Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Wellness w/ President Tate Hackert

This month, ZayZoon president Tate Hackert was featured in an interview with Karen Mangia about company culture. They explored important topics like how culture can support and sustain mental, emotional, social, physical, and financial wellness.

Here are some of our favorite quotes from Tate:

On workplace wellness

“We’ve found that the most valuable ways to correlate and quantify our impact consists of surveys, data collection, and open communication … We use surveys on a regular basis to measure employee wellness. Additionally, utilizing baseline and continued data collection and open communication through 1:1s and AMA sessions have proven to be successful.”

On team wellness

“The intention is always there, but sometimes weeks or months can go by and you realize you haven’t actually done anything to improve the wellness of your team. Here are some thoughts that I find useful:

• Communicate

• Engage with employees through surveys and interviews. Have an open dialogue.

• Experiment

• Build a culture of experimentation and have this extend to wellness too.

• Find benefit programs that are easy to implement. 

• Jeff Bezos talks about 1-way door decisions, which are decisions that are difficult to reverse after making. Try to avoid making 1-way door decisions until necessary.

• Give yourself the opportunity to fail fast.

• Implement
• After you’ve collected the data and felt the results from your experiments, then you need to embed it into the fabric of your company: awareness, repetition, and continued feedback.”

On the four-day work week/unlimited PTO

“I don’t necessarily agree with the four-day work week or unlimited PTO, as I think both are symptoms of an unhealthy organization, not the solution to one. Instead, I would recommend taking a look at emotional/mental, physical, social, and financial wellness within the company. For emotional/mental wellness, we work to ensure internal meetings are valuable and run with an objective and key outcome in mind. We also utilize Slack and internal management software Jira and Confluence to manage our documentation and projects in an asynchronous manner. Ensuring that employees are able to work asynchronously, especially when they need it, is critical. Physically, taking walks or stepping outside as a refresher from the computer screen makes a world of difference. Socially, we are constantly staying connected and focusing on team building, even as a remote team.”

On the top 5 trends in the future of workplace wellness

"Financial health — Earned wage access provides employers with an opportunity to minimize financial stress with their employees and increase workplace wellness. ZayZoon has been proven to minimize workplace financial stress and improve productivity, employee retention and recruiting, and increased cost savings for companies. Focusing on employee financial wellness is the most important and effective trend to the future of workplace wellness.

Remote team building — Like so many of us over the past 2 years, ZayZoon has moved largely to remote work. Our team has had to evolve our best practices for managing remote employees, but utilizing tools and increasing communication, especially 1:1s, has proven to be effective in remote team-building. Ensuring that your team can stay connected and still develop meaningful working relationships is critical to fostering a healthy remote workplace.

Communication in a hybrid workplace — As remote work continues to become popular, hybrid workers are faced with similar challenges switching between remote and in-person work. Communication is always going to be one of the most important pieces to workplace wellness, but when it comes to hybrid work environments, staying connected and keeping the door open for conversations is an integral piece of a hybrid environment.

At ZayZoon, one of the many ways we ensure clarity in communication is through daily scrum: a 15-minute meeting every morning with every single ZayZoon team member.

Flexible benefit plans — The employee-first mindset is coming out on top after two years of a pandemic and people realizing the benefits they were getting might not be enough, or might not be the right ones. A pick-and-choose approach is something I see becoming more important as diversity in the workplace grows. No two people are the same — age, race, sex — which makes it difficult to provide a one-size-fits-all benefits package.

TeleHealth — The rise of remote work means the rise of remote services. Telehealth will become more prevalent. It just doesn’t make sense to take 2 hours of your day for a 30-minute appointment. Transportation to and from appointments, taking time off work — these are difficult for anyone, but especially for those living paycheck-to-paycheck."

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Be sure to give the full article a read to learn more!