The pandemic pause brought us to a moment of collective reckoning about what it means to live well and to work well. As a result, employees are sending employers an urgent signal that they are no longer willing to choose one — life or work — at the cost of the other. Working from home brought life literally into our work. And as the world now goes hybrid, employees are drawing firmer boundaries about how much of their work comes into their life. Where does this leave employers? And which perspectives and programs contribute most to progress? In our newest interview series, Working Well: How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness, we are talking to successful executives, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, and thought leaders across all industries to share ideas about how to shift company cultures in light of this new expectation. We’re discovering strategies and steps employers and employees can take together to live well and to work well.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Kassandra Chas.
Early in her career, Kassandra identified “human wellbeing” as the sole focus of her professional endeavors. Starting in the behavioral and mental health field, she quickly identified that these areas of wellness needed to be addressed in more than a clinical setting. She has since brought her focus into the place where people spend the largest amount of their time — work — by serving nonprofits, associations, and a variety of organizations in applying behavioral and positive psychology approaches to the employee experience.
This interview originally appeared on Authority Magazine.
Harvard Business Review predicts that wellness will become the newest metric employers will use to analyze and to assess their employees’ mental, physical and financial health. How does your organization define wellness, and how does your organization measure wellness?
At Dopple we look at life as a venn diagram, with work life on one side and personal life on the other. The middle part, the overlapping part, that is where WELLNESS resides. Wellness can benefit from either side of the diagram, and it can be negatively impacted by either side of the diagram. If we focus on health and intention in both our work lives and personal lives, then we can maintain our wellbeing.
We measure wellness in a few different ways.
GRADE: We use in depth engagement surveys to dive into not only the employee experience but the human experience and where those two overlap. Using pointed engagement survey questions, we are able to gauge the current state of wellness within our organization.
ASK: We are always asking for feedback from our employees. Tell us what is working, and what isn’t. Tell us what has improved your wellness, and what has obstructed your wellness.
SHARE: We go straight to the source, and meet one on one with employees for “Wellness Checks”. We start with a high level topic (either something the employee wants to share about, or a trend we’ve identified internally and want to learn more about) and then get into granular details. With wellness checks we are able to focus on each individual, and find out where they are thriving versus where we can support them.