Mastering Well-Being at Work in 2024

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In this episode of the HR Leaders podcast, join Jeri Hawthorne, SPHR, GPHR , CHRO at Aflac - America’s most recognised supplemental insurance company - as she shares valuable insights on unlocking workplace well-being.

Jeri provides practical advice on selecting the ideal wellbeing provider, creating compelling and effective benefit communications, and the number one piece of advice for fostering employee well-being in the workplace.

Episode Highlights:

1. What good looks like - Aflac’s 5 pillars of wellbeing

2. Tips for choosing the right wellbeing provider for your business

3. How to ensure wellbeing and benefits communications are engaging

4. The number one piece of advice to support employee wellbeing at work.

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🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Jeri 0:00

Our CEO has a phrase where he says if you take care of the employees, they'll take care of the customers that is really an underpinning of how we operate. This

Chris Rainey 0:09

makes sense of how this aligns with your core values and your focus on wellbeing. And it's no surprise that there's that link that permeates through the organisation.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the HR leaders podcast. On today's episode, I'm joined by Jerry Hawthorne, who's the chief HR officer at Aflac, America's most recognised supplemental insurance company.

During the episode Jerry shares, our flex five pillars of well being her top tips for choosing the right wellbeing provider, how to ensure wellbeing and benefits are communicated effectively. And her number one piece of advice to support employee well being at work. As always, before we jump into the podcast, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn notification bell and follow on your favourite podcast platform.

With that being said, let's jump in. Jeri, welcome to the show. How are you?

Jeri 1:02

I'm well thanks. How are you?

Chris Rainey 1:04

I'm good. I'm good. How you been?

Jeri 1:08

Busy. You know, it's it's a little bit of our tax season from an HR perspective, because we're in the middle of, you know, finishing bonus calculations and getting ready to pay out our bonuses and then launching goal setting for next year. So this is a little bit of our I like I said I referred to it as our tax season. Fun times. Yeah, well, people get their bonuses. So I'll leave it at that people are usually generally pretty happy about his time.

Chris Rainey 1:33

No, but then pressure on you to make it happen.

Jeri 1:37

Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah. Before

Chris Rainey 1:40

we jump in, like tell everyone a little bit more about yourself personally, and your journey, and also a little bit about the organisation if people want the words. Yeah,

Jeri 1:48

I've been in HR for more years that I'm actually pleased to say a minimum of 20 I'll say it that way. I've touched almost every part of HR in my career. I actually started almost in a backwards way after graduate school, I worked at Berlitz, which is in their cross cultural training division. And so we worked with expats who were moving internationally are coming back and parlayed that into working in international HR dealing with Expat management, employment contracts, etc. have had a great opportunity for a few years where I was actually an expat and lived and worked in Denmark. For Novo Nordisk, which was just one of the better experiences I've had, and went from that to leading. I worked for a nonprofit organisation where we were opening laboratories and other countries and got to do that, which was really fun. Moving into talent management, moved into financial services at that point in talent management, and kind of the HR business partner role, and then have been in that space ever since I worked in energy, financial services, and have been with Aflac, since 2019, have held a couple of different roles here started with our corporate HR team. And then talent management and our employee experience team were added. And now I'm the CHR O for for Aflac, our overarching organisation and Aflac is a company where we are actually we have worked, I would say we're co located our headquarters are in Columbus, Georgia, we also have a massive operation in Japan, where about 80% of our revenue was actually generated. And a lot of folks don't know that. And so it's from, from an employee size, it's about double the size of our US organisation. So we have about 6000 employees in the US. We sell supplemental insurance policies, which are designed to pay the pay the expenses that insurance traditionally doesn't cover, insurance wasn't health insurance wasn't designed to cover all expenses in most cases. And so supplemental insurance is a key. It's a key, it's a key part of of helping employees to solve kind of that gap in it covering their health insurance costs. And, you know, everybody knows Aflac through the duck. You know, those commercials are in the US in particular, those commercials are significant in Japan, they are as well, it's that, of course, culturally appropriately there. But the duck is really sort of the the big brand recognition that we have here and in Japan.

