Masawa Minute 40
Should we work four days a week? | Lyra Health hits $4.6 billion | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets on what we’re pondering + where you can get active.
It’s already July — where did the time go? We hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter), we know we are. In the last two weeks, however, we couldn’t get work out of our minds and have been reading a lot of content related to the topic. That’s why this newsletter is about improving our workplaces, work lives and transforming the way we work to allow us to put wellbeing first.
Masawa Thoughts
Work! What is work? Now that more people can live in their pajamas and still earn a living — either working from home or in athleisure — what will work be? We don’t know, and, honestly, it’s not in our wheelhouse to pontificate authoritatively. However, what we do care about is people’s wellbeing while working in the future (and now, too, please).
We get to dive into tons of new-ish products geared towards workplace wellness. Honestly, most are band-aids disguised as benefits that don’t work, or are without a vision, to also address the systemic issues of mental ill-health in and out of the workplace.
So we pose the question to you: What aspects of a ‘workplace’ would you want to see or already experience that foster more mental wellness?
Get Active!
📞 Listen
Masawa’s Founder and Managing Partner Joshua Haynes recently appeared on the Founding Impact podcast hosted by Kasia Zalewska and Maciej Gałkiewicz from Ragnarson.
If you want to be in on the latest trends in the social impact ecosystem, discover the secret to reducing startup failure rates and learn about what we’re up to at Masawa, this episode is for you. Give it a listen!
🎠 Attend
Investing in Diversity is the next event in Future Forward, UK Business Angels Association (UKBAA) investment series. It focuses on exploring the opportunities that come from investing in founders from historically underrepresented groups, actions that can be taken to improve diversity across the ecosystem and more.
The event taking place on July 13th will consist of multiple keynote speeches delivered by a diverse set of experts from a wide range of companies, a fireside chat as well as pitching events. If you’d like to hear about how different ways improve diversity within companies as well as in different sectors and how it can benefit your work, sign up! We hope to see you there.
What we’re reading…
💼 Are we ready for a four-day work week?
With organizational health and employee wellbeing becoming an increasingly bigger part of the mainstream conversation, the idea of a four-day working week is often discussed as a desired yet distant possibility. However, some people have experiences that suggest it’s not only a very feasible way to work but also an inevitable future of employment we have to embrace. While the critics of the idea suggest it’s impossible to apply the four-day work week to the jobs outside of the nine-to-five pattern, real-life examples (in this case, the BBC Radio Manchester newsroom that has implemented the measure in the 70s) show that the idea is successful when the approach centers improving productivity and the autonomy of the workers rather than an all-around reduction in the hours worked.
Among the lessons we learned during the pandemic is that employee autonomy can no longer remain a perk for a privileged few — it is a necessity for all. The ability to take control over working hours is essential to improving equity in the workplace, for instance, by tackling the unequal gender distribution of time spent balancing work, care responsibilities and personal time. Globally, women still perform 75% of unpaid care work as well as more women than men have seen their workload increase in every aspect of the domestic life during the pandemic. One of the important advantages of the four-day work week is the opportunity for people to adjust the time spent caring for their families in a way that gives their partners more freedom or allows them more personal time.
The experience shows that a four-day week is possible without government interference. The four-day week at the BBC Radio Manchester newsroom was more of an unofficial experiment and only lasted two years until the change of management. Still, the fact that it could go unnoticed for so long is the true testament to how it positively affects productivity and the quality of work. The same has been proven by trials on multiple occasions in different companies around the world. Research has also demonstrated this arrangement to impact employees’ mental health positively, noting reduced stress, burnout, and, in turn, other mental health disorders. It’s a logical next step to take as we start recovering from the pandemic and shift towards workplaces that prioritize wellbeing.
