Creating "Whole Person" Health: How Culture, Healthcare & Benefits Work Together to Build Well-Being

What are the best ways to support a whole person's health and build a close and inclusive community of employees when your workforce is dispersed who support and inspire one another to create and sustain healthy habits.

Transcription:

Deanna Cuadra (00:10):

All right. Good morning everyone, and welcome to our general session, creating Whole Person Health, how culture, healthcare, and benefits work together to build wellbeing. I'm Deanna Cuadra, Senior Reporter with EBN, and yeah, I'm excited to dive in with this excellent panel of experts. Right next to me, we have Bernie Knobbe, Senior Vice President of Global Benefits and Wellbeing at AECOM at Global Infrastructure Consulting firm. Bernie is responsible for the health and wellness of 50,000 employees in 60 countries. Right next to him we have Lindsay Cushman, Director of Benefits and Global Mobility at Maxar, a space tech company. Lindsay has over 16 years managing benefits, leaves of absence and retirement plans. And last but certainly not least, we are joined by Kyle Daquanna, Director of Strategic partnerships at Empathy Benefits provider for bereavement care. Kyle has spent the last decade innovating the employee benefits space worldwide. Alright, without further ado, we're going to go ahead and start. Now, as you guys very much know, whole person Health, holistic health, wellness, wellbeing, these are all big buzzwords in the HR and benefits space. So I want to first ask these guys, how do you define these words for your companies? And Bernie, you can go ahead.

Bernie Knobbe (01:42):

Hello everyone. I'm Bernie Knobbe, actually, by the way, like OB one, so if it's easy name to remember, apologize. That's okay. I've been in benefits a while and I'm always pleased to have an opportunity to share a little bit of our story. So hopefully you'll walk away with an aha moment or two and maybe something you can either think about or possibly apply in your situation. So at AECOM, I don't know if we have the slides or not, but having worked at places like Gap, Hilton and Yahoo, they're really big into visuals, and so it's always about telling the story is much easier this way than a lot of words. So I'll try to quickly go through those. So when we think of our wellbeing program, it used to be five pillars, now it's six. It can always be better if we come up with a seventh, we have one for every day of the week.

(02:21)

But for right now, we have emotional, financial, intellectual, physical, planet, and social. We really wanted something around the environment and green. And so planet played really well for that. And so when we think about it, we think about it in all of these terms and we make sure that every time we communicate that we relate to those. And in almost every situation, it's not one or two. Everything you do in benefits is probably three or more. So if you think about it, emotional and physical is almost always related to health, but also it's financial. How do you make it affordable for people? So right there, you've knocked three of the six. Just keep that in mind when you're thinking about your wellbeing program. On the next slide, I always enjoy sharing this. This is a great one. This is our landing page for this month.

(03:05)

I happen to rescue dogs, so I love this, but you can just write this down. wellbeing@aecom.com, that's pretty easy to remember and you don't need to username or password. And the same with aecombenefits.com. So if you ever want to see what we're up to, what we're doing, we share that with new hires, potential employees, et cetera. And also for their family members. Not everybody works for the company, but they're impacted by your programs. So you'll see if you go to this global site, it has all the various tools and resources that we've created over the years, and it's just a great place to sort of see what's our culture of caring about and what are the kind of tools and resources we give to employees to help enable them to achieve however they define wellbeing. So if you go to the site, that's what you'll see today.

(03:50)

And then lastly, very quickly, our journey. So it all started back really at the end of 17, but the first program began in the middle of 18 and it was a wellbeing week. In 19, we did a wellbeing month, and in 2020 we were going to do a 24 7, 365 all year long. And then Covid came along in February, March of 2020. So we had to expedite from June to March. It's always fun in HR when you get your deadlines changed on you, and it's been that way ever since. So our program is universal all the time, and we've made some big enhancements over the last couple of years. Our website continues to grow. We're on 3.0. I always feel like I'm high tech when I say that. But then also we've done things like country profiles for all of our countries. We've put in global wellbeing ambassadors worldwide. We used to have 'em just in the us. We started a mental Health Allies program last year, et cetera. So I don't want to take all the time on stage, but if you get a chance, go online and look at the website and you can see a lot about what we've been up to over the last six years now and really appreciate the opportunity to share some of that today.