Chris 4:27

Thanks a lot of sense. I'm glad you mentioned that because this makes sense of how this and you told me if I'm correct of how this aligns with your core values and your focus on well being. So there's no surprise that there's that link that permeates through the organisation. And that kind of Yeah, so that kind of leads me to my first question. I'd love to learn more about and you mentioned this in our last conversation around the five pillars of wellness, your organisation you could share a bit more about that.

Jeri 4:50

Our CEO has a phrase where he says if you take care of the employees, they'll take care of the customers right? That is really an underpaid Think of how we operate. It's not just the right thing to do from a human perspective. But you know, as an HR leader, I've worked in many organisations where you really have to make sure you're putting the ROI around why you want to offer some of the different ancillary types of types of benefits. And here, it's, it's different. You know, when you have a, when you have an organisation that was founded, with a family, culture and mentality, and a CEO, who understands that it in some ways, makes my job a lot easier, which is lucky. And so yeah, so we think about when we think about wellness for our employees, we really think about it through the lens of the whole employee. And so we think about it not just through kind of that physical wellness, but we also think about emotional well being and wellness, we think about financial well being and wellness, we think about spiritual well being and wellness. And then we think about social, right. So it's, it's not just about being a, you know, individual, it's about that social element, and what the organisation is doing as well. And so join me to go into a little bit about those. Just if I drone stopping, I'll just say, talking too much about this, because I actually I take a lot of pride. And, you know, I've not been here long enough to say that I was the architect of it, I'm just the, I'm just the kind of the lucky successor to be able to ride on and enhance some of the things that my predecessors have done in this role. But you know, from a physical perspective, we have our we have our normal, you know, normal health insurance policies, we also do things like we have on site fitness centres in our main locations. During the pandemic, our our population pivoted quite a bit. So we had about 70 or 80% of our folks on site, and then a couple of our core locations. During the pandemic, we actually acquired a couple of other companies, and like most other organisations hiring shifted, and so our population has shifted now to about 50%, in our core locations, and 50%, just dispersed across the US. And so in order to have some equivalent offerings for those folks, we've partnered with Jim pass, where we have where we, you know, purchase the service at a at a base level, and then employees can choose to add on but it gives them access to use fitness centres in a variety of different locations, if they're travelling, gives them discounts to fitness centres in some of that some of the areas where they live, in some instances, they're even free. So that's something that we've done from a physical wellness perspective here.

Chris Rainey 7:46

One of the challenges for cetera as I speak, as he does a lot of these services out there that they'll be inundated with, why did you choose to pass? Just out of curiosity? Yeah,

Jeri 7:54

so you know, it's, it's, when we did our evaluation, what we actually found with Jim pass at the time, was that they were an organisation that they were willing to look at places where we had pockets of employees. Even if they didn't have partnerships with fitness centres in those areas, if we said, look, and we're in Columbus, Georgia, right, it's 90 miles south of Atlanta, on a relative city size scale, it's pretty small. And so when they came to us, we said, we looked at the list of fitness centres, and we said, this is great, but our employees here who don't want to use our on site, fitness centres really can't benefit. And so they were willing to go to those locations, where we have work that may be more remote or rural, and find partnerships with fitness centres, so that our employees could actually take advantage of that benefit. And that was a big draw for us. So it was it was earlier in when they were kind of building their brand. And they were just very, very flexible. And they even had at the time, we had just opened a small it hub in Northern Ireland. And they had, they had partnered with fitness centres in Belfast. So it was one of the first benefits that we could say to that team, which is operating in a completely different structure, hey, we have this up, we have this perk that you can, you can actually participate in as well. So that was a big driver for us, which what

Chris Rainey 9:17

about beyond physical locations? Go What about those employees that can't get to a gym?

Jeri 9:22

Yeah, so they have a really robust online suite of applications we're out? Well, it's one application within the application. They have a suite of different types of programmes that you can select from. So you can do online classes. You can do online counselling, you can do meditation, you can do yoga, you know, they have running programmes, they have weightlifting programmes, so you can really kind of customise what you want to do based on you know, I am a big personally I'm a big peloton, person and I have As an example, I have that app on my phone. And one of the things that I like about that is, regardless of where I am, I can access it. And Jim paths is very similar to that, in that, regardless of where you are, you can actually go into the app. And if you have programmes that you like, you can do them from anywhere,

Chris Rainey 10:18

go to an HR executive recently, and I said to her, Well, why did you join? And they were like, they had an amazing fertility plan, you know, part of the benefits, I couldn't see in any other companies. And I was like, Oh, wow, like, you got to think those sometimes. Those are things that are highlighted, you don't realise that mean? The most? Exactly.

