Interview with Amy Mosher, Chief People Officer, isolved

"There's An Awareness Of Employee Experience This Year That Wasn’t There Before"

 
 

With more than 20 years of global human resources experience, isolved Chief People Officer Amy Mosher has contributed to the success of multiple public and private companies across various industries, including software, biotechnology and hardware. For the last decade she has served as the Head of Human Resources with Accel-KKR SaaS software portfolio companies, including HighWire Press, Inc., KANA Software, Inc. and, now, isolved – enhancing cultures and building positive employee experiences at each. Visit www.isolvedhcm.com Connect Amy Mosher Follow @iSolvedHCM

“It’s a trying time for everyone and being able to log into a system to record life events, reduce deductions, request PTO and more – without having to ask someone in HR or payroll 1:1 – is key since employees are reacting to their needs,” says Amy Mosher, Chief People Officer, isolved. 

In an interview with HR.com, Amy talks about the importance of empathizing with individual circumstances and evangelizing the need for flexibility to meet an individual’s unique needs, and much more.

Excerpts from the interview

Q: With remote work being the current trend, what new benefits are your organization offering to ensure the well-being and safety of your employees?

Amy: When people are disconnected – whether it’s because of remote work, a distributed workforce or, now, the global health crisis – it’s critical to be more connected in the form of communicating early and often with employees. While implementing wellness activities such as yoga are amazing benefits to offer, we believe HR professionals need to start at the ground floor of considering how employees want to interact with their employers on a daily basis. At isolved, we have increased our internal communication efforts 10-fold to ensure that employees know that we empathize with their individual circumstances and evangelize the need for flexibility to meet their unique needs. 
 

As an HCM provider that helps companies employ, enable and empower their workforce, we also practice what we preach by using our own products to ensure employees are connected with each other via an internal social network and are connected to the self-service and self-learning options that isolved makes available. It’s a trying time for everyone and being able to log into a system to record life events, reduce deductions, request PTO and more – without having to ask someone in HR or payroll 1:1 – is key since employees are reacting to their needs. Employee experience is multi-faceted but getting the basics right digitally – to ensure employees have what they need to access existing and new basics – is key to reducing stress by being able to self-serve.  

Q: How are you helping your employees through the open enrollment season?

Amy: Employees’ expectations for how they can enroll in benefits is being set by the consumer experiences they have when they’re online shopping on their favorite retail site or scrolling through a social media app. isolved helps our employees through the open enrollment season by offering self-guided learning and group and 1:1 learnings. What makes isolved stand out, however, is the self-service aspect of signing up for new services with an intuitive, consumer-grade platform. While we can’t say people really “enjoy” using isolved to manage open-enrollment season, we can say that the technology helps them rather than gets in their way of managing this critical step in their employee and wellness journey.  We are also helping our customers through this process with our self-serve technology and our services. A non-profit customer told us they thought changing open-enrollment providers would take them six months, instead it took them one month with isolved and they were able to pass on nearly a $90 per month savings to their employees while keeping their deductibles the same. 

Q: Do you have resources in place to support employee mental health during and after the crisis?

Amy: Yes. We have a 100% employer premium paid employee assistance program which offers in-person and phone counseling and access to other resources. This service is confidential and at no cost to employees. We’ve also implemented regular remote wellness activities including virtual meditation, yoga, dance classes, virtual game nights, etc. 

Q: Is your organization offering telemedicine as a benefit? If yes, can you share the experience?

Amy: Yes, we have 24-hour nurse access via phone built into our medical plans. 

Q: Have you recently or do you plan to change your PTO policies?

Amy: The biggest change recently is encouraging the use of PTO. With isolved, employees are able to view their time-off balances, project current balances and more but what are finding is that most employees are taking off less time this holiday season and it’s happening all across the country. Our recent survey of external full-time employees found that 38 percent are taking less PTO than last year. While a lot of that has to do with people not travelling – 81 percent of survey respondents said they are not going out of state of the holidays – management needs to encourage employees to take the time off to recharge after a trying year. 

We also implemented an expanded sick policy to allow anyone to take an additional 10 days of sick leave for any reason in addition to their PTO to eliminate concerns regarding income, if they were out ill for an extended period. 

Q: What new trends do you expect to emerge in the employee benefits arena?

Amy: There is an awareness of employee experience this year that just wasn’t there before. The same isolved survey found that 56 percent of full-time employees indicate that employee experience will be more important to them in 2021 than it was this year. The future of work is here, and employees need leaders to make the right decisions about collaborative and self-serve tools to amplify their experience – empowering them to engage regardless of the circumstances.
 

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