By Brittany Dubeck & Sean King
As part of our interview series with WELL business leaders, we sat down with Shane Sabatino (WELL Health’s Chief People Officer) to discuss Canada’s Healthy Workplace Month and the benefits and policies that help to make WELL a healthy place to work.
Q: Hi Shane, thanks for taking the time to sit down with us. As you may know, October is Canada’s Healthy Workplace Month. Can you let us know what a ‘healthy’ workplace means to you?
To be a healthy workplace, we need to help our team members be at their best.
Part of that is creating an open and respectful environment that allows people to feel and perform their best. The other part is creating a workplace where everyone’s mental, physical, and career needs are met. That means providing support and help for everyone who works at WELL.
Ultimately, being a healthy workplace is about aiming to follow ‘The Golden Rule.’ Creating a culture that treats every team member the way we would like to be treated.
So really, being a healthy workplace requires a mix of different things. Everything from showing our appreciation for our teams with annual BBQs to putting in place mental health support through Focus Mental Wellness and creating time-off policies.
It’s multi-faceted. It’s in everything and everyone.
Q: As a healthcare company, WELL takes physical well-being seriously for all our patients. But from a People & Culture perspective, how is WELL helping to support the physical well-being of WELL Team Members and contractors?
There are a few things I could mention here. One partnership that I would like to focus on and am proud of is our partnership with Bright.
With Bright, WELL team members can access over 250 available sessions and classes that help support them with physical well-being and goal setting. In terms of physical well-being, you can do everything from a 7-minute posture reset at your desk all the way to Zumba® classes in the evening!
The sessions support any level of physical fitness level from beginner to advanced. And most are designed to support our team members wherever they are working, whether that is a home or physical office or even a clinic – Bright is very accommodating that way.
And if anyone is looking for inspiration on how to eat healthier or nutrition generally, Bright has on-demand classes too.
Another way we want to support physical well-being is with our paid time off policies. We want to encourage team members to take the time to relax, recharge and come to work at WELL refreshed.
Family Days are another point worth mentioning, as these offer flexibility to our team members to care for their own families when illness or when “life” happens.
Q: You mentioned mental health earlier, and promoting psychological well-being is another focus of Canada’s Healthy Workplace Month. Can you let us know a little about the changes your team has made in providing mental health support to WELL Team Members?
One big thing we have put in place is our program with Focus Mental Wellness, which gives every WELL team member a free session each year with a therapist and an ongoing affordable therapy option.
That’s a big deal because that first session is a gateway to helping those in need!
All of us, me included, have moments in our life when we need help. But navigating how to get help isn’t always easy.
We want to make the process as simple and understandable as possible, so we’re making it easy for people to get support.
That’s why we created a program that gives our team members a convenient and confidential way to access mental health support because it is so important.
We’ve worked with Focus to provide team members with a WELL Health portal where they can confidentially book their free session. And after the first session, Focus also offers heavily discounted therapy rates to WELL employees. That helps our team members continue to get the help they need while making the most of our extended benefits.
We’ve also introduced WELL Day. That’s something that we launched in September 2021 and it’s an additional day of leave for WELL team members that can use for personal well-being.
It’s flexible, and team members can use it for anything that supports their mental or physical well-being. That could be taking the time to rest, meditate, spend time with friends and family, support a religious holiday or get outside for some exercise.
Q: How do you make sure that WELL is focusing on creating a healthy and open work environment for everyone?
I think this is another great example of why culture is so important.
When I joined in May 2021, I could really tell from Hamed (WELL Health’s Founder, Chairman and CEO) and the leadership team that there was already a caring culture here.
That’s so important because one of the biggest things we need to do is “care for the care providers.” We have all these healthcare professionals and team members within the WELL family, and they need to be healthy, thriving and where they want to be. And need to continue to help reduce workplace injuries, illness, and burnout.
We want to promote flexible work policies wherever possible too. Within WELL, we’re supportive of remote and hybrid work where we can be. We have different departments and business units collaborating across the country as remote or hybrid teams.
Ultimately, we want to trust our team members and managers to decide what’s appropriate and how best to get work done.
What I’ve also learned is that all this needs to start with me! I have to live and breathe well-being, diversity, equity, and inclusion. So that means I need to be learning more, doing more and being open to any form of positive change in the organization. I need to be a role model.
Then I continue to transfer this knowledge to our Executive Team. We are lucky because so many of those people are great leaders who believe in this as well. If we can be genuine and do all of that, then it will permeate throughout our entire organization.
But it isn’t just about what our leadership is doing! If you think about EPIC, which stands for Employee Program Inspiring Culture, that’s a workplace program that is all about creating a fun, healthy and collaborative culture within WELL.
EPIC is led by WELL team member volunteers who organize initiatives, including social events, a recognition program for team members, and other health and wellness activities.
Overall, we know that our work is not done. While we know that we have started the journey, we have more that we can do!
Q: You mention continuing to do more, how important is it to you to keep progressing? How do you make sure you maintain the culture that everyone is working hard to create?
We have to continue to measure our success and get feedback from our team members. We want to make sure that everyone knows about these programs and can access them!
It’s a marathon, not a sprint though. We must continue to put our actions behind our words. And if you look at our ESG Report, we made sure that ‘a healthy place to work’ was one of our three pillars.
We also want to ensure that our purpose-driven culture extends to supporting WELL team members if they want to make a difference to a community or cause that they care about. That’s why we introduced Volunteer Days, where employees and contractors can take up to 1% of their work time each year and dedicate that to a cause they care about.
Going forward too, we want to focus on attracting and retaining talented and passionate people and make sure our culture values the contributions of all team members.
Q: Finally, we’ve heard a lot about the different things that your team is putting in place for WELL team members, and you’ve mentioned that you still think there is so much more you can do! So, what is it that excites you about working at WELL?
That’s a great question. It’s a combination of two things really.
First, I get to inspire, develop, motivate, and support all our WELL team members to help people achieve their goals at work and in their personal lives. And second, WELL really is at the heart of healthcare. So, to me, we have the perfect combination at WELL of supporting team members and helping to serve our patients and the most vulnerable every day.
How many organizations can say that they are working to make people healthy every day? So, I consider myself lucky in this career.
