Caring for Employees Total Well-Being

Like many organizations, @Synchrony has had to quickly and decisively focus on doing what’s right to support our partners, our customers, and most importantly our employees. Recently, @Margaret Keane shared some of her leadership lessons detailing how our commitment to communicating openly, empowering our employees to lead during this time, acting decisively with an agile mindset and focusing on our future have been crucial to our success in navigating uncertainty. As an HR Leader, it has been important for me and my team to prioritize the health of our employees, as well as our own, and guiding our people leaders to do the same.

As we enter Mental Health Awareness Month, I am challenging our organization to think about this from a broader lens: Our Employees’ Total Well-Being. It falls naturally under our current benefit programming—Synchrony 360, where we regularly provide resources that assist employees career, financial, mental health, physical health and work-life well-being. In this virtual environment, we’re working together as one team and launching necessary, ongoing internal conversations not just about mental health or pandemic response; but how we will collectively work together moving forward to bring our best selves to our families and to work each day.

Here’s how we’re doing this:

• Our Benefits: In partnership with our various benefits providers, we are continuing to evolve and think through the benefits our employees will need to support their individual life situations during this time and in the future. Some of these include expanded back up care, mental health programs, financial planning seminars, and additional flexibility and reimbursement to support our contact center employees’ shift to working at home.
• Education & Awareness: We are hosting enterprise-wide programming that will guide our employees on how they best leverage our Employee Assistance Program, Synchrony Assist, in addition to sharing stories of how our employees have benefited from this program and other resources.
• Virtual Leadership Training: We are equipping our managers to operate and lead teams in our new environment, including specialized training our Executive & Senior Leadership Teams, and providing guides and resources directly to all of our leaders of people on an ongoing basis.  
• Employee-Driven Events: We are engaging our key employee groups beyond HR, including Diversity Networks, to lead and join the conversation around ensuring our employee’s total well-being. Together, we have planned a dynamic set of events to engage employees around the wide range of experiences they are living in right now.
• Pulse Survey: We are launching an internal pulse survey to gather quick feedback from our employees about our approach over the past couple of months, providing us with understanding of where we can strengthen our efforts to support them both at work and at home. 

This is a very unique time for us to show up for the people we support within our organizations and focus on doing the right thing. If I think about my key leadership lessons during this time, it’s listening to our employees, leveraging our partners to increase and quicken our ability to deliver, and communicating often and in different ways so that our employees have what they need when, or even before, they need it.