Jeri 10:36

And I mean, we'll have people you know, we give all of our employees, our policies for free for that for themselves. And so, you know, essentially, I know, it sounds silly, but that's free money. Because if you have our wellness policies, and you go get a physical, or you go get your eyes checked, or you go get a mammogram, if you're a woman, you you can you get reimbursed for that. So, you know, excuse me study and reimburse to get paid a fee for going to do that. And so, you know, that's just it's it's small, it's nominal, but it's a, hey, here's an additional lump sum of money that you can use for whatever you need. If you if you happen to file a wellness claim with it's just for going to the doctor,

Chris Rainey 11:16

we spoke about sort of physical well being so far, what about some of the other pillars of wellness that you focus on?

Jeri 11:24

Yep. So from a social wellness perspective, I'll talk what let me go, I'll talk about financial because I actually think, you know, I think physical and financial sort of go together. helping employees to to maximise their earnings, I think is is important. And it's, we've talked to you and I talked about this, that navigating the healthcare landscape is pretty, it's pretty complex. And you know, ensuring that you're maximising the value of the plans is complex. And so from a from a financial wellness perspective, you know, we of course, we pay competitive salaries, we also have a very generous 401k. But we spend a lot of time trying to educate our employees on ways to maximise the 401 K, we have a deferred compensation plan for senior leaders. So they can, you know, defer tax, pre tax compensation that's at the very higher levels of the organisation. We bring in financial planning, when we open up our 401 K plans, at the you know, kind of at open enrollment, we also will set up during the year wellness seminars for specific populations for women, for other for marginalised populations, where we'll bring in someone just to talk to that specific, that specific group of people about planning about household budget planning. And we do that we probably do that four or five times a year because we're trying to target different groups at different times. But that's it's a targeted and deliberate effort. And we've had a lot of success in the usage of our 401 K's in the back of the people actually maximising the benefit that we offer with the 401k. So we do quite a bit around that. From a social wellness perspective, you know, people want to work for companies that are purpose driven, and that, you know, have an impact in the communities that they operate in. And I would tell you that we're unique in that one of our you know, cancer is our core product. And we actually are massive donors, and it's the Aflac it's the Children's Hospital of Atlanta, and we have the Aflac Cancer Centre, and Japan has an equivalent as well, cancer centre there. And that really is one of the top top organisations that our employees donated to will do volunteer work and do fundraisers for. And it's important, it's an important cause for our chairman for senior executives, Aflac. Because we work with so many brokers and independent independent agents, we have what we call the Aflac nation. I think it's about 20,000 strong, and they are massive contributors to that organisation, but it really is we walk the talk when it comes to supporting communities that we work in. We have a lot of our leaders and employees who are active on local nonprofit boards. We allow employees to take volunteer hours to engage in efforts that they're interested in. Of course, we work with the United Way so that folks can donate to organisations that they want. But we we do a lot of active efforts around around social wellness for our employees

Chris Rainey 14:51

was kind of neat to us. That's another thing I'm seeing from a lot of people that I'm interviewing that we're hiring is people want to be part of an organisation that's aligned with their purpose. All right, I for me, for me back in the day, it was for all about the salary when I was younger and having a job, but it's changed now, you know, the, the product that's no longer on top of the pile, it's really like, it's as a company that aligns with my wife vision and purpose. And that's kind of, there's no stronger purpose than yours, in the sense that you're a company that's helping save people's lives, and supporting them, support them for a hard time in their life. That's

