CHROs Reveal Top Approaches To Boosting Employee Resilience And Wellness

Strengthen morale and productivity in the workplace

We've gathered valuable insights from six Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) to foster resilience and enhance employee well-being. They share their experiences, from empowering change to offering comprehensive health and wellness programs, which have significantly increased employee morale and productivity.
 

• Empower Change, Not Just Resilience
• Invest in Employee Safety for Well-Being
• Integrate Sports Psychology for High Performance
• Train Employees in Mental Health First Aid
• Build Team Resilience Through Optimism and Care
• Offer a Comprehensive Health and Wellness Program

Empower Change, Not Just Resilience

Promoting employee well-being and a healthy work environment is a top priority in our organization. While resilience is often highlighted as a key attribute, I resonate more with Glennon Doyle's perspective on the glorification of resilience. Doyle suggests that the emphasis on resilience can sometimes be a way for those in power to encourage persistence in unfavorable conditions, turning it into a badge of honor. Instead, she advocates for recognizing and celebrating the courage to identify what's not working and to walk away from it, prioritizing mental health, joy, and freedom.

With this in mind, our approach to well-being and morale focuses on creating an environment where employees feel empowered to speak up and make changes when something isn't working. One of the initiatives we've implemented is the practice of conducting stay interviews. These interviews are designed to provide managers with insights into the factors that motivate employees to remain with our organization and potential reasons they might consider leaving.

We hope that these stay interviews ignite honest conversations, allowing employees to identify what is working and what is not in a psychologically safe environment. By prioritizing open communication and active participation in shaping our work culture, we create a space where team members can feel comfortable expressing their needs and concerns.
 

Rachael Peters, CHRO, Evergreen Life Services

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Invest in Employee Safety for Well-Being 

I have a firm belief that a direct investment in employee safety creates the foundation for well-being and morale. It begins with an absolute commitment to physical safety. Physical safety is a foundation to prevent human harm, is a legal requirement, and creates strong employee engagement. Once people feel physically safe, there is a natural progression to psychological safety. A good safety process inherently creates strong engagement, feedback mechanisms, and actionable ideas. At the highest level, employee well-being comes from actively listening to and acting on employee needs.
 

Mark French, CHRO, Dalkia Solutions

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Integrate Sports Psychology for High Performance

We recently launched a few innovative programs on High Performance, where we integrated the sports psychology of high-performance athletes with executive coaching principles for a powerful model of building resilience and unlocking potential. This program incorporated models of mental strength, including resilience, and various reset-ritual practices with a strong focus on coaching. We are excited to see that the program has increased our team members' engagement, productivity, and overall wellness.
 

MaryAnn Kempe, CHRO, Birchwood

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Train Employees in Mental Health First Aid

Managers and HR are not mental health professionals, so when discussing well-being in the workplace, it's important to recognize boundaries and support well-being as appropriate. Offering Mental Health First Aid training to every employee is an excellent way to create a shared language about well-being, talk about the benefits and resources you offer, and better understand boundaries. All of which makes for a better employee experience.

When it comes to resilience, on any given day, employees use their resilience to deal with ageism, sexism, racism, ableism, anti-fatness, anti-blackness, and so on, some of which may occur within the workplace. So, it can feel disingenuous to ask employees to be more resilient, without recognizing and addressing their experiences. Instead of asking employees to be more resilient, we should ask how to better create psychologically safe workspaces.
 

Stacey Nordwall, VP of People Strategy, Pyn

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Build Team Resilience Through Optimism and Care

We are so busy in HR taking care of others that we sometimes neglect ourselves and forget the key building blocks of resiliency, including the importance of optimism and self-care. One thing I have done with my HR team is to make it a priority to at least once a year get them all together for a time of development and team-building, where we provide tools that build positivity and teamwork, create a safe environment for relationship-building, and allow them to bond over a shared goal and objective and team self-care. To me, resilience is built as a team, and it is all about teamsmanship!
 

Donovan Mattole, CHRO, Langan Engineering

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Offer a Comprehensive Health and Wellness Program

We promote wellness and resilience among our employees through an Employee Health and Wellness Empowerment and Voluntary Benefit Reserve Program—a predictive and preventative health and wellness program that provides on-demand healthcare and helps with out-of-pocket expenses.

This program is paired with a complete virtual solution: a telemedicine health and emergency app that employees, and their dependents, can use anywhere in the United States, 24/7.

The app ensures peace of mind by providing support for those important aspects of life outside of work, including health tracking, care coordination, mental health support, and concierge-style support for insurance, billing, and prescription assistance.

Personally, the program has saved my family over $500 in urgent care, prescription, and healthcare expenses in the past month, not to mention the time saved.

When we can find innovative ways to help our employees with predictive and preventative wellness, it is not just a benefit but a lifestyle enhancement.

Review your people data and HR analytics to see if this program would work for your employee population. If you find escalating costs due to medical claims, emergency room visits, and absenteeism, then the program is worth researching.
 

Coreyne Woodman-Holoubek, Former CHRO / Founder, Progressive HR

Brett Farmiloe is the CHRO & CEO of Featured.