MODERATOR: Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. We're glad you could all join us. Before we begin, I wanted to let you know that this will be recorded. So you will get a link in your email later today so that you can access the webinar on demand. Attending this webinar also qualifies you for SHRM and HRCI credits. We'll share those codes at the end of the webinar.
Also, if there are any questions, please put them in the Q&A box, and we will answer them at the end of the webinar.
Today, we're pleased to have three workplace well-being experts joining us. First, we'll hear from doctor Gabe Hatch, clinical psychologist and senior researcher at the O.C. Tanner Institute. Gabe specialises in quantitative research methods, interpersonal relationships, and mental health functioning.
As part of the O.C. Tanner Institute, he investigates how organisations positively and negatively impact the mental health of their employees with perspective and behavioural insights.
Next up, we'll hear from Gabrielle Jones, Vice President of talent and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at Personify Health.
Gabrielle oversees global talent development, accelerates DEIB initiatives, facilitates change efforts and performance management, curates leadership development programs, and rolls out career development efforts so every colleague can grow and thrive.
And finally, we'll dive into how one company has built a thriving workplace well-being program by hearing from Brad Bruce, senior director of benefits and well-being at CIBC.
Brad has spent his career in clinical rehabilitation, disability management, and HR benefits policy. He has been with CIBC for sixteen years where his passion for well-being and his work have found a perfect match. And with that, I will hand that off to you, Gabe.
DR. GABE HATCH: Thank you so much.
Thank you all for coming. So before I begin, I wanna offer an initial disclaimer. Much like most and many in this virtual space, mental health is a really important topic to me, and I believe that we collectively play a role in supporting one another's mental health. This topic is going to be heavy for some, and I wanna offer some hope. I'm gonna be providing you with some specific information on how we can improve employee mental health on both the individual and organisational level. There are points in this presentation where I am going to talk about differences in psychopathology by gender and race in this presentation. The data come from the National Institute of Mental Health.
I think these differences are due to systemic issues that really need to be addressed, and I think that we can collectively play a role in reducing these disparities.
I'm drawing attention to these concerns, and so we can equitably reduce these disparities in a really meaningful way. But I think you'll notice throughout this presentation, depression, anxiety are really common, costly, affect all individuals, and there are steps that we can take to make this better. So let's go ahead and jump right in. Oh, am I hearing there is no voice?
I'm hoping there's voice. Can everybody hear me? I'm good. Okay.
Perfect. Well, let's go ahead and jump right in then.
So first thing that has become really clear to me is mental health deserves more attention than it's getting in the organisational context.
One of the main reasons I believe this is the case is because depression and anxiety are extremely common occurrences within the workplace. Oh, I clicked the wrong button here. Excuse me.
For instance, we see that thirty one percent of the adults in the United States experience anxiety, and will experience an anxiety disorder throughout their life. Nineteen percent of adults in the United States have also experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year. We see that these impact women more than they do men, and my slides are skipping a little bit here.
Apologies.
We see that an anxiety disorders affect more women than they do men.
To put this in perspective, one of three of us in this room will experience an anxiety disorder throughout their lives, and approximately one in five of us in this virtual environment will experience severe anxiety in this next year that will rise to the level of a disorder.
So let me provide another instance of what this looks like. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna transition over to depressive episodes. In the past year, twenty one million Americans had a depressive episode, which corresponds to eight point three percent of US adults or about one or ten of us in the current webinar.
These episodes occur most often among individuals that are eighteen to twenty five years old. That's eighteen point six percent or one in five, and it is most prevalent among those identifying as two or more races with it being about thirteen point nine percent, highlighting these potential systemic issues that I alluded to earlier.
What I'm trying to illustrate here is just how common mental health concerns are within the organisational context like depression and anxiety.
What I haven't mentioned and what I'm not giving a ton of attention to, which probably should, are things like ADHD, autism, post traumatic stress, personality disorders, or other forms of psychopathology.
When we start to combine all these things, I think mental health concerns are far more common than we care to admit.
But one thing that is difficult about mental health concerns and clinical psychology is really understanding what these abstract figures really mean.
For many, we might think of depression, anxiety as things that are really hard to understand and visualize, especially if maybe we haven't experienced them firsthand or met with clients or maybe have even, like, been a therapist in a state hospital. It's my view that allowing these percentages and base rates to predict things that we are familiar with really help us understand the impact and help us to really visualize these things.
Most of us, I'd say, probably all of us are familiar with money. So let me throw up some of these costs.
The annual cost of absenteeism or the pattern of not showing up for work for unknown reasons can be as high as eight thousand two hundred and sixty dollars per year per affected employee with depression.
When we consider the annual cost of presenteeism or an employee not giving their full effort while at work, we see that the average cost can be six thousand seven hundred and forty six dollars per affected employee with depression.
Taken together, the annual cost of presenteeism and absenteeism can be over fifteen thousand dollars per affected employee, which is quite a bit of money.
Mental health concerns aren't only really common, but they're really costly.
And I think what this sets us up to do is create a win win opportunity for both the employer and the employee to fix.
So from here, I think it's important to talk about maybe how we talk about mental health within the HR framework.
So what I'm terming this as is buzzwords and band-aids or buzzwords are band-aids.
