Transforming Workplace Mental Health

Speaker A: Hello, everyone.

Speaker B: This is Michael Vandervoort on another edition of Drive Thru hr, where we talk about human resources issues, workplace and jobs every day. So our guest today is Steven Floor, who we'll introduce in just a minute. But first, I want to say hello to Robin.

Speaker C: Hello, Michael. Happy. Um, cold spell.

Speaker B: Thanks. Once again, I managed to botch the intro. One of these days I'll get a cold open done, right? I don't know. Anyway, so Robin, we were talking about cold earlier before we're both over winter. I think our guest is. Is in a warmer climb. Find it more. Find, uh, out more about that in a second. But what else is going on this week? Anything?

Speaker C: I am m. Over winter. We've got about two and a half weeks left, uh, of carnival season before we hit Mardi Gras. And so it's time to, you know, shove as much King Cake in our faces as possible until that happens. Other than that, that's, that's about the happenings.

Speaker B: Gotcha. Uh, I, Yeah, I'm trying to avoid listening to the news because there's stuff going on there that's just, it's insane. So we'll not go down that path.

Speaker C: Talk about mental health. And that's what we're talking about today.

Speaker B: Talking about mental health, which is, is an appropriate topic, unfortunately, and very timely and maybe more so every day. I did see a King Cake in my local grocery store the other day, and that reminded me that Mardi Gras was on the way where you live. It's like a monthly, monthly daily thing up here. We're not quite as wrapped into it in Tulsa, so. Anyway, Stephen, welcome to Drive Thru hr. That was our, our Friday afternoon version, uh, of banter, I guess. How are today?

Speaker A: I'm good. I'm good. I'm really excited to be here with you guys.

Speaker B: We're, we're glad to have you. We're going to talk about mental health. It's, it's a, ah, it's a, it's a workplace issue that's been growing. Um, I was thinking about the show this morning and Robin, remember we used. We, we spent like four years talking about COVID and how it impacted the workplace and broke thing, and you've kind of finally, five, six years later maybe sort of drifted away from that conversation, but there's all kinds of other stuff going on. 30,000 people being laid off at UPS, another 16,000 being laid off at Amazon. Just big concerns about the economy, concerns about jobs, all sorts of reasons to have stress. Steven has both written a book and Runs a company that helps employers deal with these kind of topics and issues in the workplace. And so we're going to delve into that with him. So, Steven, why don't you start us off by telling us about you and about Journey, not the band. Sure.

Speaker A: Oh, you can talk about the band, too. So, born and raised in, uh, in New York. Grew up in Queens. Spent my whole life in New York up until four months ago when I decided to head to warmer, warmer pastures. But about, uh, wow, 2015, a long, long time ago, um, I started, uh, Journey. And the idea was to help provide people with tools and resources to live, uh, happier, healthier, less stressed, more balanced life. And the genesis there was, I was really fortunate. A couple years before that, I found meditation, and it really changed my life, like, really deeply transformed it. Uh, and I thought, how do we bring this to people in a way that's really helpful and simple and approachable? And over the years, you know, obviously there's been a global pandemic, a whole bunch of wars and everything else going on. The company's evolved quite a lot to meet the needs of people. So we expanded from meditation into other subclinical practices, journaling and digital cognitive behavioral therapy and things like that. And then a few years ago, we added clinical care as well, substance abuse and adolescent care, and in person therapy and things like that. So that no matter where you are on the spectrum, you could feel really supported. And so everything we do is with companies that's kind of the world that I spent a lot of time in. And so we work with all different size and shape companies all over the world to support their employees and their families and their. And their loved ones.

Speaker B: No. What is. Robin, I just have one quick question to interject, and then I'll throw it to you. So, Stephen, uh, I kind of meant to tee this up, which is why I'm asking it. How is what you offer with Journey different than an eap?

