Speaker 1: Well, welcome, everyone. My name is Anna Greenwald, and I am the CEO of a corporate wellness company here to tell you why wellness sucks. But before we unpack that, I'd like to start with just a little game, a favorite of mine. Would you rather? Okay? So you can think your answers in your head if you want. If you're here, you can call them out. Would you rather, A, have a state-of-the-art on-site gym at work, or B, have the ability to flexibly work from home? You can think about it. Got another one for you. Would you rather, A, have unlimited free snacks at work, or B, unlimited vacation time? Okay, one more. Would you rather have, A, one more bag of company-branded swag, or B, a boss with enough emotional intelligence to know when you and your entire team are burnt out? If you have answered A to all of these questions, congratulations, you are in the minority. In fact, research suggests that the majority of workers would choose benefits like flexible working options, more paid vacation over a higher-paying job, and that employees who feel that their employers care about their mental health, that actually give them positive reinforcement, are half as likely to be looking for new work. Unfortunately, this is not what most employers are thinking about when they're thinking about workplace wellness programs. Most employers are still operating under an outdated and even destructive idea that workplace wellness is about pressuring employees to make different health decisions in their personal lives, or incentivizing employees, through perks, to stay at work all hours of the day, even past the point of burnout. But this approach to wellness does not create an ROI for most organizations. And in fact, it can often have the opposite effect. It can create a toxic work environment that people are running from. And that's because these employees, employee is just a funny word for human, like you and I. We get it. We know how it feels to be cared for versus to be commoditized. In fact, I would venture to say that every single person in this room knows what it feels like to work in a toxic work environment. Even if you've never imagined that work could be different than that. Now some of you may have left a work environment like that. Some of you may be in one right now. And many of you are probably sitting there thinking, is this it? Isn't there anything else? And I know that because you're not alone. A recent workplace health study of over 5,000 American workers showed that 56% are currently looking for new jobs. And they're not just thinking about it. They're doing it. In August of 2021, 4.3 million Americans left their jobs in what is being called the great resignation. And yeah, some of them are gone from the corporate world forever, off to start their bespoke woodworking shop on Etsy. But many of them are just looking for the next opportunity. These people are looking for a more human experience at work. And the companies that are winning are the companies that are creating landing pads for these employees. The companies that prioritize the physical, emotional, community, financial, and environmental health of their teams. The organizations that constantly develop and evolve policies that put diversity, equity, inclusion, trust, and transparency at the corner of every business operation. The organizations that are concerned with developing their employees at every level. These are the organizations that understand what workplace wellness means. And these are the organizations that are going to get to choose the future of how we work. Now before we dive any deeper into that, I want to make a pit stop at a very important question, which is, what the heck is the role of an employer in the wellness of its employees in the first place? Now while I don't think there is one right answer to this question, I do believe that there are a few wrong answers. I do not believe that it is the role of an organization to make health decisions on behalf of its employees. I do not believe that it's the role of an organization to tell its employees how to think, what beliefs to have, and certainly not what emotions to feel. And I do not believe in a dystopian future where we give all of our health and engagement data to our employers so they can process and analyze it. I don't think any of those things would make the world a better place. But I do believe that the role of an employer in the wellness of its team can be best understood through a little journey back in language. So besides being the CEO of an organizational well-being company, I am an avid word nerd. I love words. I love the etymology of words, the origin of words, understanding where do they come from, what do they mean, how are they connected. So tonight I'd like to share with you the origin of two different words, company and organization. Company comes from the Latin words com meaning together and panis meaning bread. It literally means bread fellows, mess mates, the people that we sit down and share a meal with and maybe even rely on for those basic needs. The word organization comes from the word organ, literally organ, a living system inside of a body that requires and relies on other living systems for life. Companies and organizations in our society play a crucial role in our communities. They are communities that we contribute to and receive benefit from, especially in America where our employers don't just pay us, they give us access to important benefits like healthcare, paternal and maternal leave, education. Organizations in our society have the power and the responsibility to improve the quality of life for the communities that they serve, both externally and internally. So when I tell you that wellness sucks, what I mean is asking Brenda from accounting who hasn't eaten a carrot in 30 years to go on the keto diet, that sucks. We need a new definition of wellness, organizational wellbeing, an approach to prioritizing the health and wellbeing of the individuals, the humans within our organization at every level of systems, of policies, of leadership, of how we interact on a daily basis. That is what the future of workplace wellness is all about. So when we think about workplace wellness, we're asking ourselves, how do I get there? How do I get to this new future that isn't only a better future for the individual, but produces better outcomes for the organization? Organizations that approach wellbeing in this way are consistently rated the best places to work, and research shows that those best places to work outperform the competition by some research up to 115%. So how do we do it? How do we become this organization that people are running to and not from? Well again, I have to say there's no one right answer, but that is actually the first secret. We are trained to value repetitive scalability, especially in business. We want a system that we can instate and implement across the entire organization, and that makes so much sense for