Lindsey Cushman (04:59):

So at Maxar we really kind of focus our wellbeing on similar pillars, but with tech people, they can be a little bit particular about things. So we try to do wellbeing without calling it wellbeing. So we focus on our philosophy, which is innovative compliance, sustainable benefits, and there's a fourth one that's escaping me. And when we try to do wellbeing, what we focus on is meeting someone where they are and supporting where they're going. So we have a really broad array of types of employees, different ages. We have five generations working at Maxar, so we have lots of different types of people at different points on their journey. And so for us it's really important to create a lot of variety for people. So we need variety that will meet someone where they are, if they're nearing retirement, if they're brand new into their career, if they're working in the defense industry, that comes with a lot of compliance strings if anybody's in that world with me.

(06:06)

So you have to kind of fence everything in with that. We also have high tech, so we are competing against really big names in the benefit space who have well-known benefits. And so what we try to do is offer something that allows people to customize what they need for their own wellbeing journey. So whether that is you need a lot of physical support, maybe you need mental health support, maybe you need more in the financial space, maybe you need social support, maybe there's career support. So we try to offer a really broad package that allows people to customize what they need.

Kyle Daquanna (06:47):

Yeah, really good. So I don't want to be redundant, and those are really good answers. We agree with all of that. The only thing that I would add here is that we call it the wheel of life in these buckets, the physical, the spiritual, emotional, mental, and financial that they're all equally important, but the importance of one particular bucket varies over time and that when we're designing and working with benefit leaders and consultants on designing it, that we're being mindful of that and the seasonality of the employee's kind of life cycle and ensuring that we're crossing all of those buckets. So that's all I really had to add to that one.

Deanna Cuadra (07:22):

Now to that point, you bring up the point, of course, all of you brought out the point of diversity and benefits. People are having different needs, of course, no workforce is homogenous. So then I want to ask, when building that definition of Whole Person Health, why is it so crucial to engage peer communities like ERGs?

Kyle Daquanna (07:44):

Yeah, I can actually take, I'll go first on this one. So peer groups and ERGs are super important. I mean, there's a lot of study and data that shows that companies that are leveraging these effectively that have higher productivity, their culture and their scores are better for employees. So I'd highly encourage you to leverage those. There's two components of the kind of peer engagement that I'll highlight right now. One of them is for driving utilization as benefit leaders. I'm sure that word stands out for you, right? Maybe even measured on it. Sharing inside of these resource groups what benefits the employees have available is a huge way for you to spread the word to thought leaders amongst the industry. So driving engagement and utilization is one. The second thing that I want to highlight on those is for good benefit leaders, they're not just making decisions at the top in some ivory tower, but they're truly taking feedback from the bottom and leveraging those groups as these resource centers.

(08:34)

I'm going to give an example. I was reading something and it talked about the difference between culture and climate in an organization, culture being what the company said that they're about and the climate being what it actually felt like to be an employee in that organization. And I have a real life story where a friend of mine was working and she had lost someone in her family and her and her family are Jewish, and this company's policy bereavement policy allowed five days of bereavement leave. They waived a banner at the very high of her coming in the interview process on diversity and equity and inclusion and belonging and how important she would feel inside this organization. But when she lost someone that she loved, the true policy that they had written excluded her, the Jewish tradition allowed for seven days ceremony for the next process. She had to take personal time off as a result of this and did not feel very inclusive. She was a part of their inclusivity group. The ERG was able to share this with other peers, drive it up, policy was made. So I think that's a really good example of how these peer groups and community when you listen to them can drive change at the top.

Lindsey Cushman (09:31):

Yeah, I'll just echo that. Our ERGs are so critical because the landscape is constantly shifting in the aerospace industry. So things are constantly changing. There's mergers, there's acquisitions, there's spinoffs, there's all kinds of stuff moving all the time. And you can do a survey and you can get some really high level data, but it's not enough. When people then form these groups like the ERGs and they bring everybody together, they're focused around the same spot on their journey a lot of times. And so they can help you get some of that grassroots feedback of what is important to you, what is it that you need and how can we support you? And it also creates that feeling of belonging that is so important. So we've talked a lot today about the warmth of leadership and all of those types of things, and it's really important to engage that with your peers as well.