Speaker A: It actually is an eap.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: But it is very, very different in a couple key ways. So, um, a little bit of history here. I'm sure you probably know this, and probably a lot of your listeners do, but EAPs have been around since the 1930s, right? And they came in place to help with alcoholism and domestic violence and things like that. And they were basically like a safety net for when things went wrong. And that was the case up until about 10 years ago, when digital EAP companies like Spring Health and Modern Health and Lira Health, that were much, much better in terms of providing therapy and digital tools and really modernize the experience. However, both traditional EAPs and digital EAPs are all reactive to when an employee has a problem and then they're reaching out to get care. Whereas we said, well, why don't we turn this on its head rather than being a reactive tool, why don't we make it proactive and preventive? And I think we all know that when it comes to physical health, if you catch something sooner, you're going to get better outcomes. If you take certain steps, you can stay healthy. Right. Whether we do them or not is a different thing. But we know that when it comes m as a golf and the same thing is true for mental and emotional well being. And so everything we do is preventive, proactive. And so we um, launched a product three years ago called Journey Proactive VAP as the first and only preventive platform that delivers care before the crisis. So that means engaging employees early and often, using AI to identify warning signs when a person might be in need, helping them build healthy habits, reaching out and then getting them the care they need. Whether that is clinical. Right. That might be substance abuse or something like that, or hopefully catching it earlier before things snowball or spiral. So.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Hopefully that answers your question, Michael.

Speaker B: It was great answer. Yeah, it does, thanks.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I'm glad you've, you've taken us down that path on that journey, so to speak, right at the beginning because as I was diving into what you do, that, that Journey Proactive EAP aspect that, that really resonated with me just looking at it from the outside because I think to your point, we are so used to with the traditional eaps, just have them come in and do a class or do, you know, whatever. And it's a resource after someone has brought forth, uh, you know, that they're in some sort of crisis or something. So when you talk proactive, what does that look like typically? What is the typical employee experiencing when they have that available to them?

Speaker A: Yeah, there's really three different categories of things, uh, when it comes to making it proactive. And so we'll talk about all of them. The first is something we built called Journey Signal. Journey Signal is a real time AI intelligence engine that takes information, takes data, takes signals from the employee, what they're doing or not doing, what they're engaging with, et cetera, the employer. Some employers give us no information, some give us an eligibility list, but more and more are giving us an employee census. Think about all the things we can do if we know your hire date, your date of birth, your number of dependents, your zip code. Right. Like, I think. I don't know when this episode will go live, but, you know, as of today, January 30th, everything that's happening in Minnesota. Right, Right. Regardless of, you know, your opinions, politically, just. There's a lot happening there. Right. So, yeah, the support that we can provide to those people at this particular time, or if we see that your number of dependents has gone up or has gone down or et cetera. Right. You've just gotten promoted. Your title, so Journey Signal captures all this information from the employee, from the employer, and from the world and allows us to reach out at times when the employee might be more in need. Right. If we see, for example, that your dependents have gone up, maybe you just got married, maybe you just had a birth, maybe there was a debt, you know, if it goes the opposite direction.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: Maybe a death or a divorce. Those are times when you may be in need of more support versus just a generic, one size fits all sort of outreach. That's one part of it, right? That's the technology part. Second part is how do we embed this into the fabric of the ecosystem versus having it exist on the intranet or only where the HR person knows where it is? So we built out this really robust ecosystem that has a web app, a Slack app, a teams app, a zoom app, a calendar integration, a daily email. There's a break room app for retail and hospitals. There's something called the Journey tablet, which is physical hardware. So if a person's working, you know, on a manufacturing line or in retail or anywhere else, really, they can go and make appointments and do things like that. So the idea being, how do we make it part of the fabric of the company versus like a standalone product that's somewhere else? And then the third thing is one of the challenges we always hear from HR leaders, and I'm sure the two of you know this is offer all these great benefits to employees and nobody uses them. Engagement is really low. And part of that is because HR has a lot of things that they have to do besides try to crack the code on human behavior. Right. And so for us, we've taken lots and lots of data points from many, many companies and have figured out a certain secret sauce in how to take what you tell us about your organization. So we start with this proprietary process called Jedi Journey Engagement Discovery Interview to go really deep and unearth some learnings. And then we have an internal innovation lab called Studio E where. Where we come up with really novel out of the box, unique things to capture people's attention. So to give you an example with Walgreens, we worked with Walgreens and the Guinness Book of World Records to set the record for the most views for an online guided meditation.