your IT department. But when it comes to humans, it short circuits the system. Think about any amazing friendship you've ever had. Think about it. I want you to think about the inside jokes that you've had with that person, the nicknames, the memories, the activities you do with them. Now imagine if that friend used the exact same formula for every friendship that they had. The same nicknames, the same inside jokes, the same activities, the same allotted time for emotional support over the phone, and the same amount of hugs for every friend. That would be a really weird friendship. In fact, I would say that that probably would not be a friendship at all. When it comes to human-centered work, this is not a problem to solve. It's not a product to buy. It's not a single policy to implement. It's an approach to everything we do, how we design the foundation of our businesses and the way that we work each day. This is the future of workplace wellness. And so with under 20 minutes, unfortunately I can't go around the room and design a custom plan for each of you. You'll have to find me after for that. But what we can do is discuss three crucial shifts that we can make internally as humans to help ourselves and our communities, our organizations, step into the future of work. Now each of these may require you to question some assumptions, so I just want you to be primed to think a little bit differently. The first shift that we can make is to learn to uncover the hidden value of human-centered work. Now while I will be the first to say a big mistake I see employers make when they come to improve their workplace culture is to take a cost-first approach. There is a lot of value in understanding how to uncover and how to talk about the financial gains of working in a more human-centered way because it truly exists. I'm going to give you an example that to some of you at first glance might feel a little spooky, which is unlimited vacation. Two-thirds of job seekers report that they would prefer unlimited vacation over a higher paying job. Now as a business leader we need to learn to look at that and say, okay, I can get a high talent professional at a discount if I give them unlimited vacation. But no, oh wait, no, that's going to cost so much money, they're never going to be at their desk, they're just going to be on the beach drinking margaritas all the time, it's never going to work. The research also suggests that by implementing an unlimited vacation policy the amount of time that people tend to take doesn't necessarily materially increase and in fact it's very important when we implement an unlimited vacation policy that we set clear guidelines around how to use that time to make sure that people actually feel psychologically safe to take it. But a great thing happens financially when we do instate unlimited vacation. We remove a liability from the employer. Every year American workers leave over $200 million of unpaid vacation on the table. They don't take it. And this is a liability for the employer because for most employers when that employee leaves their job you have to pay that money out. And research suggests that by implementing a policy like unlimited vacation we can actually save up to $2,000 per employee over the lifetime of that employee at an organization. But that's not even where the benefit stops, that beginning of the math problem. If you learn to dive deeper, to uncover the hidden value, you can look at research like the fact that only 1 to 2% of employers are currently offering a benefit like unlimited vacation. That is a huge competitive advantage in what is currently a hugely competitive job market. And more foundationally than that, when you provide your team with a policy like unlimited vacation you are signaling to them that they are adults who you believe should have the time, the agency over their time. So learn to talk about, to uncover, and to implement the value of human-centered work within your team. The second shift at the expense of sounding completely overly simple is learn to treat people like people. Now what I mean by this is it's so common for leaders to refer to their employees and their leadership team as titles, not as humans. Especially in HR we love to group people in buckets based on job type, geography, even age, gender identity, and race. Just to understand the demographics of our team. And that can be helpful, but when we make decisions about what people need based on their titles or just simply a demographic label, we're not making decisions with them as humans. It's very easy for leaders to separate themselves, not because they're bad leaders, not because they're cold or they lack emotional intelligence, but simply because when we don't share experiences with our fellows that we sit at the table with, our brains don't have enough information to empathize. We can't empathize. So I ask the leaders out there, when's the last time you sat down with your employees and uncovered what are their daily challenges, what are their questions, what are their successes, what are their needs? And maybe even ask yourself if you were one of the 56% of employees currently looking for new work, would you want to work at your organization? Learn to uncover the hidden value of human-centered work. Treat people like people. And finally, of course I've saved the most cerebral for last, just consider what it means to be a leader in the first place. The word leader means to go first. And the leaders of the organizations that are attracting human-centered workers, those are the leaders that understand the importance of being the first to pay your employees a livable wage. To be the first to commit to values like net zero carbon emissions. But also to be the first to ask your employees how they're doing after you come into a team meeting. Or to admit that you've made a mistake if you were wrong. This type of vulnerable leadership attracts loyal and transparent team collaboration. It inspires creativity and it inspires better work. The world of work is changing, whether you're looking at it or not, and we need a new definition of well-being to match that world. For my organization, On the Goga, that works with teams across the world to step into this new world of well-being, we don't even use the word corporate wellness anymore. And that's because you're never going to find us peddling a weight loss challenge or preaching the far-reaching impacts of ping pong tables. We work with organizations to better understand their corporate ethos. To build connections between team members and to improve the human experience at work. And yeah, it's good for business. But more than that, it creates a future for our world that is more ethical and more sustainable. So I ask you, if you're sitting down to create a workplace wellness program for your team, would you rather have all the biometric data of every single employee or create a future that's worth going to work for? Thank you. Thank you.