So it's my belief that in the organisational workplace context that we've created a language of buzzwords to talk about mental health in a really kind way without expressing the underlying sentiment that we are feeling. I see a lot of couples in my practice, and I liken this to a session of couple therapy where one partner might be repeating the words that are coming out of another partner's mouth, but they don't understand the underlying emotion that's present.
So let me provide you with a few examples that I think y'all might resonate with. So the first thing that comes to mind is rage applying or mass applying to jobs due to irritability and tenseness with at work.
But as a psychologist, I might ask, where does this rage come from?
And I might try to connect with the underlying emotion here. Maybe this comes from underlying feelings of sadness, betrayal, mistrust, and fear about a financial future.
And, overall, I think this buzzword fits nicely as a symptom of maybe an anxiety disorder.
We start to look at other words like bare minimum Mondays. I thought this was a fun one. Doing the smallest amount of work on a particular day, especially Monday. Again, as a therapist, I might wonder why does this behaviour exist? Does it stem from feelings of exhaustion, sadness, or feelings of being overworked?
I might argue that this could be construed as a symptom of major depressive disorder.
When we start to look at other things like presenteeism, not giving that full effort at work, absenteeism, not showing up for work for unclear reasons. Again, I might ask, why do employees not give their full effort at work? Why are they not showing up? Why aren't they getting out of bed? Could this be due to feelings of sadness, burnout, low energy, financial fears, challenging interpersonal relationships, thoughts of suicide, difficulties maintaining concentration?
The list goes on. But in several ways, this could be manifestations of symptoms of depression, or anxiety.
And what I see is empathy on the organisational level for people facing these challenges has really got to be present.
So up to this point, I want to be a little bit self aware and acknowledge that I've painted a fairly doom and gloom picture of mental health, but I hope to have illustrated a few things. One, these things are common. Two, they're costly.
Three, we're talking about these concerns even if we haven't realized it. But despite these challenges, I think there are a couple effective strategies to improve mental health at the organisational and even individual level to improve these symptoms.
So from here, I wanna provide hope and show these things that we can do.
As a therapist and with my clients, I try to tell my clients what I'm going to do, and I hope to mirror that even in this presentation.
I wanna do this by providing you with a scientific explanation for what I'm doing and describe how to do it. So let me kinda show you what I mean here.
So the first strategy that I'm going to recommend is one that I use with my clients all the time. I just saw Seattle, Washington come up, and, one of the more prominent psychologists that kind of uses this methodology was based in Seattle, Washington. So I'm excited to see that. So the first strategy that I use is behavioural activation.
It's been shown in multiple scientific trials to reduce depression, anxiety, PTSD, and several other mental health concerns.
The theoretical rationale for this goes like this. Depression and anxiety are caused because negative events keep happening or there are a lack of positive events.
From here, our mood keeps us stuck. For instance, my brain often says, I don't feel like exercising, and sometimes it might go so far as to say I want to eat Cheetos instead.
Thus, because I don't feel like exercising, my mood, that negative mood because I haven't exercised in a long time, can kinda keep me stuck. And, therefore, I am deprived of the endorphins or the positive experience this brings. However, behavioural activation flips this on its head, and it argues that we need to constantly place ourselves in rewarding scenarios despite the fact that we might not feel like we want to do want to do these things.
So while my brain might say, I don't feel like exercising, I go ahead and I exercise anyway. Simply put, we have mood that follows the behaviour. So what this might look as and look like is something like this. Go ahead and do the things you value even if they make you uncomfortable, and your mood will eventually follow.
The second strategy, I think, is O.C. Tanner specific, and we have some really cool things going on here.
So what we see with gratitude specifically or recognition is it can lead to reductions in depression and anxiety. A recent study that compiled all the evidence shows that frequent expressions of gratitude can reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. In a lot of ways, I see incredible overlaps between expressions and gratitude and behavioural activation. Most of us feel that expressions of gratitude are valuable, but they can also make us feel a little bit uncomfortable because it can be a vulnerable process.
However, we see that there's sort of a reciprocity that exists in these expressions of gratitude. Those that give recognition get recognition. Those express gratitude receive gratitude in return.
Gratitude is best received when it's action oriented, specific, and descriptive. I'm gonna be pretty technical here because I wanna provide you with the how to do this. In a more technical way, we found at the O.C. Tanner Institute that gratitude is best received when it is lengthy, full of positive sentiment, full of verbs, adjectives, and nouns. So instead of saying something like, thanks, Tom, for the hard work you do in sending me referrals, I might recommend something like the following.
"I wanted to take a moment to recognise your exceptional delivery to our clients. Your attention to detail and commitment to excellence have not gone unnoticed. I deeply appreciate your proactive teamwork and consistently sending me referrals. Your efforts have truly strengthened our partnership. Thank you for your dedication and collaboration. Wishing you a great week ahead."
Go ahead. Lengthen out those messages. Make them more descriptive. Explain what those people are doing and how they're helping you.
So as I close here, I just wanna say, first and foremost, mental health concerns, which are stigmatized and costly, are common, and they are fixable. Meaning, mental health concerns can be resolved through behavioural activation expressions of gratitude. And finally, just as a disclaimer, I do wanna mention, these recommendations are not recommended replacements for comprehensive mental health treatment.