Speaker C: Huh.

Speaker A: That got a lot of people to pay attention right Inside the company, they were excited about integrating into payroll systems. When employees punch in, there's a reminder about mental health. When they punch out, there's a reminder. So always trying to come up with things that are going to get people to say, oh, that's really different, and, and then take action. So I can go on. But those are sort of the three legs of the stool when it comes to being proactive.

Speaker B: Uh, so I was, I was joking around on a show we did a couple of weeks ago that I hit my 40th year in HR this year, which makes me kind of like, throw up a little bit every time I say it. But what you're. But that I don't need an EAP for that. What, what I, what I am so struck by, and what you just said is like the old model of eap and Robin will probably echo this. Most of my employers had an EAP and nobody ever really knew what it was. And to your point, nobody really ever used it. We used it more often for, like, if somebody was a discipline problem based around, around behavioral issues, you would force them into an EAP referral as part of, the, part of the managing of the issue or, or if you had a layoff, you maybe would offer people EAP counseling. Here, you can call this number if you want. And, uh, my opinion was most people didn't even know what it meant. And then even if they did, they didn't necessarily feel as if they trusted the, the unknown entity that I was giving them a phone number for or whatever. You know, they didn't know if they trusted them with, with a sensitive issue. The, the. The. So two things, not two questions, but two things. One is that, that, that strikes me where you guys, the proactive model seems so much better, but you're using, you're using data to kind of identify it seems like. Is. Is. Am I, is that what I'm hearing? You say that you go through people,

Speaker A: it's always available, so it's there the same way another EAP is meaning you can pick up the phone and call 24-7-65. You can log on digitally and book an appointment. You can do. You know, we come on site when something happens. So it has everything that a traditional EAP would have and a digital EAP would have. And our core DNA is proactive and preventive versus reactive. So that's the, that's the big difference.

Speaker B: So what I was trying to, what I was trying to understand a little better I guess was when you do, when you like say you see in the census data or whatever, you refer to whatever data that you have and like you said somebody has a death, do you guys reach out proactively around that or. Because some people have different reactions to that type of stuff.

Speaker A: So a couple of things. So first, everything is, um, we get permission from the company, right?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And number two, at a global level. Right. And then number two or at a macro level. And number two, the employees can change things. We will never mention specific things because that's overreaching. It feels too. Big brother. Hey Robin, we saw you just move to uh, this new apartment. Looks like a beautiful place, right? Like, yeah, that's a little creepy and weird and uh, yeah, not cool. But if I have the choice between reaching out to you, Rob, and pick any random day365 out of a hat and hope that that's helpful, or two weeks after you just moved and be able to say, hey, just a reminder, you have resources available, including blah, blah, blah, without saying anything. So to use your example, Michael, we would never, first of all, we wouldn't know if the number of dependents went from two to one. Is it a death, a divorce, what happened? But even if we didn't, it still just wouldn't feel nice for somebody to reach out and share that. But what would be nice is if I'm at a time where potentially I'm more in need, if somebody was saying, hey, just a reminder, support is available to you. Right? So that's the key there is not mentioning it, not overstepping or overreaching, but just helpful reminders. The other thing is those are like easy examples for me to use because you know, people get them, it's more linear, like X happened and then, and then Y. But actually what the AI is able to do is a whole bunch of data that's much more subtle to be able to say, okay, how can we help? So if we know that you're 65 year old man in a rural neighborhood and this is your job and XYZ happens, you might be more in need of support than if you're a 24 year old gen Z female living in a city. Right. Um, and so not just when to reach out, but how to reach out, is it via email or text? Is It a homemailer? Is it a human outreach? So a lot of, um, you know, smart technology that makes people feel really supported. And we did a clinical study. It took two years and 7,000 employees. And it showed that because of Journey's proactive approach, we save at risk employees, 17 clinical visits and save employers $5,000 in healthcare costs. So if you think about it like we're getting to people sooner, they don't end up needing to hit the health plan, they don't end up needing all of these therapy sessions. And obviously that saves, you know, both the human being and, of course, the company a bunch of money.