(10:22)

So you have groups that come together around a common purpose or a common station or a common anything. And that is a really essential way for us as benefit leaders to get grassroots feedback. When we implemented a direct primary care at Maxar, it was a grassroots movement. It was a lot of parents who had come together and were utilizing a similar benefit outside of the company and said how useful it was to them. And then they helped us to find the culture champions that would help us to launch that program into our world. And the other thing is, I think as benefits people, we always have the swan song of benefits people is how do I get this information out? How do I communicate this to everyone? And ERGs are such a great way to do that because you can engage certain people and they will help you get your message out, get your information out about how to utilize whatever is in your package that is supportive of that group, and then it starts to spread and you'll get more feedback and it's a lot more useful than a high level survey, I feel.

Bernie Knobbe (11:31):

Yeah, just to add great points, when we think about our ERGs, they're representatives of the communities and the allies that align with them. And we actually have 11 now. And what we realized was from a benefits perspective, their lens is just different. 80% of what you provide really applies to all your employees, but it's that 20% is the difference, whether it's LGBTQ, whether it's the veterans, whether it's individuals that might be challenged from a mobility standpoint or even people thinking about retirement, all those categories, they think about benefits a little bit differently and you have to acknowledge that. And so not only have we created, we call them one pagers, and if you go out on our website, you'll see them. There's a one pager for every one of those communities. And on the left hand side, the content's all the same. It's very specific to our programs, but then on the right hand side is even more specific to individuals that are in those various categories where maybe it's just important that they realize that for their community, these are also things within the program.

(12:32)

It's like pulling out the good information and making it very relevant for them is so important. We talk about personalizing benefits. I mean, for me it's Diet Mountain Dew, right? Everybody has their own life, somebody else at Starbucks, whatever. You have to find a way to do that in your programs and in your communications. And so fortunately, we work with a very innovative firm called Blue Communications, and so they've helped us to develop within our website. I see content at the bottom of the page that is more related to me. I call it Amazon like benefits feed, but it tells me things because what I've searched on, what I'm interested in, and it makes it feel much more relevant to me. The other thing I'll mention too is it's not just ERGs, it's about business context. So we happen to have a very strong health and safety group, obviously for the work that we do.

(13:20)

And so what we realized years ago is you have to plug in with those groups as well. So make sure you look within your business and find where can you link wellbeing and your benefits programs with things going on in the business because they are the greatest opportunity for you. It also helps you in things like getting funding for programs or initiatives if the business is behind it, as you were saying, that really does make a difference and also look for those little moments that are a win. So five years ago, everybody did a safety moment at the beginning of the meetings for the last two years, everyone does wellbeing moments. It's not that safety moments don't still happen, but everybody's been doing wellbeing moments for the last couple of years because it just feels like with everything around mental health, emotional wellbeing, financial wellbeing, challenges people are facing, they need something that says, we realize it's hard and we're trying to help you with tools and resources to help you manage that. So look for that personalization and make sure it's relevant to the people. I think the first slide there says something about meet them where you are or where they are. We always say that. I also think it's meet them who they are. And so make sure it's relevant to who they are, not just where they are.

Deanna Cuadra (14:33):

Now, as you guys know better than most, there is seemingly a never ending list of benefits that employers are told they should include for their workforce. But I think it's important to ask in your opinions what benefits are worth fighting for? And another way to ask this is, what benefits have you fought for your companies?

Lindsey Cushman (14:53):

I'll start with that one. I'm pretty passionate about direct primary care. I already mentioned it, I mentioned it so much. Everybody knows that that's my answer. But direct primary care, if you don't know what it is, you pay a monthly membership fee to a group of doctors. And when your people access that care, it's either extremely low cost or it is free. They can access it virtually, they can access it in person, and a lot of times you can get them to come on site. So at Maxar, we have engaged with a company called NextEra for years, and it was a grassroots effort. People that were patients of the organization brought it to us. And in California we've engaged with a company called Ever Side as well to just kind of provide some of those same services out here. When you talk to people about why they don't engage with their primary preventive health, they always say that they don't have time, they don't have a doctor, they can't afford it.