If you are going through an emergency, there is nine eight eight, the suicide crisis lifeline, and I welcome you to visit a therapist near you. At this point, I'll go ahead and turn it over to Gabrielle.
GABRIELLE JONES: Amazing. Thank you so much. It was great to kind of hear through, especially, I think what resonated with me was the buzzwords as band aids. I know working in my current role as kind of talent management and DEIB, we often find ourselves wondering how we make sure that we're addressing those root causes.
How are we making sure that we're listening to employees and moving on from there? And it was also great to see everyone's locations in the chat. As someone who moved around a lot, I think I saw all representations. There was an Oklahoma, an Ohio, and New York.
So it's great to kinda be in community with folks from my hometowns.
So I'll just start by here just kind of putting some data out there. So eighty percent of employees say that benefits offered by their employer are very important when it comes to searching a job. So we're thinking about, are we making sure that we're retaining the right people, attracting the right people? We want to know what's important to them.
And I think sometimes when we think around benefits, we might be thinking of the day to day transactional things. You know, your health care plan, your dental, your eyes. But it's really sometimes more than just those benefits that are really thinking about the holistic view of well-being to make sure that we're really setting up a supportive workplace. There's more than just kind of those well-being initiatives.
It's really thinking about the person as a whole. So we wanna think about their well-being in a variety of different ways. We wanna think about their mental health. We wanna think about their career well-being, their financial well-being.
Are we providing the right tools, resources, and support to really address all of the needs that these employees have, not just sometimes those transactional benefits? So as I walk through this, you'll hear things not just pertaining to our benefits, but what are we doing at an organisational level, at a leader level, but also at the employee level as well.
So a recent study that Personify Health has done over the course of this year was really around what is important to employees. So I wanna walk through state of the talent, think about what's happening in the organisation, and then I'll drill down to two case studies that Personify Health ourselves have been doing to share what we've seen work, and maybe this can also help you in your organisation as well. So this survey was around two thousand Americans, and we really want to understand what is needed, what is the reason behind and some of the root causes behind maybe some of the things that you saw around the band aids.
And so when you're really asking people, what is impacting their ability to do their job, you'll see a variety of ways of well-being. So you'll see it in their mental and emotional health, which is that highest one at forty one percent, physical health, financial health, and social well-being.
So these for us are really those signals of where should we spend our time to make sure that we're addressing those causes and those needs for our employees.
You'd really see that show up in different ways as well. And so it's really kinda making sure that, are people engaged in work? Are they making sure that people are excited to come to work, feel valued when they come to work? So making sure that people are excited to come to work, feel valued when they come to work is really critical to making sure that we're driving up that well-being help.
You can also see it in trouble focusing. You can heard that from Gabe's speech around fifty five percent have the increase of trouble focusing. And, you know, it definitely could be underlying mental health. It could also be organisational needs. Are we making sure that employees are clear with their role?
Are we being clear around the strategic direction of the company? So really being able to make sure that we're understanding what's important to our employees and really, what are barriers to ensuring that they're happy and healthy at work as well.
And, also, when we're thinking around that list of what's really the cause, you can start to see that employees have have voiced that burnout, lack of satisfaction with pay, and that poor work life balance.
So these are sometimes those focal points that organisations really wanna go towards. And it's really important to make sure that we're looking at what's happening in the organisation, what's happening externally, and also what's happening internally. So these data points are really great signals for leaders, managers, and individuals to really be more self aware and really reflect on kind of where do we should we focus our time and our energy.
And when you really think around the top actions that employers can do to really improve that work life balance is, one, providing incentive to help motivate folks to engage with their benefits. And, again, the variety of benefits that can be included, making sure, how do we make this easier for people to do, bringing all their health care and their benefits together in one place for easy access and really being sure that we're communicating regularly about the benefits that we're using to improve health and well-being and really make sure that we're personalizing those benefits to meet the needs of our employees.
So I'd love to just chat around kind of these bottom two and what we're doing at Personify Health to get there. So how can we make sure that we're communicating regularly, making sure that our benefits are personalised to our employees' needs as well?
So, really, it's where I'm taking all those insights that we've done and putting them into action. So the insights that I shared here are more of those external, what's best practice around top actions, but we know that every culture is different.
So what we've done is making sure that we've built a great employee listening strategy. So not only do we do an annual employee survey to understand what employees need, but really narrowing it down to what do they need in the instance of well-being.
So understanding, how can we engage you? What's important to you? So you'll see things around, I wanna be engaged in the culture that I wanna know.
I really wanna make sure that I'm secure in my health and my family's health. Diversity, equity, inclusion. How can I show up as my best, most authentic self at work? These are some of the strategic initiatives that we heard straight from our business leaders and straight from our employees.
And really through that, the internal and external research kind of builds that place of, what is our philosophy for well-being overall? And so I think you remember in the early times where it's not just that one benefit that's really gonna help people kind of meet or overcome the barriers to what they need.
It's really kind of looking across that employee life cycle across the board and seeing what are the tools and resources that we can do to address what some of those barriers were. So you saw it was really around kind of mental and emotional health, physical health, and financial health.