Speaker C: What? Um, you know, so often when we think of pick a benefit, really, but Certainly, you know, EAPs, and I really love this kind of proactive messaging and approach to things. But we often think of these things as being in HR's wheelhouse and leaders and managers don't need to think about it. Right? Oh, well, that's, uh, uh, you know, here's this kind of HR thing. Where do managers, line managers, you know, directors, leaders, whatever level that is, where do managers, people, managers fit into, as you see it, sort of this, you know, this proactive approach. And where shouldn't they fit in? Where, where do they need to not be involved?

Speaker A: Managers play an absolutely critical role. They have the, uh, hardest job. As you know, I'm sure you've heard the old expression, right? People don't quit companies, they quit bosses. And I remember when I first became a manager, I mean, this is like the, the 90s. So it was, it was a while back, nobody talked about mental health. That wasn't a thing when I went to business. Well, like that, it was all about maximizing shareholder value. It wasn't about, you know, supporting the mental health of your employees. So it's great that we've evolved in that way. And the training for managers is still sorely lacking. And so we're asking so much more from managers and life is just more complicated. And to the conversation you guys were having right at the beginning, like, don't check the news, right. Cause you do that and then all of a sudden it's a whole nother bombardment of stress that, you know, human beings didn't have to live through a long time ago. So we're expecting so much. So the way we think about it is we want to try to have a holistic approach where we're reducing stigma so people could talk about mental health easily and openly. We're creating permission. So, for example, if I was to come in with a Broken arm. Maybe I have some embarrassing story of, you know, I fell off the counter or whatever. But I wouldn't be embarrassed to say I'm going to have a hard time with work if I have a broken arm. But if I was up all night with anxiety or about whatever's going on in my life, I might not share that with my boss or my colleagues. Right. So reducing stigma, creating permission and training managers. And when we think about how to engage, we think about it holistically, 360, top down. So can we get senior buy in? Um, can we get executives to talk about, can we get bottom up? Meaning can we get, can we build a well being champion program? Can we get other employees talking about it? And then side to side, on one side you have HR and being able to, you know, send their emails and do what they can do. But of course, employees tune that out and things like that. And then on the other side, you have managers there to be able to support. We have this mental health certification program that we first built for Lululemon and now have rolled out for Pfizer and Regeneron and taught it all over the world. That teaches people, number one, for managers specifically, how do you take care of yourself? Right. Put your oxygen mask on first. Number two, what to look for. How do you know when an employee is in need? Number two, number three, how do you approach them skillfully and thoughtfully and compassionately? Because sometimes we know a person's off, but we don't want to say anything, we don't want to do this, and so we shy away from it. And then the fourth thing, perhaps the most important, how do we direct them to the right resources? So not trying to play armchair psychologist or psychiatrist just because we took this course, but hey, here's where the right support, the right resources sit within the organization. So managers are very, very important in this whole thing.

