Working Well: Laura Gross Of Cultural Vistas On How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness
An Interview with Karen Mangia
Embracing the power of social connection .
Social connectedness is an essential component of mental health and wellness. It’s essential. We saw just how important it can be over the past two-plus years.
The pandemic pause brought us to a moment of collective reckoning about what it means to live well and to work well. As a result, employees are sending employers an urgent signal that they are no longer willing to choose one — life or work — at the cost of the other. Working from home brought life literally into our work. And as the world now goes hybrid, employees are drawing firmer boundaries about how much of their work comes into their life. Where does this leave employers? And which perspectives and programs contribute most to progress? In our newest interview series, Working Well: How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness, we are talking to successful executives, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, and thought leaders across all industries to share ideas about how to shift company cultures in light of this new expectation. We’re discovering strategies and steps employers and employees can take together to live well and to work well.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Laura Gross, the Director of Administration, People & Culture at Cultural Vistas, a international nonprofit that leverages the power of global education and intercultural exchange to address the world’s most pressing challenges. Over the past two-plus years, Laura has deftly helped manage a workforce that has undergone several significant transitions. Amid the uncertainty, she has made nurturing the organization’s internal community and prioritizing well-being and authentic connection among their teams around the world a priority. Her outstanding work was recognized in November 2021 as Cultural Vistas was cited by Kudos among the 26 organizations around the world Kudos’ Annual Best Culture Awards. Laura is a SHRM Certified Professional (SHRM-CP) and a Qualified Facilitator of the Global Competence Certificate. She also has her Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace Certificate. Laura received her Masters from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her Bachelor of Arts from The College of Wooster.
Thank you for making time to visit with us about the topic of our time. Our readers would like to get to know you better. Tell us about a formative experience that prompted you to change your relationship with work and how work shows up in your life.
I have always worked in small nonprofits, so it has always been normal for my professional network and my social community to be interconnected. This is both beautiful and challenging, of course. It’s beautiful because spending time on pursuits that benefit my profession doesn’t feel like work when they also provide me with the opportunity to serve my community and spend time with people I care about and help them to succeed. It’s challenging though because it can be hard to get distance, have healthy boundaries, and it sometimes requires making difficult decisions.
Harvard Business Review predicts that wellness will become the newest metric employers will use to analyze and to assess their employees’ mental, physical and financial health. How does your organization define wellness, and how does your organization measure wellness?
To me, “wellness” is a holistic combination of physical health, mental health, work/life balance, engagement at work and in your personal/social life, and your overall quality of life which also has an element of financial wellness or stability. At work, these can be measured by monitoring the number of promotions, sick days used, the number of employees who take advantage of benefits like EAPs for mental health or reimbursements for gym memberships, yoga classes, step trackers, bike repairs, or other outlets for exercise. Some places might also count the number of employees having children, buying homes, or pursuing degrees.
We also implement annual pulse surveys to measure employees’ level of engagement, feelings about inclusion and recognition in their workplace, strategic goal alignment, and preferences about benefits offerings, all of which are often followed up by focus group conversations, so we get a good balance of qualitative and quantitative data.
Based on your experience or research, how do you correlate and quantify the impact of a well workforce on your organization’s productivity and profitability?
There is a ton of research about how wellness and productivity/profitability are undeniably correlated. Organizations struggling with limited capacity and employee burnout often also have to navigate the expenses and business disruptions associated with frequent turnover. Recruiting to backfill positions and onboard new team members takes staff time away from doing their jobs and in turn limits productivity. On the flip side, organizations with more high performing teams are also more likely to have employees who feel fulfilled, seen, heard, supported, and have healthy work/life balance.
Even though most leaders have good intentions when it comes to employee wellness, programs that require funding are beholden to business cases like any other initiative. The World Health Organization estimates for every $1 invested into treatment for common mental health disorders, there is a return of $4 in improved health and productivity. That sounds like a great ROI. And, yet many employers struggle to fund wellness programs that seem to come “at the cost of the business.” What advice do you have to offer to other organizations and leaders who feel stuck between intention and impact?
An organization’s business relies on its people so if the people are not at their best, the business won’t be either. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to check on how your people are doing, what they need, listen to their experiences and their thoughts/suggestions about how to improve their experience as an employee. Even if you are not able to implement every suggestion, just asking for feedback and input is a good start. As we know from our work in DEI, the impact is really what matters. Good intentions will ring hollow if the impact misses the mark.
Speaking of money matters, a recent Gallup study reveals employees of all generations rank wellbeing as one of their top three employer search criteria. How are you incorporating wellness programs into your talent recruitment and hiring processes?
Among the benefits we offer, we have a 35-hour workweek and a flexible work schedule that allows people to either work five short days or four 8.5-hour days and one half day. This is great for employees who want to pick up their kids from school every day or have recurring appointments during the work week. We also offer an annual wellness reimbursement for physical wellness (gym memberships, yoga classes, step trackers, bike repairs, or other outlets for exercise), as well as communication reimbursements to offset the cost of home internet during remote work, and a home office allowance to purchase desks, chairs, monitors, or anything else that makes their home office environment more productive and ergonomic.
We’ve all heard of the four-day work week, unlimited PTO, mental health days, and on demand mental health services. What innovative new programs and pilots are you launching to address employee wellness? And, what are you discovering? We would benefit from an example in each of these areas.
- Mental Wellness: We held a staff-run brown bag session at the end of last year on mental health that featured a number of resources for employee mental health as well as caring for the mental health of our program participants. Boundary-setting techniques were an important feature in the session, providing employees with a resource about determining and measuring personal values as it relates to time and boundaries.