So what are we doing to make sure that we're addressing those? And so really around our financial health, making sure that we have competitive pay, making sure that we're addressing any pay gaps or pay equity issues that we might have. In the health piece, what are we doing to make sure that physical and mental and emotional health is really set? Really that mind body experience because, really, you're spending a majority of your time at work. And what are we doing to address that?
And culture is sometimes a wrap all word, but you can really drill down what is your culture. It's the relationships that you have with your team, with your members, with your managers, making sure that in the terms of building the culture of gratitude, what are we doing to recognise and value the work that's being done when it's above and also when it's kind of Business As Usual and the things that really keep things moving forward.
Making sure that people have that clear direction of their career. What does development look like and what does their growth at a company look like?
And, again, really kind of that one thing that really helps people drive forward is purpose. Being clear around what are we doing in our cultures, in our communities in which we work in, and what are we doing to give back and make sure that we not only have an inclusive and equitable culture that we work in, but also the communities in which we operate.
So, again, it's really around taking that employee feedback and an employee sentiment and really making it into applicable ways that we can really make change in our organisation by one, creating a really supportive work environment and then two, making sure that we're understanding and being very clear around the expectations that we do have.
So two ways to kind of really drill down into maybe the culture, which I think, is a really powerful part, is really empowering and enabling our leaders. This group, sometimes our managers, are the ones who can really personify a little bit of what our benefits are.
These are the folks who are working in our one on ones and daily with our teams who can really understand, how can I translate the benefits that we do have to the employees' needs that we have?
So what we do in our organisation is we have the leadership success profile, and that's five behaviours that we expect of all leaders in our organisation to live and breathe by. And these are the five behaviours that will not only help us get to the next stage in our organisation, but it's really gonna build a great and supportive workplace where people are excited to come to work every day, and they feel healthy and happy and whole.
And I'll go from the left to the right very quickly for time's sake, but really just walk through each of these behaviours and what's one tactic that we use and teach and train on.
So the first one is really around inclusivity. So having an inclusive leader to make sure that we're building an authentic workplace and making sure that we're valuing diverse and meaningful perspectives. You can start to see this as we kind of build a training model just on this one model tool.
How can we make sure that we're building trust? How can we make sure that we're maintaining trust? Because that really is the core of psychological safety.
So when there are things that are coming up around someone's well-being, they feel like there's a safe space where they can come to their manager and ask for either, this is what I might need for a flexible work arrangement.
I need to make sure that on these days, I can come in at this time. Is this how we're gonna get the best work from this team? Does that match with with the business team? And that's really where meaningful conversations can come is when an employee feels that their voice is heard and valued, and managers have those tools and capabilities to have meaningful conversations.
And really around how making sure that we're developing our talent, driving results in alignment, and leading through change. We know change is inevitable, but it's still hard even when sometimes it's the right thing to do.
So making sure that, one, our managers are being taken care of because you kind of have to wear two hats. What's that change for you? What does that look like for your individual growth to meet on the other side? And then what can you do to make sure that you're building an inspiring and incredible story for your teams?
And, of course, at the end of the day, being able to be agile as things change. And so learning how to fail fast, which also is rooted in building psychological safety and trust, because you really learn a lot from your mistakes more than your strengths.
So what can we do to kind of build up that smart risk taking where managers are able to kind of build kind of guardrails, but then employees can really lean in? So, really, this one is about how do you enable and empower your leaders to be value based, making sure that they have the right skills and capabilities to support employees as they go through that entire life cycle.
And I'd love to switch over to a second one, which is, like, not just around leaders and what they can do, but around what can the organisation, what can managers, and what can employees do as well. And it's really all around recognition. And so my viewpoint is always to make recognition as large and holistic as possible. It's really not just what leaders can do at the top. It's not just what employees can do, from the ground.
So what we've done is making sure that our values are infused in every step of our recognition program. And so on the left hand side, you kind of see our prize wide cornerstone, which we call MVP, which is our most valuable performer. And these are really those talent that can be nominated by peers, and you'll start to really see kind of the leaders and employees who are going above and beyond.
Those are definitely some of the most important projects that we have. They're also some of the Business As Usuals, the things that keep us going.
And so then to get to the very personal, you know, everyone deserves to make sure that they're recognized in their work. And so sometimes it's more when your department head is the one making sure that your work that you're doing is being valued.
So we allow each of our departments to really own the department for themselves. We have clear and consistent criteria across the organisation around what is great recognition and what is great work being done, but it really is up to that department to make sure that it's meaningful for their team. We also partner holistically across the board.
So you'll see sometimes there was around that financial well-being and career. So what are different ways that we can make sure that we're recognising folks? Some folks are very monetarily valued. Some folks have non-monetary values.
What does it look like to make sure that they have more visibility? Make sure that our managers are empowered and enabled to leverage programs as needed, such as a spot bonus, to recognise excellence?
And that really gets to how do we personalise, how do we make recognition meaningful, and how do we make it relevant to that employee and timely as well.
And the last one really is around peer to peer. And so it's really making sure that our values are being seen in the day to day. So we have a well-being platform where those shout outs are incredible. And exactly to kind of what Gabe said, it's really around making sure that it's specific.