Speaker D: Hey, this is William Tincup. Listen. We did a series for Isolved called Heroes of HR where we talk to HR practitioners. And, uh, these are just your run of the mill, every day, slogging it out. 300 employees and Cedar Rapids HR pros. Mostly, um, it's centered around isolves and they're what they do with isolve. But also they talked a lot about kind of the day to day rigor of hr. If you're curious about that, uh, search for Heroes of HR wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Speaker B: Steven. You mentioned Lululemon and uh, I mean, obviously a fitness wear brand. And you know that probably a lot of the wellness and Stuff is baked into their DNA of their culture. Not every company, every company has that same ethos, whatever you want to call it. I would guess so. And we, like you said, we've evolved. But where, where are we really at today? Are, do our employers, are they really concerned about mental health or is it some of these things? Like in the olden days EAPs were more like we'll offer this cause it's a feel good thing. But we never really promoted it. We never, never really did anything to make it, make it part of something that they uh, people actually perceived as a benefit. So do you guys, with the, with the proactive, do you guys have a side, do you have a more, do you have a different approach on that these days?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I, I mentioned Lululemon for the mental health certification. But I, I should say when it comes to Journey Pro, most of our clients are companies that you would consider more traditional. Now they are being more progressive in bringing in Journey and saying hey, we want to do something better. But we're talking about companies like beck and Dickinson McKesson, um, which is a Fortune 9 company, Cushman and Wakefield, Regeneron Micron. So really across the gamut. But one thing that a lot of them have in common is they have employees that are hard to engage. Like I'll use BD as a good example. They're in rural areas. It's manufacturing workers. It tends to skew older and male. And I don't think I have to tell anybody here that when it comes to older males working in manufacturing in rural environments, the first thing they don't want to do is go home and start talking about their feelings.

Speaker C: Mhm. Right.

Speaker A: You know, go. Right. So how do we engage them when they're not on email, they're not sitting at their desk. Right. So I've actually been so pleasantly surprised in the three years since we've launched Journey Proactive eap, how many companies that, that are not the Lululemons and they're drinking the Kool Aid, are saying we have to do more. We know we're not doing this because it's the right thing to do. Which is probably why the earlier companies, you know, you think like the Lululemons or the Googles, we're doing it.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: But we're doing it because it makes business sense. Because we know if we provide proactive care, people aren't going to hit the health plan. And oh, uh, by the way, we're self insured. So every time they hit the health plan it's costing Us a lot of money. And to uh, your, to your point earlier, Michael, hey, somebody's about to go on short term disability. Hey, call the eep. Hey, somebody has a part like that reactive approach is actually very expensive versus being proactive. So I've been very pleasantly surprised in seeing how many companies that wouldn't fit the mold are being much more progressive now.

Speaker B: Interesting.