The Four-day Week Is Unavoidable, It Is The Way We Have To Go
🥁 Facilitating social change in the workplace
Change in the workplace is happening — people are demanding equity, justice and autonomy, and organizations attempt to hold themselves accountable to their commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. Unfortunately, sometimes the efforts to challenge discrimination and injustice can come at a steep price. People who take it upon themselves to do so are often faced with hierarchy-related barriers, emotionally taxing and time-intensive labor, and sometimes even punishment or conflicts that can hinder their careers. While we all understand why a shift towards a more equitable workplace is essential and admire people who can be vocal about their demands, these barriers are existing and valid. To make it easier to get started with this effort and understand the strategic approaches organizational activists employ to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, we’re introduced to some of the most common approaches.
Method number one is advocacy. Advocates work as individuals or groups to directly confront and expose harmful and problematic practices, achieving their goals by being vocal and applying pressure. The second tactic is subversion. People who organize in this way work under the radar, quietly amplifying the tensions to disrupt the status quo. They might tackle challenges themselves or employ existing mechanisms and power dynamics to promote change. It is a useful approach in a high-risk environment as it might not draw the attention like advocating would. The third approach is facilitation. Facilitators work in a public way to de-escalate tensions and calm defensive responses. This approach is not particularly risky, but it requires a skill of mediation and an environment where people feel free to express themselves in the face of power differences. The last act is healing. Facing discrimination and injustice daily is traumatic, enraging, and extremely exhausting. Staying well and reducing stress is an act of resistance in and of itself.
While these are some of the common strategies people engage in to see their workplaces become more equitable and inclusive, managers need to do their part by encouraging and supporting people who advocate for positive change. The organizational activists should be welcomed, compensated and rewarded by creating structures that allow for difficult conversations, accepting feedback, and responding to criticisms. It’s particularly important for many activists who belong to traditionally underrepresented groups and must carry the burden of fighting for justice while simultaneously doing and keeping their jobs in workplaces where they face problematic practices. As we progress, these tools and strategies will only become more important — efforts of social change should not end at the office door, and organizational activists and leaders who support them are central to the transformation.
🤹♂️ Megasuccess: Lyra Health valued at $4.6 billion
A mental health startup providing care for employees Lyra Health is back with great news: its most recent funding round totaled $200 million, doubling the company’s valuation to reach $4.6 billion today. The round was led by Coatue Management, joined by a new investor Sands Capital. Next to the funding news, the company also announced an expanded global strategy. It builds on Lyra’s recently announced partnership with ICAS, a global employee assistance program provider, which allows the company to offer its services to people from more than 180 countries by working with more than 85,000 mental health providers.
Currently, Lyra Health offers evidence-based support for people across all aspects of mental health, ranging from wellness to preventative care for severe mental health conditions. The company’s signature approach is the blended care model, pairing video counseling sessions, one-to-one messaging, and digital activities prescribed by the provider to provide its users the support they need in their everyday lives. It also offers ongoing support between sessions. A peer-reviewed study found this approach to be highly effective — as much as 83% of the participants felt that Lyra’s blended care therapy helped them improve or recover from anxiety or depression. In 2022 Lyra plans to unveil a new digital unified platform that will grant the users access to all the services — preventive care, mental health coaching, therapy, medication — in one place.
According to David Ebersman, Lyra Health CEO and co-founder, the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its ambitions to deliver mental wellness solutions globally. At this point, it serves more than 2.2 million members worldwide, remotely and in person. This funding round is expected to be the biggest mental health tech deal of 2021, coming amidst a larger scale influx of capital into the booming sector. Other mental health companies like Ginger, Spring Health, Modern Health have all raised substantial funding in 2020 and the first quarter of 2021. It’s safe to expect this trend to continue, fueled by concerns for the Covid-19 aftermath and continuous innovation in mental health tech, and we couldn’t be more excited to see what comes next.
Mental health startup Lyra Health now worth $4.6B with latest megaround
🍻 The pandemic destroyed our networks — can we get them back?
Research shows that our professional and personal networks have shrunk by close to 16% during the pandemic. It has some serious implications in our lives — it can make finding a job an even bigger challenge, hinder career growth opportunities, decrease our sense of belonging and community, which, in turn, worsens our mental wellbeing. This is something we would have been unlikely to face under normal circumstances — our networks tend to churn rather than simply contract, lost connections being replaced by new relationships. However, it’s not what we’re experiencing now, and at the time where we struggle with loneliness and feeling disconnected, it’s more important than ever that we take control of rebuilding and maintaining our social circles.