And so we do train on a recognition and a feedback model, which is SBID. We're just making sure that it's specific. It's based and rooted in a behaviour. And, also, really importantly, it's around, what is that impact.
What is this impact to me as someone who would partner with you as a team player? What has it done to our members and our clients as well? Because that impact is really incredible.
And the D usually really comes in around feedback. If there's any time for, like, development, like, what could be even better if.
So the SBI is really about recognition, but also feedback is an incredible way to make sure that people know that they're on track in what they're doing. So these two tactics kind of vary around the organisation, leaders, and management, but also what each employee can do that themselves.
And at the end of the day, in terms of our priority for well-being, it's always around that formula of what can we do for our company, what can we do for our people, making sure that employees are engaged, retained, they're collaborating.
We feel like we have a best in class well-being program to minimize that mental health stress and burnout, making sure what we're always living and breathing and walking by are the pillars of our values.
Making sure that DEIB is at the cornerstone of all that we do around diversity, equity, inclusion, and building that sense of belonging.
And our goal will always be to strive for a very impactful and meaningful company culture. This really is that foundation where, you know, we're only as great as our employee who kind of feels they are seen and supported and valued as possible.
So that was really kind of my section around little things that we can do as an organisation, but has amazing and great impacts.
And I'd love to hand it over to Brad to walk through what does this look like in practice and share some results and some impact there.
BRAD BRUCE: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Gabrielle.
And thanks everyone for, you know, providing me that chance to share some of how CIBC has worked to embed recognition and well-being into our culture, as well as some of the results that we have seen.
I'm gonna start if I can make the slide go.
There we are. A bit of a delay.
You know, with our purpose. I think all businesses can describe what they do, but few can describe why they do it. At CIBC, we are very clear on our "what." That is: our client focused strategy to build a relationship oriented bank for a modern world. But we are equally clear on our "why," and that's our purpose, which is to help make your ambition a reality.
This is our North Star, our backbone, and our check against every single thing that we do. And it's important that I start here as it is embedded into our internal programs, and it's integral to the success that we have had.
Along with our purpose, there are actually three client experience principles that we live each and every day. Those are always professional, radically simple, and genuinely caring. And you'll see these shining through in the subsequent slides.
CIBC's global recognition program is named Moment Makers, and it celebrates career milestones, encourages connection, and recognises moments of accomplishment and triumph throughout our ecard and points redemption program.
The name Moment Makers acknowledges the everyday moments that we all experience and encourages us each to actively engage in recognising those moments, both big and small.
There's a few components to our Moment Makers program that support meaningful and purposeful recognition, and it takes all of them working together to inspire performance and drive business results.
Starting at the bottom of the pyramid here, we celebrate the careers of our employees at key milestones as well as those of newly hired and retirees, reinforcing a sense of fit, belonging, and commitment.
Career recognition gives us that chance to focus on the individuals, honor their unique talents, skills, and contributions over time.
We also celebrate events. We have an extensive ecard library to engage and connect with each other to celebrate accomplishments and personal events throughout your career.
And we encourage effort with recognition via e cards with or without points, we can build momentum and confidence in skills. It's a great way of recognising progress along the way to a goal or a project and thanking a team member for jumping in to help, giving that extra effort, or going above and beyond for a client.
Moving further up the pyramid is we talk about rewarding results, and doing so formally with what we call purpose awards in the amount of two hundred and fifty points, five hundred points, or one thousand points to reinforce those contributions of our members to the bank.
Purpose awards highlight the accomplishments and results and shine a spotlight not only on the recipient, but signals to every team member what great work looks like at CIBC as these are shared amongst others.
There's three different levels as I mentioned, and each represents a step up in effort, scope, and impact that you've had at the organisation.
And all of them are tied to those client experience principles as well as leader behaviours that we want to instill across our organisation.
And then reaching to the very top of the pyramid is honoring the best. Employees who exemplify what it means to be on purpose are recognized through an achievers award, an annual achiever's award. These are selected from the pool of individuals who achieve a thousand point purpose award, throughout the year, and they are invited to attend an annual achievers celebration in recognition of their consistently outstanding contributions throughout the year. For us, in 2023, the annual achievers conference was actually held on the big island in Hawaii, so a very special trip for our achievers as well as a guest.
Moving to well-being, for well-being for CIBC, it starts with our commitment.
I mentioned our client experience principles and similar to how they show up in Moment Makers, we really turned the lens internally for well-being, focusing on that genuinely caring aspect of our client experience principles and being genuinely caring for our team members.
We built our well being statement to be simple, powerful, and aspirational, and we focused our intention around four key pillars of mind, body, life, and finances. The next page focuses on, you know, bringing that commitment to life through providing our team with the resources, work environment, and leadership support to make their well-being a priority.
Through this visual, we define each of our pillars in more detail. We also describe what we would like our employees to feel or experience as part of each pillar, as well as, throughout their time and their work at CIBC. And we developed four key enablers, which recognise well-being as a shared responsibility between CIBC and our employees. And those enablers became the criteria that all new ideas would be measured against.
