Lyra Health sponsored Mentera’s August Care Chat which welcomed Sheila Krueger, former head of Global Benefits at Zoom. Krueger shared her thoughts on creating and communicating a fully fleshed-out wellness program and how to build trust internally within a company.
The first component, she says, is building and maintaining employee trust. Krueger notes that the strengthening of HIPAA laws has helped employees feel safe when expressing their vulnerabilities. “It’s certainly a lot different now than it was 20 or 30 years ago because there are lot more privacy laws that help us to protect our employees and ourselves, if we’re the ones that need the help.”
That need for privacy should not, however, discourage managers from checking in on their team members. Krueger says it is HR’s role to teach managers how to engage with employees who may be having issues. “Even to the point where you may get a script for a manager, so they have very specific things that they can go through.”
Five Pillars of Wellness
Krueger says in the last years of her career, her goal was to create a wellness program based on the five pillars of wellness. Loosely inspired by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, those five pillars include physical wellness, mental wellness, financial wellness, social wellness, and community wellness. “Those five pillars of wellness to me are what should be making up the bulk of your wellness plan,” she says.
Community wellness or connection to the community at large is one pillar she says is missing most in wellness programs. Krueger says there are a number of ways organizations can encourage connection—some of which require a budget and others that don’t. “A very simple one is to give people time off to volunteer for the projects that they really believe in….If you’ve got a budget and you can build on that, you could donate to their organizations in exchange for their volunteer time.”
She says to build a robust wellness program, flexibility is key because regardless of how similar their employees may seem to be, what they need to be supported in wellness can be very different. How you communicate the wellness program needs to be flexible as well. “Mental health providers have been around for a really long time, but we haven’t always wanted to talk about mental health, not as an employer, maybe not as an employee….So for me, the communication piece was a lot about using your C-suite folks, having that come down from the top, like, ‘Here’s something we’re providing to you.’”
Zoom changed its wellness vendor right before the pandemic hit. During the pandemic, they had a huge spike in the number of people using the mental wellness resources and they continued to build on that momentum as the health crisis lessened by putting on webinars and offering learning opportunities to their employees on a regular basis. They also brought more departments into the process—such as the physical safety team—so that when a traumatic event happened worldwide, employees would get an email with resources for them to reach out to if needed.
The pandemic also taught them the importance of taking personal and vacation time. During the pandemic, the company had triple the staff, and Krueger shared “everybody was just mach two with their hair on fire all the time. And so there was a long period of time when I never saw an out-of-office for anybody going on vacation. And finally, it really reached critical mass and it was like, we need these people to take a break.”
Sheila continued, “One of our sales leaders actually brought it up at an all-hands meeting and said, ‘Hey, I’m going on vacation next week. I’m completely disconnecting. I won’t be looking at emails, I won’t be listening to voicemails. I’m out.’…And the CEO did it later in the year saying, “Listen, I’m up next week. I’m gone. I am out.’ And just those kinds of examples are really important. So you really need the support of your senior leadership team and their willingness to be public and be open about the time that they take and just help model whatever it is that you’re trying to help your employees do. And that goes back to that vulnerability piece when we see senior leaders within the organization being vulnerable enough to say, ‘Hey, I need a break. I’m not going to be taking emails.’ Then that models for other people and tells them it’s okay to take time off.”
Encouraging Employees to Use Mental Health Resources
There is still a lot of stigma around mental health and accessing resources. For Krueger, it’s important that the C-Suite communicate in an authentic way, sometimes personally in a 1:1 situation. Mental health isn’t just for the employee, it’s for families too. A big percentage of people contact mental health providers about relationship issues. Employers can make website resources available to employees and families. Zoom found that watching communication spikes in exchanges with vendors to judge the value of the program was key. The constant communication coming from top leaders, not just HR, was important in their success.
To hear more about what Krueger says about building and communicating an effective wellness program, watch her interview here.