Jeri 15:26

exactly your interview. And you know, I've had the fortune to do this, if I go out to our, to our call centre, our, our call centres, and I'll sit with the employees who were listening to people who are calling in with requests. And, you know, some of these people are calling in at some of the worst times in their lives, or in need. And this is, you know, this is a call centre person who's talking with someone who's just potentially gotten a cancer diagnosis, and they want to understand, you know, what aspects that they, you know, what should they consider from a policy perspective, and what's covered or not covered, but even as some of the best times, and you know, when they'll talk with someone who just found out that they're pregnant, or that, you know, you talked about in vitro, and that they're, you know, they're they, the in vitro worked, and they're able to have a child, and so they're, they're giving them support, and helping them understand what the benefits are at that point in their life as well. So, you know, down to our frontline employees, they're, they're involved in actually making, making our customers lives better. And even our claims, folks, right? So if I'm someone and I have a high high cost claim for a cancer product that I'm waiting, and, you know, our claims, folks, they are focused on making sure that they're paying claims as quickly as possible, because they know that people rely, in many instances on that money to help to pay for things that health insurance doesn't provide.

Chris Rainey 16:49

You should share more of those stories on your website. I think, because I was looking for your website, and maybe I didn't see maybe I didn't see them. It's my fault. We have them

Jeri 16:59

in some places, but but and we share them very heavily internally. Okay. But it's great feedback. Yeah,

Chris Rainey 17:06

yeah, I think, you know, places like LinkedIn, you know, telling those stories and the performer point, employer brand, perspective is so powerful. And impactful. Obviously, I don't have to look at your talent, build your careers page, and I can see some, some stuff on there. But you know, there's nothing better than, you know, having a short, you know, two, three minute clip from someone and those frontline workers that are having those conversations and what it means that's

Jeri 17:32

a great idea. That's great. Are you looking for a job,

Chris Rainey 17:37

you know, is one of the things I've been doing over the years, it's not even part of our offering. And what we do here is, whenever I find those moments, I record them and just put them out there. Because I even if it's not for me, even if it's for people I'd to speak with, because I think it's important, important. People don't do that enough. I feel like companies sometimes over produce stuff. It doesn't have to be philosophy and like, you have to hire in a professional company, it could be someone with a mobile phone, to say yes, this is this is what it means to work here. And this is you know, why I value it and love what I

Jeri 18:08

do. That's actually it's, it's you're absolutely right, I think it's a great call out. Because we talk about it quite a bit internally. You know, once you're here, you know, we talk about it all the time we talk about it, we have for anybody who's new to the organisation, we have we call it induction. Duck, do you see K shine, which is our real employee orientation, and we bring everybody into our corporate headquarters, everybody who's hired in the US into our corporate headquarters, and at the induction, we spend a lot of time talking about our company purpose, our benefits, our values. You know, we share stories we have, we have the Cancer Centre come in and they share a share stories, we have survivors come and share stories and videos that we that we will broadcast then. But I don't know that we do as much from an external perspective. So it's a good call out how do

Chris Rainey 19:01

you incorporate the spiritual well being element into because that's an interesting one.

Jeri 19:07

Yeah, it is. It is. And I will tell you that it's this is the first company that I that I've been with it, they calls it out from a fundamental perspective, it's giving people the space to reflect in the way that they that they believe, regardless of their religion, race, etc. And so it's about providing those locations and the time for people to have that. But one of the other things that we do even as from you know, most companies have EAP we have that we have it through multiple vendors and you know, you talked about the oversaturation of you know, are people using it, and I would say that we we talk about that as well because we have our traditional EAP. We have it through Jim pass, we have it through another company called neuro flow. But we also have a partnership with an organisation here in the US called Corporate chaplains. Is of America. And they're a nondenominational organisation, where if you want to talk to, you know, if you're Jewish and you want to talk to a rabbi, you are in contact with someone, if you're a Christian, and you want to talk with a Christian leader, you're Catholic, but sort of cool employees. And you know, we're in the south, right. And so that's what our headquarters is. And some employees prefer to talk to a faith based leader in times of need. So if something's happening, you know, even if there's been, you know, their best friend decided to leave the organisation, or they've got something going on, they prefer that to, to a traditional EAP. And we've seen that with a lot of our employees, that they actually prefer that chaplain, and we've even had, you know, chaplains will go, they've been with employees when they needed family members needed last rites. They have been with employees when they, you know, when an employee has gotten married, like we had an instance where an employee got married, and one of the chaplains, actually was an officiant of the service. Yeah, they'll go, you know, we had an employee who had a very tragic, a very tragic loss of a close family member. And they, you know, they went and counselled not only the employee, but their family, they went to the funeral. So they've really gone above and beyond. And so that's one of those that it's not for everybody, right? Because not everybody wants that. And that's okay. But for the people who value that it's a massive, it's a massive benefit. That means a lot. And it's unusual. I think that we offer that. And I

Chris Rainey 21:40

don't know, many, I can name maybe two hands. There's not that many companies I know that offered to employees. Yeah.

