Wellist’s Post

Transcript

Well, hi, everyone. Laura Bowser here with Fahrenheit Advisors Human Capital Consulting Practice. And today I'm super excited to welcome Ashley Reed. Ashley is the founder and CEO of Willis, a company that recently won Fast Company's most innovative award. And Wallace has really changed the game when it comes to improving employee well-being and making the most of employee contributions. So I know what Fahrenheit our clients are often looking to find new ways to keep employees and to create strong cultures. So I'm super excited to chat with Ashley today and learn more about Willis Mission. So Ashley, congratulations First off for the award. From your perspective how can companies. Their line? They're benefits and the actual needs of their workforce to retain talent. Yeah, so I'm actually relatively new to HR. I've actually built my background first in marketing and advertising and then bake management consulting. And I started well list when my best friend's father died of cancer and she went into preterm labor within 24 hours of her dad dying. And it was pretty. As you might imagine, and so the original business for Wellness served hospitals, originally cancer centers to connect patients to the right resource at the right time. And what we saw was there were a bunch of things that provided by the health system as well as in the community that could help people in times of need, but they were just difficult to access. Not everyone knew, for example, if you're 36 in a breast cancer that you should be connected to a fertility resource. In your care or that there is a young adults rest Cancer Support group, or so on and so forth all the way down to if you need groceries delivered, you can't just call Instacart and have them drop bags on your front door. If you just had a double mastectomy, you need someone to come in and unpack them for you and. During the pandemic, as you might imagine something hospitals are business meaningfully disrupted. But their care team said we need this, We need backup childcare, we need emotional support, we need drugs delivered to our parents. And what we discovered was that employers had invested a ton of money and a ton of time pulling together benefits portfolios to support employees. The problem is most of those resources are buried. So they're. 300 resources, for example, in the AP, but most people only think about the AP, is like 6 hours of divorce counseling. And so when we have intranet pages that organize access for employees by vendor. So here's the EAP, here's the health plan. Here is the mental health resource. It's really difficult for employees to really understand all of the resources that are available to them without doing a pretty significant amount of heavy lifting to go dig for what they know they need. And so the first and foremost is to organize information around the end user. If someone's pregnant, being able to walk them to the breast pump buried in the AP or the financial assistance program for families, or how to take off weight, which is a partner of, for example, their health plan is really meaningful because employees don't have enough time in the day to get their work done. They certainly don't have enough time to spend going for mining all of this. Different for me. And the reason why this is important to employers is today frequently as you know, benefits are like a top five or top ten expense for these companies, but three out of four employees are not using these resources and they are not valuing the investments. And so not only does that mean that there's a ton of waste financially, but it also means that employees are not getting these very real human needs met. Yeah, and oftentimes you know it. On the the role of HR as well and they don't always know what they have access to or how to help these employees. You know, Speaking of that, what do you think the role of leadership really is when it comes to dismantling stigmas around well-being so that they can support their their workforce? I think it's just a business choice, right. And and today most of our businesses like humans are, are, are products, they are the success of our ongoing operations. And so to assume that what happens outside of the direct responsibilities doesn't impact your bottom line is just kind of like putting your head in the sand. When we supported nurses, what we learned was, OK, let's look and see what do employees actually come and use when we connect. Into the full breadth of support, what we saw was actually only three of the top 10 categories of resources, things like fitness and childcare. We're in the benefits portfolio. The things that we're most commonly used were things like grocery delivery, home cleaning errands and tasks, pet care. Think about hospitals, They're overwhelmingly staffed by women. 25% of nurses are leaving because they cannot manage their work and their life. And so the ability to help them with those types of supports, not only one helps them stay in their jobs, but now we no longer have to wait for a nurse to be in a mental health crisis. We can walk her to the EAP when she's overwhelmed with grocery delivery and home cleaning. So to really think more strategically about your people as a core business asset to be able to then look at the full breadth of things that limit sort of their full potential. Input programs in place that address those needs means that not only is that good leadership and I would say good ethics, but it's also good for your bottom line. And so I think smart leaders understand both of those. Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. During the pandemic, we saw such a exodus of women in the workforce just because of a lot. Well, daycare has began to shut down. But, you know, that trend hasn't really ticked back up. And I know you all are working to really, you know. Use and leverage data to drive decision making with employers. Can you speak a little bit to, you know how employers are reacting when you show them the data, Are they trying to build it into their total rewards packages and and how can they reach out to you to learn more about what you're doing? As we've talked about, well, List has a precision resource matching platform that no one else has and we have it because we spent a decade building it. As an extension of patient care serving hospitals, the benefit of that means that employees can get connected to the right resource at the right time. But it generates a bunch of data on what do employees really want and need, where can you connect them to community resources that they might prefer so you don't actually have to pay for a benefit. Childcare is a great example. We had a client that we could look at the data and say, oh, you have two childcare benefits and you think. This is giving a voice choice, but in fact it's only meeting the needs of 45% of your employees, and it's the exact same 45%. When given choice. 55% of your employees prefer something they have to pay for. That's in the community. And as it turns out, people strongly prefer the first resource to the second resource. So it is literally redundant. You don't have to be for that. Like even simple things like we called on a major, major food company and while they were telling me their portfolio, I said why are you paying for the call map? You already get it for free buried both in your health plan and to this other partner. And so if the HR team doesn't have any way to keep up with all of this, so our employees going to right? And so by giving them this level of intelligence, they can not only better understand how to manage. Neighbors workforces how to address the full breadth of human needs to get their employees to to full potential. But they get also, candidly, just figure out how to eliminate waste, stop spending money on things that aren't driving value or where there is duplication or where employees might prefer something else. And so the real hard RI dollars in improving the fiscal control of these benefits investments is where there's. A real win for employers and so I'm easy to access if anyone cares about this problem. My e-mail address is Ashley Ashley at Willis, WELL ist.com and we are really excited to partner with people who care equally about doing right by their employees and doing right for their bottom line. And so organizations that have more than 2500 employees that are really thinking. Strategically about this challenge as a way to build competitive advantage, we're excited to connect. Absolutely. I thank you for, you know, joining. And I just want to say you know, right now I can't speak more strongly to the fact that we're seeing, you know, compensation total rewards as being one of the biggest, hottest topics. And we've got states where they're changing the laws around transparency and you know, people are constantly reaching out going how do I retain talent. I don't want to lose folks and they're not always thinking about the fact that people are actually just exiting the work workplace and and and not returning. So they're not just job hopping. Anymore. So if you want to learn more about how you can retain your your talent and really solve the problem, the bigger problem at hand when it comes to the complexities of balancing work and life and home, reach out to Ashley at Willis.