On the far hand side, it's to build team members self awareness, desire, and capability to act in support of their well-being. We want to inspire personal self care and healthy habits. We want to enhance and introduce well-being benefits and programs that target the the key risk areas that we hear from our employees through surveying or through health risk assessments or other benefit related utilization and results. And we want to lead by example, developing and activating leaders to role model and further foster a culture of care.
Over the past few years, we've seen a number of initiatives launch, grounded in our strategy and enablers. And of note, I mean, we've introduced peace of mind for our team members by having virtual care available to them through their mobile device device 24/7, making it easy to connect with a nurse practitioner to get a diagnosis, referrals, prescriptions, whether it's for physical health issues or even mental health concerns.
We enhanced our mental health benefits by increasing the annual reimbursement amount, to help remove financial barriers to those that are seeking mental health care. We continue to offer a robust employee assistance program for anytime counselling for a variety of challenges or issues that our employees may face. And maybe most importantly, we introduced our CEO as our executive sponsor for well-being, something that he readily took on.
And through his advocacy and work as a role model, our employees saw that it was important to the organisation. And perhaps more importantly, it gave our team members that permission that it was okay to focus on self care.
We followed up that commitment from our CEO with messages from his direct executive leadership team sharing their own well-being stories to help us further deepen the organisation's commitment to well-being.
But we didn't stop there. As we looked at our well-being offerings and research best practices, we identified a need for a digital well-being tool that was accessible anytime, anywhere, simple to use and personalised. And this became a big opportunity for us to help advance our culture of well-being and get our employees more personally involved in driving sustainable, healthy habit changes.
We partnered with Personify Health to launch Your Pulse at CIBC in October of 2022. And since that time, we've worked with our team to thoughtfully build awareness, excitement, and momentum through various channels and campaigns and communications so that more of our employees would reap the benefits of improved health and well-being.
I'll share a little more about those efforts in a few slides.
One of the other things we also identified was that connectivity between recognition and well-being.
When we think about recognition in the context of our pillars at CIBC, it would fall under life. Strengthening the connection between work that we do, our own personal ambitions, and our purpose.
Recognition when designed well helps you to connect to your organisation's purpose, build a strong sense of belonging and commitment to personal and professional values.
We also heard earlier from Gabe about the impact of gratitude and recognition on mental health and well-being. So with these two global platforms, Moment Makers and Your Pulse at CIBC available to our employees, it was important to us, that we show that connectivity. And the first thing we did was to enable our teams to recognise and appreciate each other through Moment Makers for making a difference in their well-being, whether that was somebody who exemplified the habits of well-being, in their own personal life or somebody that helped another person prioritize their well-being. We wanted to celebrate it.
And as we launched Your Pulse at CIBC, we added new Your Pulse themed ecards that, to further, you know, deepen that link between Moment Makers and and Your Pulse.
In addition, we have quarterly draws that take place, for our employees. And by doing simple things within Your Pulse, you earn points that earn you entries into draws, so that you can, you know, receive a little bit of an external motivation to help you focus on your well-being. And each year, we award over four thousand employees with points just for doing things that focus on themselves and then proving their health and well-being.
And then last year, we held our first ever global activity challenge encouraging our employees to create train teams and strive to be the most active, tracking their activities automatically through the Your Pulse app or converting them to steps. We had more than five thousand of our team members collaborate to get to the top of that leaderboard. And as a team, we took over one billion steps in a three week competition period. And as an extra bonus, those teams that had the the most steps or individuals that had the most steps received additional Moment Maker points.
Moving to some, you know, thoughts around results and insights and see how this is related to our Your Pulse program. There's lots on this page, but I think what I'd like to highlight is that, you know, through the various initiatives, after just over a year, we've seen, you know, solid enrollment in the platform, with over fifty percent of our team members downloading the app, and we've got regular engagement around thirty five, thirty seven percent utilization, both above the benchmark. And we're seeing that employees are using it to become better informed about their health by taking our health check quiz, but they're also starting to build social connections, something that we feel can help improve belonging and overall support mental health.
From a Moment Maker's perspective, one of the key measures for recognition for us is the percentage of the population that is giving and receiving recognition.
Both of our percentages are well above established, benchmarks and goals that we've set for ourselves. And as noted earlier, in addition to our formal recognition program through ecards and and purpose awards, we also celebrate the career milestones of employees with lapel pins and gifts. And a key part of the milestone program is a celebratory yearbook, where managers and peers can contribute comments and pictures and videos.
We still have work to go to make these yearbooks as impactful and as celebratory as possible, but we are really close to nearing our goals.
Lastly, I'll focus on some internal indicators. Not all of them are quantitative measures, but we do feel that they're, you know, a demonstration of the success that we're having. First, and, you know, we mentioned this already, our CEO continues to be our champion, advocate, and role model, a powerful demonstration of the importance of this at our organisation.
Second, well-being is talked about more and more. It's not stigmatized. Leaders and employees want to know more and hear more, and there's not a month that goes by where I'm not asked to speak at a town hall or team meeting about the various resources and what well-being means at CIBC.
Third, the use of our programs and tools are are up. Through our awareness campaigns and by making the tools accessible anytime, anywhere, our employees are finding the support that they need to prioritize their self care.