Jeri 21:48

Yeah. And, you know, it's funny, because we have our Global Investments crew at the new in New York City. And they're, you know, they're always kind of the sceptics of this, and even some of them have had good success. So it's, you know, again, it's sort of about having a menu, you talked about kind of the customization, it's about having a enough that people have choices to choose what they prefer, but not having so much that you have benefits that are not being utilised at all. And that's a hard balance to strike. Right. That's, that's, you know, that's a hard, it's hard to strike that because it becomes the, you have to go back to why you engage that benefit provider to look at the measure of usage. So, you know, corporate chaplains, that's not for everybody. So what do we anticipate? Do we anticipate 20% of our population will use this 10% of our population? You know, what is that usage rate? And then what's the quality of the people who are users? What's the feedback that we're getting?

Chris Rainey 22:46

Yeah. Love that. What would you say in your careers that have been the best communication channel for these type of things? Because, you know, sometimes, it's just sitting there in a intranet somewhere, no one ever sees it. Or you're bombarding people with too many emails. And then because it's not personal, they don't read anything. What have you found that to be the most successful way of engaging and sharing that information and educating people? Yeah,

Jeri 23:10

I mean, so we've done a couple of things. So we have, we have a platform called Sharecare, which is a consolidator of all of our benefits, where employees, you know, who are tech savvy can go on to the app, and they can kind of pick and choose, you know, that's for the more tech savvy, what I would say, for the for, you know, kind of the, probably myself, it's a little bit old school, right? It's tell them, tell them what you tell, tell them what you told them and tell them again, so we have multiple benefit fairs. Each year, we have virtual benefit fairs, we have in person benefit fairs, not just at open enrollment, but on an ongoing basis. We have wellness events, and that those wellness events will not just have a you know, we have a right now a wellness challenge with some of our senior executives, it's a weight loss challenge between them, we'll use that as opportunities to when we, when we do stories about that to re to re message those benefits, actually using some of those senior executives to be a little bit of an infomercial, about some of them, you know, we have onsite care centres here and have recently partnered with, it's called Marathon Health, that to offer that service nationwide, virtually. And so using some of our senior executives to do a little bit of like a commercial about the benefit of going to the centres, as well as you know, using that using the app because it's free for our employees. It's another benefit that, you know, if you go to the kid, if you go to the Wellness Centre and you file a wellness claim, you had it, you got a free service, and by the way, you file that claim, you get paid for that. So it's another kind of way but so we tried to market it that way. And I also you know, when we when we hire folks at our induction, we have been we have a benefits fair at that as well. But for me, it's really about it's a it's an ongoing cadence of communication. Asian. And we try to do it in clever and creative ways. But we also try to do it in just sort of pretty old fashioned ways. And just going to tell you again, by the way, we're going to go to your leadership meeting, we're going to talk to your employees about it, you're having a town hall, we're offering this we're going to come in and sit down and talk to your team about this. So it's, it's broad, but it's also targeted at the same time.

Chris Rainey 25:21

Sure, you kind of go hit every angle, but I'm sure what would be one of the main ones is obviously then educating your for your leaders, right? Those your managers, you know, the ones that are really there with the frontline workers managing the team's day to day data, your voice to sheets Exactly. Want to spin and talk about the importance of succession planning, because you spoke about that. Last time we spoke and I don't think there's enough conversations happening about the importance of succession pipelining for senior leaders, could you share your approach on that? Yeah,