(15:50)

They don't want to be, if they're on a high deductible plan, they don't want to spend $200 to be told they need rested and fluids or they don't have time to take a half day off and drive to the doctor's office. Drug primary care answers, all of that. And if you're a self-funded benefit plan, you are giving someone the opportunity to make a better choice with their healthcare. So instead of ending up at the ER with a cold, which we all in this room that makes us cringe, right? You don't need to spend $3,500 on that. You can make a better choice, but we can't constantly apply sticks. We can't just keep increasing those deductibles and those out-of-pocket maximums, there is a limit and there is a breaking point. And direct primary care gets in front of that. And when people get in front of their health, they improve their health risk scores, things get taken care of sooner.

(16:38)

It doesn't become this really expensive drawn out thing that's better for the person too. We have to remember that these are people, they're not just financial numbers and it helps that person's overall outcome and it also helps your financial bottom line. If you're self-funded, you are reaping the rewards of people making a better choice. So for me, that is something I always engage in. And the second one is mental health care. I haven't met the person yet that couldn't do with a little therapy. I don't know about all of you, but I really think that people should be engaging with their mental health in the same way that they engage their physical health. It should be preventive. You should be talking to someone regularly, just checking in, make sure that you have all the tools you need as you encounter different obstacles in your life. So those are the two that are really important for me.

Kyle Daquanna (17:30):

I'm passionate about this one as well. Which ones do you fight for is which ones that matter for your people far before your employees are your employee. They have other roles in this world, their fathers, their mothers, their children, their caregivers and their life. I don't want to be remembered as the number one thing is being head of growth at a company. I'm a sandwich caregiver. I'm a single dad of two boys who were eight and six. I care for my dad who had a stroke three years ago. So when I joined empathy at the beginning of the year, it was imperative to me that they had some sort of a solution that cared about me off the field because that's who I really am as a person. I'm a single dad. That's who I am on the side. I build out growth for this company and get to work with enterprise companies and absolutely love it, but it's not who I am.

(18:22)

And I think your benefit design package and how you show up for families means a lot there. And so again, going back to joining empathy as we partner with Family First, a world-class caregiving solution, it's a huge part of the workforce and there's a continuation of care between the caregiving and loss and it impacts how employees are showing up to then be your employee. Because I'll tell you sometimes on Sunday night, if it's a long night with my dad, that's going to impact me at work. And so having some benefits and resources that my company provides that helped me be who I really am also helped me show up better at work as well.

Bernie Knobbe (18:59):

All right, I'll go last. I don't think there's any one benefit plan. I think it's about choice and personalization. So there's four generations. Somebody actually says there's five depending on the industry, five generations, there's 80 plus year old at Walmart and other places that are still working because they're active, they're engaged, and they want to have an opportunity to contribute to something and feel good about themselves and so forth. So with that situation for all of us, we have to look at our programs and say, does it meet the needs of all these different generations and or all the different needs? I mean, families are defined so differently now. We happen to define ours with four-legged fur animals. Everybody has their own definition of what family is. So you have to be careful that you don't get so focused on any one per program per se, but that you offer choice.

(19:46)

So if you think your life's hard, we have 25 medical plans. It's actually five carriers, but with five options because we have a healthcare exchange. So if you think, oh, I've got this one healthcare plan to manage or manage 25, but that offers a lot of choice for people and we get really high ratings in the nineties as far as employee satisfaction. They can buy what's best for them, what they can afford, and they can change it year over year. We also last year put in flexible time off, sometimes unlimited vacation, but you should never say that in states like California. But the reality is, it is enabling you to take the time you need to care for your own wellbeing, especially when you have situations in your life that require it. You still have to get your work done, but there's flexibility there. And then we have freedom to grow, which enables you to take time where you can work from a hybrid location, you can work from an office, you can have a shared situation.

