health Training and Certification for Managers is increasingly becoming a leadership development investment to better recognize and support direct reports.
- Four Day Workweeks, or extended long weekends are becoming more commonplace.
- Increased mental health wellness, counseling and support in benefits programs.
What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of workplace wellness?
The talent crisis shined a light on the importance of employees, engagement and retention. We believe that talent are now holding employers accountable for respecting employees and their wellbeing as much as they do their customers. I am tremendously optimistic that both business and government recognize that the wellbeing of our talent is not just the right thing to do, but critical for business and economic success.
Our readers often like to continue the conversation with our featured interviewees. How can they best connect with you and stay current on what you’re discovering?
Blu Ivy Group is a global leader in employer branding, culture and recruitment marketing. We help organizations across the private, public and nonprofit sectors build extraordinary employee experiences, magnetic employer brands and people-first cultures.
Learn more about Blu Ivy Group by visiting our website and for inquiries please contact Stacy Parker, Managing Director at [email protected]
Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and wellness.