And last on this page is our employee survey results. Two measures we're incredibly proud of. Ninety three percent of our employees believe that their leader supports their well-being, and eighty seven percent believe that CIBC generally cares about their well-being.
It's been a journey for us and one that has never finished, but we do feel confident that we are having an impact and are making both recognition and well-being an important piece of our culture and how we support our employees' holistic well-being.
I'll stop there, and I'll hand it back to our O.C. Tanner friends.
MODERATOR: Awesome. Thank you. So we will now go ahead and go through some of the chat questions that were asked.
Yes. Thank you all for attending today. One question that came in was about the buzzwords we talked about kind of beginning of the presentation.
Psychological words and terminology have seeped into mainstream conversations and are often used and sometimes misused by people who don't fully understand their meaning and can even be weaponized.
How can we help prevent this from happening in the workplace? What are your thoughts about that?
GABE HATCH: I can maybe talk about a couple different perspectives that I have here?
First, within the context of therapy, I've gotten to the point where I've realized there are things that I never thought I would say within the context of therapy that I have said within the context of therapy, and it surprises me on some of the things that I will say. So with that being said, whereas one person might interpret a string of words or a paragraph as being really offensive, delivered in the right context and by the right person, the words, even if they stumble over or even if they're a little awkward can come off in the right way.
But I think what that's predicated off of is making sure that the environment is safe to connect and the context is safe to connect.
So, I mean, maybe going a little bit more specifically, like, one thing that I have noticed is colloquially, people use the word trauma in a very different way than I use the word trauma. At the same time, I understand what they mean when they're using that term, and I try to empathize with maybe the underlying feeling that is behind the term. And so I think when you ask how can we prevent this from happening in the workplace or these terms from being misused, I would just say make sure you are an organisation, even with some of the things that Brad has alluded to, make sure you're an organisation where these issues are not stigmatized, that people feel comfortable expressing their underlying concerns even if it's a little bit funny coming out.
MODERATOR: Perfect. Thanks, Gabe. Another question that came in. Leaders do carry a lot in terms of employee well-being. How can we make sure that they are also supported as leaders in the organisation?
GABRIELLE JONES: Yeah. I'm happy to take that one. I think it really goes back to some of the things that Brad and Gabe had mentioned as well is, you know, managers not only are expected to kinda get the work done and also kind of move forward and kind of paint a picture, but really allowing them to take the time themselves to go through that change. And I think it's really being clear that there's individual change needs to happen first before organisational change can happen.
So letting them and allowing time for managers. And so what we've done is really, put together a leadership structure where a lot of our leaders who are making decisions are able to kind of hear the messaging first. What are we doing to make sure that managers have talking points to things where we know employees might have amorphous or reaction to? Rightfully so.
So what can we do to make sure that they have the right tools and resources even before they're kind of bombarded, with a lot of employee needs. And so I really think it's making sure that you're taking care of your leaders first, allowing them to take care of themselves first and giving them that time and space too as well. But very curious around Gabe and, Brad, your thoughts as well.
BRAD BRUCE: I think it's, what you said is is bang on. And and one of the things we did do is, you know, create a little bit of a guide for our leaders on how to have conversations about well-being with their team members because it can be an awkward or uncomfortable situation to even bring that up in the workplace.
And a big part of that was making sure you're having that conversation with your leader first so that it you're working both ways. So, you know, we know we've got the support from our team at the top. We're trying to build that capacity to further support that at the leadership level across the organisation, and little tools like that. I mean, that's just one example, but, things that can help them be better prepared to take care of themselves as well as take care of their teams.
GABE HATCH: And I mean, I feel like I'm just piggybacking off of what are two really great comments, but I think maybe the thing that I can add is I really like this idea of modeling to leaders modeling to other leaders how leaders should respond to these concerns.
You know, be in an environment and be part of an environment where people can voice these concerns, where they can have these concerns be listened to, and they can be responded to in a really respectful and empathic way. And then that's likely going to translate when they're with and meeting with their employees, that work beneath them.
I love that.
MODERATOR: Thank you. One other question. Any advice or tips for convincing upper management the importance of employee engagement at a more traditional workforce. I'm in HR in engineering, and it can be difficult for leaders to understand employees need to be heard and understood and appreciated.
GABRIELLE JONES: Yeah. I feel like this is my my day to day all the time working with, even external, customers and clients. I think it's really kind of getting to that root cause. I think really kind of some of the numbers that Gabe showed, and so you can approach it from different ways around building a business case.
So for example, you're engineering, but if you're working with a finance team, it's really kind of at the end of the day, here's the opportunity cost of what we're losing by having maybe some of our most talented folks leave because they're burnt out or because there's a thing that we're doing. So really being able to identify, at the end of the day, what is that specific leader's need? Because like we said, this is a, it needs more attention. It is impacting each and every one of our employees, and it will impact that kind of bottom line for a manager at need.
So I really think it's kind of understanding what are some of the business needs, and making sure that you're kind of able to meet that and understand and identify it with some data. And so I think there's a variety of ways if you're on the HR team to get that data. It's through maybe, employee listening surveys. So what are employees saying and being able to bring that up as that liaison between that employee voice to the organisation.