(20:37)

So I think it's about looking at what you do and say as someone comes in the door as either a new hire or even someone mid-career, does our program offering help them to meet the needs of themselves and their families? If you're doing that, you're offering the right programs, whether they're super generous, whether they're average, or even perhaps if they're less than average, as long as the overall package has that robust nature to it, employees are going to feel good about it. I mean, let's get realistic. People don't say compensation benefits, total rewards. They don't use those terms. It's like, what does the company do for me? And that's how they recognize themselves in that organization. So you have to think about that and say, what does someone go home? Like you were saying, empathy and say at the end of the day, what does the company do to support me? It's important that you use that lens. So thank you.

Deanna Cuadra (21:28):

I think for my last question here before we go to the audience, of course, each of your companies sound like they take really good care of their employees, but I imagine it's no easy feat to get these benefits in for your company. It's got to take some effort on the benefit leaders part. How do you convince key stakeholders that these benefits, these are some things that your organization really needs.

Bernie Knobbe (21:55):

It's my turn to go first trying to be polite from the Midwest. What can I say? So I would just say somebody coined this and actually said, can we use it? I said, sure, it is return on investment, but it's also return on individuals. So when you think of the ROI of a program, always go in with both perspectives because the finance group is going to be thinking about ROI from their side, and HR and others are going to be thinking about it from the individual side. So if you can always look at a balance of that, and then also just make sure you have really good metrics and data. So I know I said it before, but Blue helped us to create a dashboard years ago. It tells a story, and I think in the article that was published from EBN, it said that it's like benefits people do great work..

(22:37)

I'm sorry, all of you do, and that's great. The problem is we don't always tell that story so well, right? Not everybody's a Disney storyteller. And so you have to find a way to get those metrics, analytics and specifics to make the point you're trying to make because then they pay attention. Otherwise, it just looks like you're talking about where culture of caring, and that's all really important. But at the end of the day, what is the return on that investment is what you really need to think about. And the more information you have, the more they're willing to listen.

Lindsey Cushman (23:09):

I'll just echo that. We benchmark everything. We have a great broker consultant in Hub International, and they've created with some of our carriers a persona analysis to help us understand personas. So like little pretend versions of lots of different types of employees that work at Maxar. And that really helps us to understand kind of how we can craft things to make sense for our population, but then also it helps our financial stakeholders to really understand why investing in certain things will help drive down our costs over the long run. And it helps us to understand what all is going on from lots of different angles. So when you talk to your CFOs and you talk to the people that you ultimately have to get approval from, you're not only bringing in soft data, you're also bringing in hard dollar ROI analysis, because I think that that's really a key piece to implementing any type of benefit is you have to have funding for it, right?

(24:12)

That's what we have to do. And so you need the data to back that up. If you go into these types of negotiations with all of your stakeholders and you don't have hard data, it's going to fail. You really need to make sure that you have a solid understanding of what it is you're proposing, a solid understanding of the three to five year impact, and then a solid way to explain it, not only to your stakeholders, but ultimately what is the story to your people? Because if they don't engage with what you're offering, you're never going to get that ROI. So that's really how you nail it, is you make sure that everybody understands what it is you're proposing, including you.

Kyle Daquanna (24:50):

Yeah, that's good. And I don't know if we can pull up the last slide that has the little dove on it while I speak to this one, but I'm going to speak to both sides, my head of both sides of my mouth on this one. The first one's to reiterate what they're saying here is that ROI cost offsets outcome data is super important. I do think that we should do due diligence when we're measuring any sort of new benefit. I also think that we should just be mindful. Our buyers are generally more on the innovative side. They're the first ones to launch and recognize that the benefits and the trends that they got us here aren't going to get us there. And sometimes it's the right thing to do for our people. And an example that I have is working with CarMax right now. They have about 40,000 lives, and they're doing a series in January of 2024 called Moments That Matter.

