Transcription:
Alyssa Place: (
Welcome to Perk Up!, a podcast about workplace culture and benefits, brought to you from the team at Employee Benefit News. I'm Alyssa Place, executive editor at EBN. And over the past few weeks, my colleagues and I have been sharing the stories of businesses that have implemented forward thinking, covetable workplace policies and benefits, keeping their employees happy and their company's bottom line thriving. Today, associate editor Paola Peralta dives into paid time off, and how it can help us manage our mental health.
Paola Peralta: (
Hello, everyone. And welcome to today's episode of Perk Up! I'm Paola Peralta, associate editor at Employee Benefit News. And I'm here to talk to you about time off — and why you deserve more of it.
Paola Peralta: (
No matter where you are in your career, whether you’re just starting out or you’re a seasoned vet in your field, talking about PTO doesn’t get any simpler. How much do you have? Can you ask for more? How much can you use? Are you using too much? Do you really need to use it all? Now, I don’t have all the answers, but I do know one thing, and it’s that stepping away from your job might actually be one of the best things you can do for it. That's something Ariela Safira, the founder and CEO of Real, realized during the pandemic. Real is a fast-growing mental health platform that launched basically the moment the pandemic took hold of the United States. Since, as folks have sought new (and safe) ways to support their mental health, Real has scaled rapidly, grown to 40 employees, and raised $16 million in funding. But rapid growth can bring significant stress, and before long, Safira started worrying about the mental health of her own hard-working team — and in 2021, to give them the break they needed, she took a drastic measure. She shut the company down. Real closes for a full week at the end of every fiscal quarter — no single employee is available to their colleagues or customers. And if anyone has a problem with it? Well, that’s just not more important than the mental health of her team, Safira says.
Ariela Safira: (
So we launched this mental health break, though I wouldn't call it a trial. Instead, we really did launch it as a full-on benefit that certainly might evolve like everything at Real, but it's meant to be a genuine part of our benefits package. And what that looks like is one week of every quarter, the entire company takes off. And that means our members can't reach us — like our inbox, our member success team is off as well. If something goes down, it will be down for the week. And as far as both the internal employee wellness, as far as business metrics are involved, it's gone phenomenally well.
Paola Peralta: (
That’s Safira, who points out that since Real was launched in the midst of a pandemic-induced mental health crisis, she was acutely aware of making sure her own company policies reflected the true needs of employees operating under unbelievable circumstances.
Ariela Safira: (
Employees changed in the pandemic, the pandemic made work-life boundaries, or rather the lack thereof so much clearer, right? People have been working from their own bedrooms and their own homes. Far more individuals are burned out. And so I was much more quick to evolve. How do we ensure the employees of Real feel rest and feel true time away from work?
Paola Peralta: (
Safira considered many ways to do that — there was even a point in the process where she played with the idea of giving employees an entire month off before it was decided to divvy up those four weeks throughout the year, instead.
Ariela Safira: (
I was curious about, and doubtful of work-life in America. It was very clear from a young age that we work too much, that my parents were burned out. And I was eager to build a company that challenged norms around: When do we work? How do we work? How often do we work? How do we measure success and productivity? So is it already very top of mind?
Paola Peralta: (
So in the weeks leading up to the official launch of Real’s mental health week, Safira sent her staff what she describes as an “annoying number of surveys” to help her better understand their rest and relaxation habits and needs. She went nitty-gritty with her questions: how would you compare summer vacations as a kid to PTO now as an adult? How do you define rest? How do you define self care? What are ways in which PTO doesn't go right for you?
Ariela Safira: (
These questions really allowed — or so it seems from the responses — really allowed people to think more creatively than, "Do you take your PTO?" And I really got to understand how I get people who work at real to actually feel off from work. And some of the biggest insights that came out of it came from that question around school vacations as a child versus PTO as an adult. And really what it brought to light is school vacations as a child felt much more concrete and validating because it was a shared ritual amongst all students. Whereas PTO tends to be a very individualistic time away from work. And as a result, it becomes something you don't really want to talk about at work, because you don't want your employees to hate you. If they had a hard time at work last week, and you were like surfing in Hawaii, right?
Ariela Safira: (
And even more than that, when you do hire high performers like we did at Real they do think that if they take time off from work their list of tasks are just going to be added onto another coworker's plate, and that's not a very healthy or enjoyable experience. And so what happens is that people wait until they've hit rock bottom to take PTO, and then it becomes much more of an emergency room, crisis management. Then it becomes a proactive and preventative form of care. And so it was very clear that I'm not stripping away the concept of PTO — we still offer that at Real, but what was made so clear is humans really need to share a ritual to feel validated in their actions to feel permission, acceptance. And the quarterly mental health break has really offered employees that.
Paola Peralta: (
And there’s still much to be said on how these breaks are psychologically beneficial — something we’ll get into right after this short break.
Welcome back to Perk Up!, where we’re diving into Real, the mental health company that defied traditional office norms by giving its employees a mandatory quarterly week-long mental health break. Madeline Lucas is a licensed therapist and clinical content manager at Real. She joined the company in March of 2020, just as the pandemic was changing everything about work and life. As she acclimated to the company (and the COVID-19 crisis) and watched her new boss take the time to understand her staff and how to best help them fight off burnout, she appreciated the care and consideration she saw, as both an employee and a professional therapist. Here’s what she had to say.
Madeline Lucas: (
We were all a part of this conversation of what makes the most sense as well as what actually seems feasible to plug unplug, right. Because I'm sure as with any PTO that you've taken, it's hard to unplug. It's hard to really disconnect in a meaningful and restorative way. So we tried out a couple of different things and it's been really cool to be a part of that since the beginning. And even when I think back to my first mental health break I imagine I checked Slack once a day, probably. Right? Like I'd still had my email around and it felt pretty unnatural, but just gets a little easier each time.
