How to Enhance Employee Well-Being? Manage the Whole Person

BY Samantha Campos | July 12, 2023

“We are booming in terms of productivity,” said Claire Zhang, VP of HR for Samsung. That’s the good news. However, there’s a flip side: “We worry that people burn out. That’s where we started creating more programs, especially awareness training for our managers and employees to create boundaries, [that] it’s OK to stop at a certain time.”

Zhang joined other HR experts in a conversation about “Enhancing Employee Well-Being Through Whole-Person Management,” moderated by Pete Suratos, a news reporter for NBC Bay Area / KGO-TV, at From Day One’s San Francisco conference last month.

People tend to cringe when they acknowledge positive outcomes of the Covid pandemic, yet a few social advances are undeniably beneficial. The pandemic greatly influenced how we measure health. It also blurred boundaries between home and workplace, allowing leaders to get to know their employees on a more personal level, with a focus on mental health and psychological safety. “One of the silver linings is a normalization [of] the psychological aspect of well-being,” said Elizabeth Pavese, Ph.D., a senior business psychologist for Workday, an HR software company. “We are whole people. We don’t just park that at the door. I read a [mental health] report recently that 74% of employees are now more comfortable talking [about it] to their co-workers; 64% are more comfortable talking to their managers.” 

The employer approach to well-being needs to be holistic, the speakers asserted. “Covid put a spotlight in terms of, you can’t just think about physical well-being anymore,” said Heidi Schisel, VP of people and culture of commercial, medical, and government affairs at Genentech, the biotech corporation. “Are you exercising? Are you getting enough sleep? How do you continue to foster that sense of well-being, but also make sure that our leaders are modeling that as well, and giving space for people to be able to take care of things in their lives?”

“When we think of whole-person health, it’s no longer about the health benefits for organizations,” said Justin Holland, CEO and co-founder of Healthjoy, a health care-navigation platform. “It’s how do we bring the mental-health benefits into place? How do we think about financial wellness? Because if someone is stressed out, they’re probably not going bring their best self to work.”

“We talk about it from the World Health Organization’s perspective—well-being as a state where a person is realizing their potential,” said Pavese. “They’re able to cope with daily stressors in their lives, be productive, and make a positive contribution. So it’s a very action-oriented, not an end-state kind of definition. That allows us to understand, assess, measure, and then put the right pieces in place that help support the growth of somebody's well-being.”

The panelists, from left: Samanntha DuBridge of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Heidi Schisel of Genentech, Claire Zhang of Samsung, Elizabeth Pavese, Ph.D., of Workday, Justin Holland of Healthjoy, and moderator Pete Suratos of NBC Bay Area / KGO-TV.

A corporate culture of well-being needs to recognize the individual. “As a 60,000 team-member company, we're not all going to agree on what's going to work for us,” said Samanntha DuBridge, VP of HR for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the information-tech company. “We all have different types of jobs with different types of responsibilities. And so we try to make sure that everybody has the resources and tools available to themselves and their families to think about what they want to prioritize, what's most important to them, and what can they take best advantage of.”

“We do need to focus more on the mental health piece,” she added. “We need to focus more on how people can take advantage of resources and feel comfortable.” 

Hybrid work is a big challenge for people leaders, since employee needs for flexibility can vary so much. Panelists spoke of a need to get creative about what they could offer employees that might be different from what was done pre-Covid. 

Access is another challenge. More than 150 million people live in federally designated areas with shortages of mental-health professionals, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The shortage could reach as many as 35,000 full-time employees by 2030.

“There’s not one county in California that doesn't have a shortage of mental health professionals,” said Holland. “If you have a mental health [issue] and you can't get an appointment for three months, it’s challenging. So how do we help increase that access to employees to help meet them where they are?”

Some larger companies focused on well-being can provide wellness resources onsite, to make it easier for employees to access. “We do have a lot of amenities on campus in terms of a health center, gym, doctor, acupuncture, you name it,” said Schisel. “Also, we’ve provided options throughout the day for employees to get to work safely, as well as childcare.” 

Greater efficiencies also emerged from the pandemic to prevent employee burnout. Leaders learned that meetings were a sore point, so they flexed. It became another opportunity to model self-care and well-being.

“Are all the meetings productive?” asked Schisel. “Do they all need to be an hour? Could they be speedy meetings of 20 minutes? And factoring in focus time, making sure you’re taking your lunch. Instead of getting behind the screen all the time, let’s just call each other and take a walk or get outside.” 

“It’s building new habits, new behaviors, modeling those habits and behaviors,” said Pavese, “and having the system and structures around it.” 

At the height of the pandemic, Workday began implementing “interventions” with the nurses of one of its health care customers, a large hospital in New York City. “This idea of deliberate rest and taking a break from your day-to-day for 10 minutes,” Pavese said. “They did art walls in their break rooms. Colors are meditative. It allows you to focus your brain, to quiet things down. Having small things like that are investments in employee well-being to curb burnout.” 

Many workers deferred health care during the pandemic, leading to delayed discovery and treatment of illness, along with greater costs and lost productivity. “There's no shortage of evidence that shows the connection between well-being [and] job performance,” said Pavese, who pointed to burnout as one of those insidious conditions. “We put an undue burden on individuals to cure their burnout. The fact is, burnout is an organizational phenomenon, it’s not an individual phenomenon. It disproportionately affects your high performers because to burn out–it's not working more hours. It's about being highly engaged but not being able to manage and cope with the stress that comes with it. You end up feeling exhausted, you become cynical, and then you feel completely ineffective. So it is a very big detriment.”

Pavese encouraged utilizing more proactive analytics and insights to detect burnout risk. Indicators of well-being dropping can help leaders deter absenteeism, attrition, health risks, and workplace accidents. “If we're investing in our people and our people are thriving, our organizations thrive,” she said. “We are all in the business of people.”

Leaders are also resetting expectations of what great performance looks like. “And it's not, here are the 20 things you did,” said Schisel, “but what was your impact in the organization anchored in specific strategic goals and outcomes? Here’s the standard of excellence that we’re seeking so that it’s consistent, it’s equitable, and people understand that it’s about the impact moving forward–and that’s how your performance will be gauged.”

Communication and intentionality are keys to enhancing employee well-being, especially while managing a hybrid workforce. Not all work is suited for intense collaboration and not all work is suited for heads-down individual time. Integrating with local culture, implementing multiple modal programs based on regions, team check-ins, and flexibility are all tools to utilize in supporting workers’ holistic health. The panelists said they support progress over perfection. 

Managers should be given discretion to adapt policies to unique situations, said Zhang. “We provide guidelines, but the guidelines are wide enough for you to have open interpretation. Then the leaders are empowered to do what is the best for their team as well as communicate with the employees to get the best outcome.” 

Samantha Campos is a freelance journalist who has written for regional publications in Hawaii and California, with forays into medical cannabis and food justice nonprofits. She currently resides in Oakland, Calif.

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