(25:33)

What they've done is they've sat down with their board and their team, and they've just identified these half dozen initiatives or milestones that one goes through in their life that really mean something that takes them maybe off the field where their mind isn't going to be in the nine to five because it's thinking about that one thing. You think of it with the bigger ones. It can be forming a family or having a child. It could be planning for a wedding, it could be losing a friend or a loved one, and there's others that they're implementing as well. And what they've done is they went out and then they shopped and they found solutions to align to their moments that matter. And some of them, there wasn't hard objective data that showcased or had a business case that was worthy of this investment. However, they recognized as people that this was a big milestone in someone's life, and they did want to be there for their people during that milestone. So both sides, I can appreciate the hard data and the ROI and outcomes, but also just recognizing this thing, this topic is important to our people, and since it's important to them, it's going to be important to us as well.

Bernie Knobbe (26:30):

One last thing I'll mention I forgot is employee survey. I mean, if you've ever worked at a company that did a hundred best places to work, and I've done that in the past, we didn't win, but the work involved is tremendous. But one of the key aspects that is the employee input, because you can talk all day long going in this direction, but they also want to know what are you hearing back, right? It's Glassdoor, it's other organizations where it's not just what you think your programs are doing, but make sure you get that input from your employees because that really helps with leadership too, because at the end of the day, the war for talent that they're dealing with is driving their decisions. So if you can say, this is what employees are telling us, and work with your talent acquisition recruiting groups as well to say, what are you hearing from potential new hires? Or as we call them boomerangs. We have a lot of people coming back because the organizations changed over the years, and so when they come back, they've experienced something else and they want whatever they didn't have before in order to meet the new needs that maybe they have at that stage in their life. So make sure you do the 360. You don't just go in one direction, like good communications, right? It's got to be a two-way street. So thank you.

Deanna Cuadra (27:39):

Alright. Well, we have a few minutes for questions from the audience. Yeah, anyone? Oh, yes.

Audience Member 1 (27:50):

So I'm at the end of a intentional career break, and part of the decision for that break was to be able to provide, when they get choked up, to be able to provide long-term hospice care for a senior dog in my family. So I'm curious because I've spent a lot of time and a lot of money going to a lot of different doctors for our dog. She's deaf, she's epileptic, she has heart disease. I'm curious what you are seeing in terms of empathy related components or other benefits programs for your employees with respect to pets because that's becoming such a big part of the family.

Kyle Daquanna (28:32):

Yeah, I'll go first and then Bernie, I don't know if you have something to add to there, but with the empathy side of it. So empathy provides personalized bereavement care when someone experiences loss and we believe loss is loss, and your policies probably identify loss as someone who is immediate family member. And we would just disagree with that. We believe it could be loss of a high school friend, loss of a football coach, it could be loss of a pet. This is a very big one near and dear to my heart as well, so I can appreciate that loss of an unborn child. So we are seeing more innovative companies build these into their policies because this is a piece of our family. And if you have a pet, I imagine everyone who does would agree with you right now on those emotions in that feeling. So we're seeing it as almost a must in the policy creation for and with supportive resources. Again, again, our care team has special training that they're doing for families when they do lose or they're about to lose a pet.

Bernie Knobbe (29:24):

I mean, there's creative things, paw leave and so forth. People are trying to come up with ways to deal with it. But the reality is also we've rescued seniors as hospice and hospice. So I completely relate to what you're saying, and that's kind of goes back to what I said earlier, how you define family. You have to get out of that traditional and realize that for everyone it's different and it also changes over time. And so there's actually a couple of organizations right next door, including one. I'm fortunate to be a part of the board, which is Avett, where it's like, how do we bring telehealth we have had for medicine for humans for 20 years? How do we bring that to the pet community so that people that say, well, I need time off to do that. I can't get an appointment, I just have a question. I don't want to spend $90 to go see a vet and take up their time. There's a lot of things we can do, and I'm getting goosebumps. There's a lot of things we can do as organizations to meet the needs of our employees and not have to be a high cost item, but a high impact item. And I think that's where the opportunity is really there for the cohorts or the personas. There's so many names for trying to describe what employees are, but that would be my thoughts. Thank you. Good.

Deanna Cuadra (30:31):

Great. I think we have time for one more question, if anyone else, any takers?

Bernie Knobbe (30:44):

Thanks for staying the 30 minutes.

Deanna Cuadra (30:47):

Well, that was our panel. I want to thank everyone for joining us. A big thank you to again, our wonderful people.