Paola Peralta: (
And so psychologically, how does a quarterly mandated mental health break change, or how is it different from from your regular PTO?
Madeline Lucas: (
When you think of it at first, it might not seem too different, but in my own personal experience of this and with talking with other colleagues it's huge. I think that for one, there's a piece of camaraderie here, so psychologically I know I can almost give myself permission to rest. I can give myself this permission to unplug because everybody's doing it around me. I'm not going to be missing anything. I can come back and I'm not falling behind. Right. I think, you know, the Sunday Scaries term, right? Coming back from a vacation. I think that hits differently after a mental health break where, you know, everybody's been doing some sort of rest. And I think with, with PTO, you know, before I was a therapist, I worked in the marketing world for a moment. And even there, it's hard. I remember having moments of, okay, I need to really earn this PTO, right. I need to work myself into the ground almost in order to deserve this break. And I use those words really intentionally of "earning" and "deserving." And giving permission to yourself. So psychologically that's been the biggest piece for me, and it's a little easier to give myself this moment and really lean into it then with PTO, where I might feel a little guilty, I might feel bad.
Paola Peralta: (
But at the end of the day, Real is a consumer-facing company, and the idea of shutting down for a week four times a year comes with financial implications and concerns. And so, the million dollar question remains: was closing the company for a week as good for business as it was for the people behind it? For Safira, the answer was a resounding yes.
Ariela Safira: (
First and foremost, Real's business model only works if its employees work, right? It is so obvious and clear to me that the team at Real will not work effectively, creatively and healthily if they're burned out. And it doesn't take very long to look at a group of startup employees and see how quickly they get burned out because of how hard they work. So the bottom line is this business only works if it's employees work, and secondly, you know, consumers are asking for companies to live and breathe as more than service providers today. Right? What consumers want is to view companies and brands as living people, right? And they want to form a relationship with companies that have more depth than you offer me this. And so I believed then, and it's only been validated more and more since, that members and the public respect us more and feel more connected to us because we so proudly stand by the mental health break and name. Our best acquisition weeks have been our mental health breaks.
Paola Peralta: (
Taking care of your mental health and successfully doing your job don’t have to be mutually exclusive. They actually depend on each other — employees have to feel good in order to do good. And the sooner other employers understand that, the faster they’ll see the results in their own companies, Lucas says.
Madeline Lucas: (
People come back and they're feeling more energized. They're feeling more creative. And it reminds me as a therapist, often people ask: what is self care? People have this belief that self care is selfish. And the way I see it is by taking risks by taking care of yourself, that is required for you to be able to fully show up at work. [13:46] I believe that work quality will improve. I think that without a doubt, by taking this time and recharging folks will be able to show up and be more effective, right. And being more productive in a way that's more meaningful. And it's not just more hours on the clock equals better work, equals more success equals blank, blank, blank.
Paola Peralta: (
So, if we know it’s good for employees and doesn’t negatively affect productivity, what’s standing in the way of more employers following this lead? And what will it take to get them to take the first steps in the right direction? I asked Safira this, and for her, the problem — and the solution — is company culture.
Ariela Safira: (
I understand that change is scary and a change as permanent and unprecedented as give your entire company the week off every quarter — I understand why that's shocking, but also I want to highlight that this benefit can only exist at Real because of what the culture at all of real looks like and because of who we hire, and the team we've built. So I certainly encourage leaders to implement comparable practices and in ways that work for their teams, though, I think it's important to name that this benefit doesn't solve the feeling of exhaustion instead it requires a culture of humanity, a culture of understanding, and it requires having a team of folks who are driven and capable and who show up every day such that, you know, the CEO can trust this crew needs.
Ariela Safira: (
I think that leaders have had a really challenging past two years. I can speak for myself in that the number of decisions a leader, and certainly a CEO, has been asked to make in the past two years have been extraordinarily challenging. And I think part of care involves those individuals separating themselves from work and getting the perspective that they need to think healthfully. And outside of that that involves us working with one another, right? Not feeling calm, competitive with one another, but really thinking like how can we as leaders get together and discuss what is happening on our teams and what is happening on a population level and how can we contribute on that population level? And that's a really exciting, you know, adventure, right? How rarely can we actually get together and impact an entire country of individuals.
Paola Peralta: (
And so how about you Ariela? Do Real's mental health breaks apply to you, too?
Ariela Safira: (
The CEO is not off unless everyone is off. Our last mental health break, I stayed in New York and I discovered for the first time in three years how amazing this city is. Right? So often, especially the past two years, all I've done here is work so much that it's kind of hard to choose to stay here when I could part from work. And getting a week to explore Brooklyn with no agenda really brought me such an uplifting sensation of joy. I do love this place and I live in a city full of culture and food, and I need those weeks off that I'm not on vacation to really feel.
Paola Peralta: (
Whether or not your company has as a progressive view of time off as Safira and Real, we hope this at least inspires you to take better care of yourself the next time you take time off. Stop checking those emails! I'm Paola Peralta with Employee Benefit News. Thank you for listening.
Alyssa Place: (
And that's our show today. Join us for our final episode of Perk Up! to learn about why student loan benefits may be the key to creating a successful and secure future for employees at your company and beyond. This episode was by Employee Benefit News with audio production by Kellie Malone. Special thanks this week to Ariela Safira and Madeline Lucas from Real. Rate us and review us wherever you get your podcasts and check out more from the team benefitnews.com.