- Emotional Wellness: Coaching has been a valuable resource to me personally and is cited more and more as a best practice for providing support in the workplace to supervisors and employees alike. Coaching allows for a customized approach to healing, skill-building, and self-awareness, while meeting people where they’re at. We should be able to bring our whole selves to work and there may be experiences in our past that show up in how we work with others, so having someone to talk to who is an advocate for your growth can be a transformational gamechanger. While we don’t yet offer in-house coaching in a systematic way, it is a benefit that I hope to include in the near future and a skillset that I hope to further cultivate in our leaders.
- Social Wellness: We have had a social committee for many years now that has morphed into a Culture Committee. This group is responsible for helping to plan events for colleagues to get to know each other outside of work, both in person and remotely. They are a cross-functional group that organizes opportunities to connect about what’s happening in the world at large, celebrate life milestones and seasonal festivities together, and activities that promote finding our commonalities and sharing resources. To learn more about this group at the height of COVID, click here.
- Physical Wellness: In addition to an annual reimbursement program for expenses related to gym memberships, yoga classes, step trackers, bike repairs, or other outlets for exercise, we also ensure that standing desks are available to those who want them since much of our work is administrative in nature and involves long hours in front of the computer.
- Financial Wellness: Annual meetings with an investment representative from our 403(b) provider for individual employees to plan for retirement and discuss their own financial planning.
Can you please tell us more about a couple of specific ways workplaces would benefit from investing in your ideas above to improve employee wellness?
When you invest in your people’s wellness and develop in a meaningful way, everybody wins. Healthy employees who feel properly supported are happier and more productive, and ultimately, cost you less while delivering more. Healthy and happy employees show up for you and your customers in more compelling ways.
In the long run, you will find that your people are your most important asset and competitive advantage.
How are you reskilling leaders in your organization to support a “Work Well” culture?
As a mission-driven organization, we always seek to live by our core values. Our values are the principles that guide everything we do, from our strategic decisions down to our individual actions every single day.
We have a culture of openness and I believe we communicate well as an organization even amid today’s remote environment. We support a “Work Well” culture by proactively seeking opportunities to collect and share employee feedback, priorities, and perspectives with organizational leaders, including our CEO.
Ideas take time to implement. What is one small step every individual, team or organization can take to get started on these ideas — to get well?
On an individual level, start with working on intentionally developing your self-awareness — Ask people you trust for more regular honest feedback. Journal about particularly exciting or challenging moments to work through the roots of your reactions. Identify your personal mission/values that drive you at work and at home.
As a team, this could mean utilizing tools like personal user manuals, personality assessments, or other resources that get the conversation started about how your individual tendencies or preferences can inform how your group works together. Find a system or routine that builds in regular check-ins about process, reflection on your interpersonal engagement, and discussions about development goals and performance. Make time to take a step back and assess as a group.
As an organization, it’s really up to leaders to foster a culture of wellness and demonstrate a commitment to taking care of people and prioritizing others’ well-being. Creating and enforcing policies are part of that, but leading by example and living out organizational values in practice will bring it to life in an authentic way.
What are your “Top 5 Trends To Track In the Future of Workplace Wellness?”
- Self-care is No Longer Just a Nice-to-Have, It’s a Necessity.
Mental health is health, but not everybody understands that. The pandemic has irrevocably changed the way we work and live. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by a massive 25% in the first year of the pandemic alone. I believe more companies will seek to build in activities and offerings that promote and support the well-being of their employees.
In fact, according to recent research from Wellable, 9 of 10 businesses intend to increase their investment in this area to be better prepared to address this aspect of employee well-being. Increasingly, I think we’ll see that those that ignore this trend will be left behind.
2. Embracing Workplace Flexibility .
Flexible work arrangements and policies allow employees to exhibit more control over their lives, and more autonomy and freedom in how they structure their days. It is, thus, no surprise that flexible work models are overwhelmingly popular with employees. Obviously the equation is a bit more complicated for employers, but I think many of the new changes are likely here to stay.
3. Increased Investment in Coaching & Leadership Development.
We can’t do it alone. As I mentioned earlier, I have personally reaped the benefits of 1:1 personalized coaching. I truly believe that this kind of offering can be a game-changer for organizations looking to improve talent retention and employee engagement, attract high performers, and grow their leadership bench.
4. Measuring Workplace Equity & Fairness.
Creating equitable and inclusive environments requires intentionality, consistency and honesty from the top-down to the bottom-up. It is vitally important for organizations to strive to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and I have been heartened by this development in recent years.
I believe; however, we will now see a shift and increased focus on outcomes, using data to assess, track, and improve the decision-making around these efforts.
5. Embracing the power of social connection .
Social connectedness is an essential component of mental health and wellness. It’s essential. We saw just how important it can be over the past two-plus years.
While we move ahead with our new work environment — with hybrid and remote work arrangements and geographically-distributed teams — it will be important for employers to continue to play a role here.
What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of workplace wellness?
I am pleased to see that people-centric management is a growing trend. The more that leaders can be curious about learning who their employees are as whole human beings and view their diverse lived experiences as a value-add to the workplace, the more we can support feelings of inclusion and belonging at work, which will lead to more authentic and productive organizational cultures overall.
I’m also optimistic about seeing the awareness and passion coming from younger generations who are coming into the workforce and holding employers and systems accountable for being better and making important long-needed improvements.
Our readers often like to continue the conversation with our featured interviewees. How can they best connect with you and stay current on what you’re discovering?
The easiest way to connect with me and follow my work online is to visit CulturalVistas.org. Personally, I am most accessible via LinkedIn. I’d also be remiss not to give a shout-out my choral music community that includes The Washington Chorus, where I sing soprano and serve on the chorus council as well as the Children’s Chorus of Washington, where I serve on the Board of Directors.
Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and wellness.
About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success A Success From Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
