Overcome Stubborns

How to Support Workers in Times of Crisis, From Natural Disasters to Personal Challenges

“What I love about benefits is that it’s not stagnant. What was considered a hot benefit 20 years ago ain’t a hot benefit today, and there’s always a need to make sure what we’re providing through benefits–yes, we want to make sure it’s competitive–is truly meeting the needs of the people,” said Chris Smith, a veteran of the benefits field with more than two decades of experience.Yet he’s surprised by how few people will simply ask employees what they need. “There is this belief that, if we ask, if we do a survey, we are signing a promissory note,” he said. So rather than promise something they can’t deliver, some don’t ask at all. But that’s not how Smith sees a survey or a sit-down meeting: It’s not a promise, it’s an exercise.Smith is the head of benefits at Universal Music Group, the music label supporting massive stars including Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Stevie Wonder, and the Rolling Stones. Smith spoke during a fireside chat at From Day One’s January virtual conference on benefits and total rewards. He offered frank advice for how employers can support their workers in crisis and in peace.Smith prides himself on delivering great benefits, so he was disappointed to find, during an open enrollment roadshow, that employees simply didn’t know what’s available to them. The same weakness so many benefits leaders find in their own organizations. And Smith prides himself on great communications emails, so he was equally disappointed to learn that those weren’t making traction.But that was the point of this listening tour, to find ways to make the system better. He’s now exploring creative ways to strengthen comms and lower barriers to access so employees can find and get what they need in good times and in bad.Though this isn’t a part of UMG’s process yet, Smith says he’d like to introduce text messaging or mailers. “People are bored of emails. People are overwhelmed with emails, and because of that, they’re missing really important information.” He’s also exploring old-school methods like mailers. If he can “shock” employees with novel or unexpected communication methods, they may be more likely to listen.Journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza interviewed Christopher Smith of Universal Music Group (photo by From Day One)In the meantime, they’ve made access easier. “People are not thinking about benefits between nine and five. It’s around 5:15 when you’re at the pharmacy and you’re trying to remember, ‘Oh, shoot, who do I call for my pharmacy benefits? What’s that phone number? I can’t find my ID card.’”So, he stood up a microsite with basic information on benefits–which company handles this or that and which phone numbers to call for help. There’s no log-in required, so employees don’t have to bother with a lengthy sign-in process as the line at Walgreens forms behind them.Universal Music Group is headquartered in Santa Monica, at the epicenter of the recent Los Angeles fires that killed 28 people and displaced more than a hundred thousand. When employees came looking for support and resources, Smith was clear on his team’s role in providing disaster relief: They pulled together every resource, whether directly or indirectly related, into a single place that employees could reference and use. Removing barriers to access was priority number-one.He also made himself personally available. “One of the things that I do–and my family sometimes chastises me for doing it–is make my personal cell phone number available in a heartbeat. I might not be able to get to you as quickly through an email, but you will be able to get to me pretty quickly by calling my cell phone. I don’t want there to be any guard rails or barriers to getting information.”Smith is preparing for the next disaster, hoping it never comes. “However, I think we’d all be irresponsible if we came through this, and didn’t take anything away from the experience and ask ourselves, what can we do better? How can we be more prepared?”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.

BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | February 03, 2025

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The From Day One Newsletter is a monthly roundup of articles, features, and editorials on innovative ways for companies to forge stronger relationships with their employees, customers, and communities.

Overcome Stubborns
By Jessica Swenson | February 06, 2025

Enhancing Productivity and Creating Relationship Breakthroughs Through Your Total Rewards