I also think if you do have employee resource groups or business resource groups, which are groups that are really tied to an identity such as it could be, black, pride, or other things like that, those are really strong employee groups where you can leverage to make sure that, hey. These are some solutions that we're coming up with and really being able to go to leaders with a solution that's been vetted through to really be able to kind of limit, the need to kind of say no to those things. So I really think it's being able to kind of build that strong business case, partner in work, and sometimes it's timing. So I think it's really just continuous advocacy and finding those leaders who are willing to listen and say yes and kind of having them build sponsorship within their peer group as well.
GABE HATCH: I agree. And I think it's really tough, you know, even when we talk about something like engagement. What what does engagement mean? How how do you measure it? I saw somebody mention the chat, like, asking, Brad about exactly how these were measured or some of the benchmarks that he was using.
At the same time and it feels a little bit the business case might be a little bit more difficult to make at the same time, I think, with what Brielle has showed as well as with what Brad has showed is when we start implementing some of these, like, more soft and empathic skills, the business case kind of starts to make itself. And when I think about, well, engineering folks don't need that, I can think of lots of research that we've conducted here in the O.C. Tanner Institute that definitively says, I think everybody likes to be treated well.
You know? And it's I realise I'm setting up a little bit of a straw man argument, but I do think everybody likes to be treated well.
Absolutely.
MODERATOR: Perfect. And, Brad, we do have a couple of questions, for you, kind of combining a couple of them. So first, how did you encourage employees to continue engaging with Your Pulse program after the initial enrollment and rollout?
And how did you set your benchmarks for success with your program?
BRAD BRUCE: Thanks. Great question. So, yeah, it was one of those you know, you put something new out there. It's an awesome program. Everybody gets excited, and then things kinda calm down a bit after that.
So, you know, really, what we did was we worked with our partners at Personify Health and looked for those opportunities where we could gamify it. You know, we did some double the points campaigns. We had some opportunities where, we're, you know, asking for greater participation on, you know, thematic, well-being initiatives that were consistent with what we are doing across the organisation in terms of times of the year, whether it's recognition of special days. Like, just trying again to keep the awareness and keep the motivation to go into that tool on an ongoing basis.
We've started to build out further connections to other resources. So by going into our well-being video library with another provider through the Your Pulse app, you're actually, you know, raising awareness. What we do is we are offered points. So the more you engage with Your Pulse or some of our other suppliers that are connected through the tool, you're raising awareness of those other resources, but also encouraging people to come back.
And then the I'd say the latest thing that we're doing is we're actually working with the Personify team to roll out a champion network. So we're trying to get that grassroots movement.
We've done a recruitment campaign of a month. We've got over two hundred and fifty volunteers that have said, hey well-being is important to me. I wanna share the message and be an advocate and a sponsor and a support for well-being and and the Your Pulse app, across the organisation.
So we're actually having our first meeting next week, and we hope that that's gonna help continue to drive the amazing engagement that we've seen and and push it beyond that fifty three percent and get to that target for us, which is an internal target that we set for ourselves of seventy five percent.
In terms of other targets, what we've done is we've kinda worked with, whether it's Personify or O.C. Tanner on the Moment Maker side, to look at what are similar companies seeing in terms of their targets and where they're achieving in terms of reach or utilization, and leveraging that information to kinda say, hey, where should we be at versus others of similar size or financial or industry, but also being aggressive and being, fairly, assertive in where we wanna be better than just what everybody else is. We wanna really try and excel and achieve and push the boundaries. So a little bit of market research and intelligence, but a lot of pushing ourselves to just be better.
MODERATOR: Okay. Perfect. I think we have time for one more question.
This is also for Brad, but probably open for anybody else. Do you have concerns or suggestions for name changes when it comes to communicating that to your employees for program changes? It seems there are changes very often. So curious how you present that to your employees to keep engagement.
BRAD BRUCE: I'm wondering if that relates to the the the name change of Virgin Pulse to Personify Health and any branding that might be going along with that.
So, you know, for us, what we were able to do and what we started at the outset was we were working in partnership with Virgin Pulse, but we named it Your Pulse. We put our own sort of naming to it and branding to it so that we could have that consistency and it would live with CIBC versus anything that would happen from a brand name or change externally in the you know, with the company that we are partnered with. So trying to keep that internal brand as our well-being brand for Your Pulse and for other well-being initiatives across the organisation.
Hopefully, that answers the question.
GABRIELLE JONES: I'd absolutely echo that as well as kind of being able to make folks feel like it's personalised to them as well. And then some things that we've done with, different ways is kind of doing, you know, a name storming with employees. And so, you know, at our town halls, having people throw out names. And so, it kind of brings people along the way. And there is some great ones, that we would have never even thought of that we can instill.
So, again, I think as much as you can personalise it to your brand and even tie it to maybe some new and fun things that are happening with a name change is also another way to kind of really ramp up adoption because then people are kind of like, oh, what's this name change? They're maybe clicking into a little bit more, and now they're finding a lot of new other features that, they might have realized before.
MODERATOR: Awesome. I think that was all of the questions that we had, unless anyone had last minute ones, but I know we're running out of time. So just as another reminder, you will get an email later today with this webinar for you to watch on demand. So, hopefully, this has been helpful. Thank you all for joining, and we'll see you at our next one.
