Several high-profile employers have lately dropped their hybrid work policies and are calling workers back to the office, and some are doing so in the name of culture. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is facing a potential “employee revolt” after he announced in mid-September that all workers would have to be in-office five days a week starting January 2025, reversing a policy in place since the pandemic. In the official announcement, Jassy claimed the decision is intended to strengthen the company culture.

His reasoning may be misguided. According to research from Gallup, the way employees are managed is four times more important than their work location when it comes to employee engagement and well-being. “Essentially, it’s the relationships workers have–with their coworkers, managers, leaders and organization–that are significantly evolving,” Gallup’s report reads. “Many organizations are radically retooling the ways they do business, leaving many employees, including managers, stressed and disconnected.”

The employee experience is felt at the team level, said Steve Arntz, co-founder and CEO of workplace social connection platform Campfire. “Probably 70% or more of what you experience from a culture standpoint is built on your team, with your manager, with the people you work with directly.”

Arntz was part of a discussion on cultivating well-being through workplace culture during From Day One’s September virtual conference, where panelists discussed preserving culture during major disruptions and how to find opportunities for reinforcing well-being.

Protecting Employee Well-Being During Times of Great Change

Guiding and preserving company culture is especially difficult during enterprise-wide changes, like mergers and acquisitions or major leadership overhauls.

Cile Lucas is the director of culture and team member experience at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. When HPE prepares for acquisitions, she works with the M&A and the corporate development teams to assess how the workforces will mesh. Using standardized questionnaires, they assess both HPE and the incoming company, “so we know the potential issues we could have when those employees join, and we can put mitigation plans in place.” Lucas said that, most importantly, she focuses on what the teams have in common, not what separates them.

HPE is slated to acquire networking firm Juniper Networks later this year, bringing in 11,000 new employees. “There’s been a huge culture assessment,” Lucas said. “We sent an extensive survey to our employees, talking about our specific culture. We have a culture workstream that’s part of the integration team to talk about, ‘How do we marry those two? How do we need to rethink what our culture looks like based on their behaviors?’”

VF Corporation–the company that owns a cache of footwear and apparel companies including Timberland, Vans, and The North Face–saw a major leadership change in the last year, and in the headwinds, the HR team held fast to the company values, trying to maintain a sense of consistency for employees. “Talent can be an incredible way to embed, support, and elevate culture,” said Lauren Guthrie, the company’s chief belonging and talent officer. “It’s really important to make sure we’re building leaders that are culture-builders as well, that they’re thinking about the culture of their most immediate teams, and that they’re considering their leadership development and acumen an important part of their performance–just like any other easy-to-quantify aspect of technical performance.”

Listening to Employee Resource Groups

At one of the world’s largest data center operations, Equinix, the VP of global rewards Todd Cowgill works with employee resource groups to improve the company’s benefits packages and make them more user-friendly.

“Some of our groups were having challenges utilizing the services,” he said. “So for key problems and situations, we built out use cases and storyboards.” For instance, for employees dealing with long-term health matters, Cowgill’s team identified all sources of support: the people within the organization who can help, the company’s short-term and long-term disability programs, and available psychological support services. “We had all the services that the people needed, they just couldn’t figure out how to stitch it all together,” Cowgill said. It was their ERGs that showed them those services needed stitching.

Workers are a valuable resource for discovering gaps in well-being resources, like access to medical care, preventative medicine, and early interventions. Employees should be empowered to ask for the things they need, said Victoria Lee, the SVP and chief medical officer at Lucid Diagnostics, a company that offers testing for esophageal cancer risk. But, like Cowgill found, not all workers will readily know what to press for or what’s already available to them. “Education is really critical when people think about workplace well-being and mental health. A lot of people don’t really think about disease until they’re suffering from symptoms,” said Lee.

She believes employers have an obligation to fill the gaps created by healthcare deserts. For instance, depending on location, some workers may have access to highly specialized screening tests, while others may be hundreds of miles away from care. “So, how do we level the playing field when it comes to something as important as preventative medicine, making it accessible to everyone?” Lee posed. Lucid brings testing to offices, so even those without local access to care can get screenings they need.

ERGs are rich channels for identifying well-being needs, but they’re easily overburdened. At VP Corporation, Guthrie retooled the company’s resource groups to reallocate work and divert responsibilities to the right parties. Their ERGs had become “catch-alls” for culture transformation, policy reinvention, and brand feedback. They even stood in for consumer focus groups.

“We wanted to re-anchor them around the promise that every associate in our company should be able to feel an authentic sense of belonging and be celebrated for the uniqueness they bring to the organization,” she said. Brand leaders are now assigned ro consumer engagement and brand feedback strategies, the company’s DEI team is in charge of getting employee feedback and converting those ideas into policies, and ERGs have a new name: belonging communities. “Let’s call them what they are,” Guthrie said. “They sit at the intersection of associate experience and well-being through the lens of belonging.”

Very often, balancing employee well-being against business goals takes a good deal of commitment from HR, but considerably more from business leaders who answer to the P&L. “You don’t max out productivity and preserve well-being at the same time,” said Arntz. As the CEO of a venture-backed company, Artnz says he’s guilty of trying to achieve both peak output and peak well-being. “We have investors, we’ve raised money, and we need to provide a return on that investment.” To stave off burnout, don’t aim for the maximum, aim for the optimum, he said. Something closer to 70% is a better goal than 100%. “Let’s keep space for connection, for collaboration, for innovation, for well-being, and for breathing.”

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, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.