It’s no secret that employees are key to an organization’s productivity and profitability. Research shows a clear link between engaged, authentic, healthy employees and positive business results. But what can employers do to enhance the employee experience and become a high-performance organization?Ingrid Woolfolk, employee experience lead with WTW, shared insights and next steps in a thought leadership spotlight session about “Creat[ing] Relationship Breakthroughs Through Your Total Rewards” at From Day One’s Chicago benefits conference.WTW helps clients build resilience, inspire their workforces, and optimize performance with data-driven solutions in people, risk, and capital. With over 50 years of insights across industries, they’ve analyzed how employee experience, rewards programs, and company performance are connected.What Makes a Winning Company?To understand what high-performance organizations are doing differently, WTW analyzed results from 16 million surveys completed between 2002 and 2023, including 6 million individual employees from 600 companies in what they call the “post-disruption era” (2019–2023). They compared the employee experience and tracked 9 separate financial metrics across 30 global high-performing companies and 500 average companies.Ingrid L. Woolfolk, the employee experience leader at WTW, led the session Data showed that total rewards are important to employees, even if they don’t use that language. Because of this, it is crucial for companies to understand what employees need and innovate their offerings to fulfill those needs. The three areas that emerged as most important to employees were recognition, growth, and well-being. These three areas also happen to be existing differentiators for global high-performance (GHP) organizations.“Recognition goes beyond traditional monetary rewards,” said Woolfolk. Leading companies prioritize pay equity, transparency, and customized compensation options. They foster loyalty and internal growth by setting clear goals, offering development opportunities, and providing advancement pathways. Comprehensive well-being programs—addressing physical, emotional, social, and financial needs—demonstrate that employees are valued beyond their productivity while removing barriers to engagement.Five Predictions for 2025Based on this research, and requests from existing clients, WTW predicts that companies will pursue the following five focus areas in 2025 to drive performance and elevate their employees’ total rewards experience.Artificial intelligence: Companies are already showing interest in using AI to improve business outcomes and improve the employee experience through enhanced communication, navigation, analytics, and operational efficiency.Spending money where it counts by analyzing employee wants and needs alongside cost and utilization rates to better understand the overall ROI of specific benefits. Subsequent communication campaigns will ensure clear articulation of the total rewards value.Bolstering employee pocketbooks: Woolfolk and team anticipate that companies will seek to improve the affordability of pay and benefits programs, advance employees’ financial acumen and resilience, and enhance retirement offerings. Elevating transparency beyond compliance: Data shows that DEI programs may evolve into broader, more sustainable human capital strategies that promote equity, inclusivity, and pay transparency. These strategies are expected to exceed current compliance standards through new governance models and stakeholder reporting.Double-down on careers by developing career frameworks that align with business goals and support productivity targets while growing and rewarding critical employee skills.Where Can You Start?Woolfolk suggests collaborating with HR and finance partners to assess your current plans. Including the finance team up front can reduce decision-making delays and improve planning. Ensure you have a solid listening strategy so you can collect, analyze, and act upon employee feedback. “Make sure you don’t ask questions that you’re not willing to address,” she said, “because nothing hurts employee morale worse than asking questions and they never hear anything back.”Work with vendors to optimize the design of benefit plans, she says. Take the lead of high-performance organizations by being sensitive to the diverse, evolving needs of your employee populations, including more people in the planning as your organization’s story emerges, and being transparent about what’s next.“Taking action now is really important.” Woolfolk said. Identifying your strengths, weaknesses, and goals is crucial to engaging with the correct partners and building out the rest of your total rewards plan. Any listening strategy or employee survey is not a single event that leads you to high performance. It is a multi-faceted, ongoing exercise, and needs to be blended with a great communication strategy and change management principles.“Combining that change management with that communication strategy is paramount. In order to create the relationship breakthrough, you need that dialogue. You need listening,” said Woolfolk. You need communication that ultimately creates that high-performing employee experience that we all want, to help drive productivity.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, WTW, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.

Overcome Stubborns
By Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | January 29, 2025

Aligning Learning Programs With Business Strategy for Global Workforce Agility

Businesses are placing more demands on learning and development teams, says Jamie O’Brien, AVP of learning and development at investment platform Voya Financial. Most importantly, “keeping learners engaged in a rapidly changing environment, and aligning our learning programs with our business objectives,” she said during a From Day One webinar. The pace of change gets faster every year.“We’re no longer designing and delivering training solutions just for different adult learning styles, but also for virtual and hybrid work environments, with rapidly changing technology, and for five generations of workers,” she said.Voya’s learners are increasingly seeking an experiential environment. They don’t want to sit through lectures, O’Brien says. “They want to do it. They want to try it. They want to feel it. They want to feel like they’ve been prepared and they’re confident in their ability to come out of training and then go do their roles.”Fellow panelist Tim Gerrits agreed: Leaders in L&D now do much more than transfer information. Gerrits is the the head of learning and leadership development at pharmaceutical company AbbVie, thinks about application most of all.“As it becomes easier to find whatever snippet of knowledge you need, that’s no longer the real crux of success for organizations,” he said. “It’s not putting information into people’s heads, it’s how you get that information back out and change behavior.” Lynnette Collins, head of global L&D at office furniture manufacturer Steelcase, identified the “most difficult part, and the most critical part,” of her job: “Making the connection between those goals, our learning experiences, and key performance indicators.” Who completed the training and when is not nearly as relevant to the executives as how they’re helping the business grow.Yet it’s not easy to demonstrate the value of L&D, said Ken Matos, director of market insights at HiBob, an HR management platform. Returns may not happen right away and even if they do, learners may need help identifying just how they’re applying their new skills. As businesses become more complex, so do learning outcomes, and measurement follows suit.Journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza moderated the panel of experts (photo by From Day One)Ultimately, leaders have to be able to feel the difference, not just see it on paper, says Matos. “Being able to change the stakeholders’ impression of what’s happening in the organization is one of your best, most accessible outcomes, because they are the ones who said it was a problem to begin with. And if they’re not feeling that problem anymore, you have succeeded. Being able to articulate that back to them is a really powerful message.”At AbbVie, Gerrits invites those leading business functions to observe learning in progress at assessment centers. “They see what we’re doing and the transformation that’s taking place with participants, and that gives them confidence that what we’re doing–not only in that assessment center, but overall–is important for the organization.”When Steelcase’s new CEO Sara Armbruster took the role three years ago, “she introduced a long-term strategy for growth, which was new for us in the organization,” Collins said. In the first year, Collins’s team contacted the top 400 global leaders in the company to ask what skills and behaviors they believe are necessary to achieve those new goals, and what might get in the way.“At first, our measurement was really around improving leader perception on how we perform these transformation behaviors,” Collins said. “But now we’re going a bit deeper, because we want to connect it to performance. Ultimately, we want these behaviors to become the way we work to achieve our results.”O’Brien knows her L&D programs are really working when they create a buzz, and managers–or individual contributors–come asking to participate or partner in the design. She knocks on doors, too, to find out whether teams feel that they’re benefitting. If they don’t seem engaged, “that’s a chance for me to ask questions about what their goals are and get closer to what it is that we can deliver.”Business goals can change quickly–just think of how many employers rushed to incorporate some kind of AI into their workflows–and priorities may migrate up or down the list. To stay relevant, L&D needs to change along with them.Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, HiBob, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., Quartz, Business Insider, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.



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