Before the pandemic, it was observed that an average person interacted with between 11 and 16 people they didn’t know well on a daily basis. Those interactions with strangers and acquaintances made us happier and helped foster our sense of belonging. However, during the pandemic, we shifted our attention to the closest connections instead of giving up on the outer circle of acquaintances — a tendency called “turtling up.” Interestingly, women haven’t seen their networks decrease nearly as much as men — their networks hardly shrunk at all while men lost around 30% of their connections. It can be explained by the difference in networking styles, with women more inclined to maintain emotional closeness through talking and men more often choosing to sustain their connections by shared activities — a challenge during the last 18 months.
Without face-to-face communication, our emotional attachment to friends and family tends to decrease quickly. After five months of no in-person contact, feelings of closeness deteriorate by 80%. That’s why we must focus on reconnection in the remaining time of the pandemic and the transition period after. We might feel reluctant to reach out to other people due to the fear of feeling awkward, not knowing what to say, and uncertainty about whether the connection is still there. Yet, in reality, it’s much easier than this — many people lack social interaction, and even a simple greeting can be enough to revive a sense of belonging and get the conversation going. So if you’re reading this, reach out to someone you haven’t talked to in a while today. Maintaining the connections in the outer circle of our network is absolutely essential for innovation, creativity, problem-solving, personal and workplace wellness — your future self will thank you.
Research: We’re Losing Touch with Our Networks
🥦 How to stay sane when fundraising
We often talk about entrepreneurs’ wellbeing and how essential it is to prioritize mental health and openly share related experiences. According to Dr. Michael Freeman (we shared a podcast featuring him a couple of newsletters ago!), entrepreneurs bring in a lot of vulnerability into their jobs, which can be exacerbated when the risks they are required to take don’t work out — as it happens often, they are prone to mental health problems and entering a downward spiral. Or, on the contrary, when everything’s working out better than expected, they are vulnerable to a different set of mental health challenges. How can this be addressed, particularly when the founders face the tough period of fundraising?
Prevention and awareness are key. A good starting point is a lifestyle risk factor assessment and some changes regarding their personal habits. It’s essential to get enough sleep and move on a daily basis exercising intensely at least twice a week. Nutrition plays an important role in sustaining mental wellbeing too. Many entrepreneurs find themselves in a tight financial situation at some point in their journey which often leads to poor choices — processed, sugar-laden foods impair cognitive functioning and have other health consequences. Maintaining a support circle consisting of connections that have nothing to do with work is also necessary. Friends and family can help to stay grounded and offer support when things get rough. Becoming aware of how these factors contribute to mental wellbeing, stress reduction and, in turn, the ability to complete a successful raise is where a journey to better mental health begins.
Next to that, there are some work-related steps that entrepreneurs can take to manage their mental wellbeing. To begin with, it can be helpful to define an out strategy early on. It’s a way to take back control and reduce some of the pressure around the business’s success. Prioritizing flexibility is also essential. When starting a company, an intuitive first step is to spend a lot of time setting plans and goals, but the plans will constantly change, and there will be no choice but to adapt — it’s better to embrace it both for the process of fundraising and the founders’ peace of mind. Yet flexibility is not the answer in every situation — it’s important to set intentional limits for how far the team is willing to go for the money and remember that declining is always an option and the only right choice to make when it protects the integrity, sanity and wellbeing of the people involved. There are more ways to keep mental health in check in the wild world of entrepreneurship, but it always comes down to prioritizing one’s wellbeing, reducing the pressure and realizing that it’s not only okay but also necessary to get support. We, along with a few others, are pushing entrepreneur mental health to become more of a priority and a topic of more conversations.
10 ways founders can manage their mental health while fundraising
In Closing
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Gabija works as a Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Masawa. She lets her vision of a more just, sustainable, equitable world guide Masawa’s story and inform the work towards transforming global mental wellness to make it accessible and accepted.