Jeri 25:51

you know, so we over the last probably 12 to 18 months, I think we like a lot of companies have gone through a little bit of a generational shift, right? So we've had some retirements of some long tenured leaders, and that created gaps. And luckily, we had a robust succession plan at the top of the house like so we've been, we've we have always been very deliberate about that. And so as these changes occurred, it was very planful. And it was kind of a, you know, a little bit of a so and so retires and then we're able to just move somebody in. And that's a great place to be, what it's created for us is, as we've looked down, it's created an opportunity for us to get more deliberate around that next level of leader and what are those experiences that we want those leaders to have, as we escalate, elevate them into higher level roles across the organisation? And so it's been a key topic of discussion from our board, from our CEO, and from our senior executives about, you know, who are who are your successors? What are we doing to grow and develop them? How are we identifying them? You know, I think we like many companies, you know, people tend to have a bias towards people who are similar to them, right? And so it becomes the, I forget the I forget who wrote the book, but it's that it might have been Marty Seligman, the book of you know, what got you What Got You Here Won't Get You There, and that kind of thing. That's it. Yes, thank you. I appreciate that. But it really becomes the, you know, what are those key competencies that we need our leaders to have at that next level? And then what are we doing to help to develop them because what I need to do to develop, Chris might be very different than I need to do to develop Jerry, even if someone may, we may be listed as a successor for the same role. Our growth and development opportunities may be very different. And so the way we think about it is it's, you know, lower in the organisation, those those newer earlier leaders, I don't love this word, but I can't it's, it's what I refer to as almost it's more commoditized, right? There are, it's a bigger population of people, they all need some similar foundational skills. That's where you have that kind of broad training programmes, the you know, entry level leader programmes frontline manager, frontline supervisor, teaching them all of those foundational things. As people go up in their careers, it really becomes a combination of what's commoditized versus what's what's customised. And of course, the higher you go, in your career, really the more customised your development and growth should be, it should never stop, I believe, kind of from an HR pitch perspective. But it really should be tailored to the what's the next role for this person, where their gaps in their areas of and their strengths? How can we maximise those strengths? And then what are the development efforts and activities that we can do to help build that muscle and by the way, if we learn that that muscle can't be built, it doesn't mean that they're a failure, it means that we need to pivot them in a direction where they can still benefit the organisation.

Chris 29:06

Why do you think leaders aren't talking about this enough? Because it seems like a very important events, if not one of the most important decisions organisations are making. I will

Jeri 29:18

tell you, I think it's the most important facet of my job. I think that and I like it's sort of the, you know, the top and then the masses, like I think of those in the, what are we doing for the most people and then what are we doing to ensure that we've got the right leaders in the most critical positions to help the organisation from a continuity perspective, and I almost think there's, it's, I could be wrong. This is just by my hypothesis. I almost think there's a bit of vulnerability when you talk about it, right? Because it really is considered to be competitive competitive advantage to have a strong robust succession plan. And when organisations start to admit that, hey, we have areas of opportunity Ready, which by the way, we all do. But when you say that, then you're saying maybe we're not prepared for the future. And that's not true. Because we're, you know, most, most good organisations think about development in a very deliberate and targeted way. Every fortune 500 company I've been with, has a succession plan, they have training programmes, they have leadership development. So it's something that's going on all the time. But it's also something that's evolving all the time, because environments change, businesses change, you acquire companies, you get acquired, it's so dynamic, that I think, you know, two years ago, you have a succession plan that looks a certain way. You think it's very, very robust. And then you have a lot of retirements and or you sell a part of the business and five leaders who were potentially key successors go with that business, and then all of a sudden, you have a gap. And so I think that might be why because there's just so much fluidness and dynamic pneus to the situation. It's an area, of course, that consultants tend to, yes, yes, yes, they get into quite a bit. And, you know, my point of view is that there are a lot of really, really good consulting organisations that can help identify potential and can help organisations assess most of them, you know, I think it's really, it's sort of like, Do you want a Mercedes? Do you want to BMW, do you want a Toyota, right, they're all good, they're all going to get you where you need to go. It's what's the one that makes the most sense for your organisation, they all have tools, they all have, you know, industrial psychologists, for the most part, a lot of PhDs, they all have proprietary approaches that are all very well defined, and very good. But again, when you're coaching a senior leader, or when you're working on development, it's not just the relationship between the two people, there are other variables at play. So I think it's also it's about matching that vendor with the company. If you're going to go in a direction, this