Speaker C: What's fascinating to me, and certainly in my years of being the purchaser, if you will, of uh, EAP services for my companies, we'd always get utilization reports and this sort of thing, right? But I think the data that you have is potentially so much more powerful than the last time I looked at an EAP utilization report. What are some of the data? How has that data changed over the years? Are there things that you're sharing with your customers, with your clients, with your users that are, that, you know, maybe signal to them trends or hey, we're, you know, that kind of take that utilization up a notch.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So it's, it's, it's interesting to hear you mention that. So you had mentioned before that I wrote a book, so I wrote this book called the Mental Health Advantage and I interviewed a hundred plus chros and people, leaders and folks like you that have dedicated their, their life to this work. Um, um, and it was across, you know, big companies, Google and Accenture and Morgan Stanley, and everyone had really thoughtful and precise things to say on the importance of being proactive on mhm, the importance of managers, the importance of diversity and globalization. And when it came to the one question, hey, how do you measure the success of a program? Almost everybody would be like, hmm, that's hm, a good question. And then a lot of them would fall back on engagement, which is important, but it's not the end all be all right. Like it's helpful. If I know that you're going to the gym, that's a good start. But what are you doing when you're at the gym? And are you getting the outcomes? Are you coming out feeling healthier? Have you done the right things? Right, depending on your goals? And so we provide a lot of different data to our, uh, partners. So first we look at awareness, which is not engagement, but is a good leading indicator. So with the traditional EAP, less than 20% of employees even know it exists. And Michael, you had said that before, right? Like nobody knows that it's there. With journey, it's over 80%. Then we have engagement and we look at two different things. Preventive. So that's joining a live group Coaching class, doing a daily check in, watching videos past a certain time. And then there's clinical engagement. So in person therapy, virtual therapy, things like that. Uh, and so on average traditional EAPs are around 3%, digital EAPs are around 10%. We average 30% engagement and we have clients with 40 or 50% engagement. So that's the engagement part. What's under that? But let's look at outcomes. So we use something called the outcomes rating scale where employees, and it could be their, their families, whomever but a member will self report how they're doing on a number of different criteria, number of different questions before, during and after therapy. With a traditional EAP, less than 50% of members see clinical improvement. It's essentially a coin toss. With the digital EAP, it's like 80, 85, sometimes 88. Last year for Journey, we averaged 96% clinical improvement. The reason being if you're getting care to people sooner, if they're not waiting as long as they're going to have better outcomes. Right to your question earlier, Michael. If somebody does have a death in the family and they're getting care two weeks after that, that might be really helpful in their grieving process versus if they're on their own and they're trying to cope through whatever mechanisms and then they're not getting care perhaps at all or maybe 10 weeks later or a year later when they're really struggling. Right. So being able to catch things sooner, um, we look at quite a lot and then we break everything down by any demographic that we can. So it could be geography. Most of our clients are large global clients. So it could be region or country, could be gender, it could be age, it could be work type. So as much data as we're able to uh, get, we get back to our clients so that it's not just data, it's actual information that they can use to make good decisions.

Speaker B: Nice. We have about, uh, about two and a half minutes left. So I'm going to, I'm going to close this out, Stephen, with, with a two part combo question. So the question will be kind of like a final thought. If there's one thing an employer or a leader could do this quarter to make a move from being a reactive on these types of issues to proactive or preventative, what would it be? And then tell our listeners as we wrap up where they can find you online so that we can uh, jump, you know, send them in with referral.

Speaker A: I think the first and most important thing is just recognizing that it does not have to Be this way. It does not have to be where we're simply trying to firefight. There is a better path. And that, uh, has nothing to do with Journey. It just means being able to go to your vendors and partners and talk to your team and say, how can we turn this from something that's simply reactive when people are unwell to something that helps keep them well, that helps them build healthy habits. So, um, I would say that's a good, a good place to start is having that discussion. You can find me on LinkedIn. I think, I mean, not. I think I know I am on LinkedIn. I'm sure you have my, the spelling of my name there.

Speaker B: We do.

Speaker A: We, we put out a lot of thought leadership pieces and white papers and case studies on Journey's LinkedIn. So I would check that out or follow that. I'm sure we have like some other social media, but I think that. And our website is Journey Live. So Journey.

Speaker B: And we'll add all those links into the show notes when the show gets posted, but we always like to wrap up with like, hearing it from the, the source. So thanks so much for doing the show. This was, uh, this was a great talk and it was a pleasure to. Pleasure to have you as a guest. Maybe we'll have, have you back at a future point to talk about what you're doing in, In a, uh, 18 months or so and revisit what's happening

Speaker C: and the, and how that all that new life in Florida is going.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker D: Hopefully.

Speaker A: Hopefully. Be a lot warmer next time we talk.

Speaker C: That's right.

Speaker B: And I'm going to give you a bonus closing question. You said let's talk about the band Journey. Don't Stop Believing. What's your favorite song?

Speaker A: Don't Stop Believing. It's just such a classic. Everyone can sing along. Everybody knows it. Um, yeah, I think that's the one.

Speaker B: All right, cool. Well, thanks a lot. Have a great weekend and we will talk to you later. Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Stephen.

Speaker A: Thanks, guys.