Chris Rainey 32:03

is where I can talk to you forever, we should have our own show at this point. Well, before I let you go, especially around the wellbeing piece, which I think is really one of the key things that I have loved talking to you about. And and I think it's clearly in the DNA of the organisation and in the leaders. And it starts right from the beginning of the story, you told me about the founders. So I love I love I love all of that, what sort of be a parting piece of advice you give to, to to our listeners around that piece. And then also, Where's where's the best place for people to connect with you, if they want to reach out to you and say, hi, like

Jeri 32:37

I mentioned quickly, like, I'm very fortunate in that I have a senior executive team I work for, you know, a company that were focused on wellness. So the need to pitch the ROI around why these things are important, is less, though I still have to. And that's what I would say to other HR leaders, which is the, you know, you've got to be able to tell the story from to your finance folks about what the true benefit is of offering, you know, having an on site clinic decreases our employee absenteeism, because they can go there at lunchtime, you know, to get a Z pack, if they don't feel well, where they can go for their flu shot. You know, having added this application, you know, or adding this fitness centre, it allows people to, you know, have lower stress, again, lower absenteeism, tracking that data and being able to tell that story, I think is absolutely critical, and even trying to correlate, and this is difficult, but you know, not only do please like it and use it but trying to correlate that, do we see a difference in our claims costs? And can we correlate that back to when we when we actually started to introduce some of these benefits and some of these changes. So I would say that's key, and then pushing the usage around the benefits and trying to get people in those moments where they, you know, want to find a benefit, and they can find it. And they can actually maximise the usage of that, and doing that in a way that meets the audience. And then to reach a LinkedIn is probably the best way, I tried to stay engaged on LinkedIn. I will tell you know, it's funny when you get certain titles, even though nothing else changes about you, all of a sudden, you know, you go from, you know, 20 people wanting to connect with you to 200. So I try very hard to pay attention and respond and that is not as responsive but that's the probably the best way for

Chris Rainey 34:30

them are trying to chase you so something's I don't worry. More than half unfortunately. But listen, honestly, I appreciate you coming on the show, as well. It's been a pleasure and this these topics are so close to my heart. We didn't even really get into it in that much detail. But I also personally struggle with my own mental health, something always I've done for years. You didn't notice when we first spoke but I also do a global wellbeing summit every year and our partner is Jim pass for that, so what closely with the founder and CEO and the team. So when you said that I was ah, that's cool.

Jeri 35:05

That's because we've had such a great partnership with them. And like I said, we started with them when they were relatively Yeah, me too. Yeah, we looked really early, and they think they're a bit of a pioneer. Without to do this. Yeah. I

Speaker 1 35:17

think when we first reached out, though they reached out to us they didn't even have a corporate offering. It was just, yeah, it was like a b2c. It was a it was just a b2c. Yeah, that long ago.

Chris Rainey 35:29

And then during the pandemic, we partnered, and I think now then, then more than ever, you know, we needed organisations like them that could be able to, for example, my first ever

Speaker 1 35:41

time that I seek to help my mental health and my panic attacks was actually through the gym pass app, or I booked in to see a therapist virtually. So it was a big breakthrough for me kind of lying about it to my friends, family, wife, and I'm being embarrassed, embarrassed to talk about the fact I was having panic attacks and didn't know what was happening. You kind of took it took away the stigma a little bit and allowed me to be in a comfortable place in my house, around jumping on a video call. It just didn't feel as scary, if that makes sense. It felt more private probably. Yeah. And that was for Jim POS, as well. So yes. So

Jeri 36:18

that's where it really is the like trying to find, you know, to have an offering that try to meet employees where they are, like I said, some people want to talk to the pastor, other people want to talk to someone where it feels a little more anonymous and private, you know, to kind of have that sort of comfort. And it's the how do you do that? Because, you know, we didn't talk about mental wellness. And, you know, maybe we can add another point because it is a massive issue. And we do our work horses report, if like we're forces report, and burnout and mental health continue to be top challenges, especially are especially in millennials, Gen Z. So it's they're they're big issues, and they're important issues for employers to be aware of.

Chris Rainey 37:00

Yeah, well, we have to do part two, Jerry.

Jeri 37:04

Opportunity. I appreciate

Chris Rainey 37:06

you coming on and I wish you all the best until next week.

Jeri 37:08

Thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate it too.

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